With that in mind, you might be curious about how many brands are truly developing and implementing CX strategies in practice. Accurate statistical answers to this question remain unclear. However, based on my observations in the industry, it appears that only a minimal number of brands effectively leverage CX to enhance their business performance.

While there could be multiple factors attributing to this, I see the low CX strategy adoption rate stemming from misunderstandings of what CX actually is. Let’s examine some of the most common misconceptions about CX and discuss how brands can address them effectively.

Misconception 1: Customer experience and user experience are the same.

While CX and UX are often used interchangeably, their goals and measurements differ. A clear understanding of the definitions can help brands create the right type of experience for customers, leading to optimized investment allocation and performance growth. Here’s a breakdown:

• UX (user experience): Focuses on how customers feel about using specific products or services driven by intuitive design and ease of use. Effective UX can be gauged through metrics such as speed of task completion, error rates in usability testing, and usage duration or bounce rates.
• CX (customer experience): Encompasses the overall emotions, impressions, and perceptions customers have regarding a brand across all interactions. Excellent CX is typically measured through customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty metrics, utilizing tools like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) or various market research techniques.

Based on the goals, budgets and resources of their teams, companies need to thoroughly fine-tune their strategies and scale of their experience design. If the goal is to enhance CX, a more thorough understanding of customer satisfaction and loyalty is essential. This requires integrating a variety of data analysis methods, from market research and analytics platform utilization to measuring customer lifetime value (CLTV). For instance, to gauge the impact of a new website design, brands can use A/B testing tools like Optimizely, Adobe Target, or Crazy Egg to obtain data-driven insights. It’s vital for teams to know how to conduct A/B tests objectively and refine their testing methods.

Misconception 2: CX design is mainly about visuals and content creation.

A common mistake I often see in the development of brands’ CX strategies is creating plans without a deep understanding of customer needs. While visually appealing and sleek designs can attract customers, they won’t sustain long-lasting customer relationships if these features don’t align with what customers actually need.

To develop a great CX that satisfies customers at every stage of their journey, brands must gain a deep understanding of who their customers are, their preferences, desires and behaviors. These insights can be gleaned by analyzing customer data through analytics platforms such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, as well as internal data tools like CRM or CDP platforms. Companies with a solid infrastructure for collecting, processing and analyzing quality customer data are better equipped to understand customer needs leading to a greater CX design.

Misconception 3: CX is completed with the adoption of tech platforms.

Another widespread misconception is that deploying tech platforms marks the final stage of CX design. Although employing the right technology assets to provide calibrated CX along with the customer journey is essential, this should be deemed as a stepping stone rather than the completion of the CX design process.

For tech platforms to function optimally, establishing a global governance framework is crucial. Central to this governed usage should be standardized account structure design and strict access management. Additionally, if these tech platforms are used to collect and analyze customer data, implementing privacy-safe data monitoring systems is essential to ensure data protection and compliance.

All of this to say, CX is an ongoing process that integrates three elements of digital transformation: platform, process, and people. Implementing tech assets without strategic governance and the presence of skilled team members can lead to wasted operational costs and fail to positively impact CX improvement.

Phenomenal CX is achieved through the collaboration between creative and analytical minds. Companies that clearly define their CX objectives, deeply understand their customers and effectively apply core principles of digital transformation are well-positioned to elevate their customer experience to the next level.

This article is an expanded version of a post originally published on Medium by the same author.

For all these reasons, the praise for AI among marketing experts is ceaseless; but while much ink has been spilled about it, we’ve merely begun to scratch the surface. This month, our team was part of Salesforce Connections, where the topic of AI and its impact on customer relationships dominated conversations. The two jam-packed days of sessions were all about creating strong, lasting customer connections with meaningful interactions—using AI combined with the power of first-party data to ideate, create and deliver them.

As the event kicked off, Salesforce unveiled their new AI-driven tools for personalized customer experiences, and we were honored to be featured in their announcement as one of the partners contributing to their generative AI ecosystem. If you want to learn more about AI and its impact on customer relationships, here are some of the main takeaways from our people’s keynotes and panel discussions.

AI empowers CMOs as their roles evolve. 

On the first day of the event, our Chief Innovation Officer, Henry Cowling, and S4 Capital Group Executive Chairman, Sir Martin Sorrell, shared the main stage. Together with industry experts such as Salesforce President Sarah Franklin, they unpacked the role of AI in consumer engagement at the CMO+ experience, which convenes an intimate group of the world’s most influential CMOs for hyper-relevant networking.

As we know, the role of the Chief Marketing Officer has undergone a significant transformation. The CMO is no longer solely responsible for overseeing marketing campaigns; instead, they have become a crucial strategic partner to the CEO and the C-suite. Today, the CMO’s role is to take business insights and bring them to market so that value can be realized. But in an always-on environment, that value can only be realized through personalization at scale, data-driven decision-making and the addressing of regulatory pressures and privacy concerns.

To unlock all of that and more, the aid of AI is key. For years, data experts have banked on predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to help identify patterns, trends and customer segments, leading to more targeted and effective marketing strategies. Now, we’re finally approaching the promised land of hyper-personalization, where real-time insights inform each customer’s experience on a granular level and personalized content can be generated at scale.

Enhance customer experiences with cross-functional data systems.

Cowling puts it simply, “In an AI-enabled marketing landscape, the smartest data set wins.” First-party data is at the center of any journey of digital transformation, and through their marketing leaders, brands have an opportunity to capitalize on their unique data and intellectual property. By doing so, they can strengthen customer relationships and offer groundbreaking experiences that are key for success.

However, leveraging your data to its full potential also demands that CMOs partner with peers within and outside their organization. It’s important for teams to look beyond their specific perspectives and collaborate with their counterparts in IT, data science, product development, customer service, sales and even external partners who can provide valuable solutions. 

On top of that, the transformative potential of AI is fundamentally changing how we see, understand and use data. Therefore, it raises new ethical, social and legal questions, requiring a reevaluation of our current systems and frameworks. The sooner brands address those with the input from their different teams, the sooner they’ll be able to leverage AI as a customer engagement tool.

Activate loyalty with a strong data strategy.

Hot on the heels of Cowling and Sorrell’s insightful chats, our customer relationships experts and Directors of Go-to-Market Ashley Musumeci and Nich Seo shed some light on the future of loyalty. Their presentation emphasized an important fact: in today’s ever-elusive landscape of consumer attention and loyalty, brands have a golden opportunity to set themselves apart by delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Contrary to outdated notions, true customer loyalty goes beyond a rewards program and requires ongoing, meaningful interactions with your customers. It hinges upon the emotional connection customers develop through their collective experiences with a brand—and there are three approaches to consider as you strive to create those bonds:

• Forge deeper connections by making sure consumers feel your brand values and understand them. Achieving this entails aligning personal values, creating impactful content, implementing personalization strategies and fostering a sense of community. It also requires the ability to anticipate customer needs and desires, exceeding their expectations at every turn.
• Offer meaningful experiences that provide genuine and relevant value for people’s interaction with your brand. This can be achieved by creating unique branded moments that leave a lasting impression, tapping into exclusivity, enhancing gamification elements to make interactions more engaging and embracing a purpose-driven approach.
• Building integrated ecosystems that expand the customer-brand relationship in innovative ways. For example, by connecting all physical and virtual touchpoints and forming an accessible universe that consumers can seamlessly navigate. 

Now, you may be thinking: this sounds great, but where do I even start? As we discussed earlier, data plays a crucial role in the marketing lifecycle, enabling the delivery of enhanced value. Therefore, the initial step toward creating seamless, personalized and meaningful experiences is to establish a robust data strategy. Customer data resides on various platforms, and collection points are scattered throughout the entire customer journey. To overcome this challenge, identify integration points between existing technologies and unify the ecosystem.

The importance of cross-functional collaboration and leveraging first-party data to enhance customer experiences cannot be overstated. With AI enabling hyper-personalization, real-time insights and effective decision-making, it’s crucial to embrace AI-driven tools and establish a robust data strategy as a foundation for success. Now is the time to harness the power of AI and unlock its full potential in driving customer engagement and empowering CMOs.

To stay ahead of the curve in customer engagement, brands must move beyond delivering AI-generated content (AIGC) to delivering AI-powered consumer experiences (AICX). While AIGC levels up content by creating content at scale, AICX levels up the customer experience by creating personalized interactions. Applying AI to CX is not just about chatbots for customer service, it's about adopting a customer-centric approach across all functions, from product development to marketing, and across all touchpoints, from digital to retail, all enabled by AI. AI has the ability to create intimate and hyper-personalized one-to-one interactions across all touchpoints of the consumer decision journey, and will be a key factor in how brands are perceived, valued and ultimately loved by consumers. Here’s how, in three ways.

AICX levels up storytelling.

Applying AI to consumer experience means moving from advertising a brand world, to participating and engaging in a brand world. The most discerning audiences in the world are demanding nothing less than a seamless and immersive brand experience: 73% point to brand experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, right behind price and product quality. Here are the ways brands are already leveling up engagement via immersive brand experiences powered by AI, and developed by Media.Monks:

• Building smart and immersive flagship stores. Chinese EV brand JIDU launched the world's smartest showroom in Beijing, powered by Baidu AI technology. This immersive space offers a unique brand experience with life-size avatars and captures valuable user data.  
• Embedding consumers directly into any story. Intel’s AI-powered technology connects young people in China to their remarkable heritage by scanning and mapping their faces in real time onto historical figures in a series of animated films that were projected on the city walls of Xi’an.

AICX levels up personalization.

The benefits of personalized customer experiences—one-on-one interaction between a customer and a brand—helps to massively uplift sales and loyalty. Research suggests that personalized and tailored CX drives over 66% of customer loyalty—more than price and brand combined. Meanwhile, 78% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend companies that personalize their interactions. 

• Creating hyper-personalized celebrity content at scale. In collaboration with Spotify, we created an interactive listening experience with a deep fake version of The Weeknd giving users a personalized greeting using data from their Spotify accounts. We created an AI to synthesize the artist’s voice allowing for an interactive listening experience between the fan and the artist himself. Over 600K fans visited in the first few hours—and The Weeknd knew every one of them.
• Personifying an AI personal shopper. What if your customers could have a conversation with an AI personal shopper that could recommend style tips and products, creating cross-selling and repeat purchase opportunities for higher customer lifetime value? For a long time, brands have tried to do this with chatbots to handle questions or complaints in a customer service capacity further down the funnel, but now conversational UI creates a smoother experience and will be used earlier in the funnel for ecommerce exploration. 

AICX levels up co-creation.

Involving consumers in product development very early on in R&D is proven to drive product success, advocacy and conversion. Companies that involve customers in the product development process see numerous benefits, including a higher customer advocacy, than those that don't. The proof is there, but brands find it very difficult to execute on immersive co-creation because it typically involves different departments and different organizational structures. That’s where AI comes in. Here are some AI-powered co-creation applications that we’re helping brands experiment with today.

• Generating consumer insights. At the Estee Lauder R&D Experience Center in Shanghai, the beauty brand engages consumers and key opinion leaders in product testing, validation and co-creation sessions for new products. Touch tables and magic mirrors powered with AI technology enhance workshops and ideation sessions and support the generation of consumer insights from participants in the room.
• Co-creating new products with customers in real time. What if a fashion lifestyle brand could run live design sessions with their community, their best creative directors and celebrities in a livestream that could generate the must-have sneaker, handbag or you-name-it based on their input…in real time? Not only would it speed products to market, but community co-creation and input would virtually guarantee success.

Get ahead by embracing AICX now.

The evolution of AI technology—from analyzing and processing data, to creating more content faster and at scale, to facilitating personalized storytelling through experiences that deepen the collaboration and intimacy between brands and its customers—is extremely exciting…and disruptive. There are new developments in the technology and its application for brand engagement literally every day, and brands that are able to harness AI’s power will be able to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their customers and drive business growth like never before. Again, this will mean looking beyond AI’s power to merely build efficiency; in an environment of content overload, delivering AICX is how brands can truly deliver value.

To explore how brands could innovate a scalable, customer centric Web3 strategy, we partnered with the Salesforce Web3 Studio to gather a team of experts for a Brunch ‘n Learn session at CES. Jordan Cuddy, Partner and Chief Client Officer at Jam3; Marc Mathieu, Co-Founder of Salesforce Web3 Studio; and Swan Sit, Independent Board Director, Advisor, Creator and Investor, discussed how early adopters have leveraged Web3 to create more meaningful connections with their customers—and how the technology represents a foundational shift in customer relationships.

While the conversation touched on several key insights and examples of brands in the space, the trio uncovered three key shifts in mindset that will help brands realize the true potential of Web3, whether by strengthening customer experiences, better understanding who they’re marketing to, or building long-term loyalty.

It’s about the value of the brand, not the product.

Whether it’s a loyalty program, a digital wearable collection or something different altogether, the true value in any Web3 engagement lies in whether it feels authentic to the brand. In short, no one is going to care about (or stick with) a Web3 project that’s at odds with what the brand stands for. So if you consider making moves in Web3, start by taking stock of what makes your brand valuable to people already. “In your P&L, when you look at the intangible lines and want to look at the value of a brand or community, that’s a representation,” says Sit.

As for what an authentic brand alignment looks like, Cuddy offered an example from our work with Adidas. The strategy team at Jam3 realized there was a shift in consumers’ minds from “Where can I go in the metaverse?” to “Who can I be in the metaverse?” Realizing the desire for unique ways to express oneself in this space, we built a platform that generates a unique, interoperable metaverse avatar based on each user’s personality. “It made sense for a brand that says ‘Impossible is nothing,’” Cuddy says.

Digital identities are complex and nuanced—not just numbers.

Consumers are people. It may sound obvious, but marketing teams everywhere are facing a reckoning for chasing cookies and arbitrary identifiers rather than forging meaningful, impactful personal relationships with their base. “We’ve forgotten that people are not just data and that we can just target them,” says Mathieu. “In reality, the underlying technology of Web3 is about giving back power to the user and creators, but that means we need to be ready to stop thinking of them as just consumers.” 

Think of them collaborators, co-creators, co-innovators or co-contributors—but either way, make sure the service you’re providing is actually valuable to them, because that’s what drives anonymous Web3 users to identify themselves. “Most people don’t want to give you their data if you don’t give them something in return,” says Mathieu, noting how in this way, Web3 technology can play a crucial role in future proofing brands’ CRM strategies as they head into the post-cookie future.

Beyond futureproofing, Web3 will make identity more complex. “A lot of people feel more authentic digitally because they’re able to express and experiment with who they are more freely without prejudice and inequalities,” Mathieu says. “We’re on the verge of having to deal with a very different concept of identities.” But that’s a good thing, because those complexities are rich for gaining deeper and more nuanced insight into your audience. What projects or communities a person chooses to invest in says a lot more about them than traditional identifiers like a phone number or email address, says Mathieu.

Loyalty is about being loyal to your customer.

“We’ve been thinking of loyalty as something consumers owe us,” says Mathieu. “Now, consumers are saying, ‘How will you be loyal to me? Are you going to serve me throughout my life through products, experiences and services?’” Again, looking at your customers as collaborators—in which brand and audience both have skin in the game—is a path to unlocking greater loyalty.

Web3 is a creator space, and brands who are comfortable collaborating with their consumers will come out on top. In fact, there may already be a community dedicated to your brand without your knowledge or authorization—but instead of pulling the plug, consider ways you can support and join in the fun. Matheiu compared it to the time he worked at Coca-Cola in the early days of Facebook, when the company discovered a group about the brand made by fans. “We asked how to make it bigger instead of shutting it down,” he says.

Cuddy also shared the process of seeking fan input in developing ComplexLand, a virtualization of the iconic ComplexCon that we continued to evolve over three annual editions. “Between each version, we talked to the community. We didn’t do typical market research; we talked to people who actually participated,” says Cuddy. In year two, for example, the team added multiplayer experiences based on fan feedback. The most recent iteration implemented NFT creation to solve fans’ need for more ways to express themselves creatively. “We listened to them and applied it, and that starts to build that loyalty when they’re the co-creator.”

Shift your mindset to win in Web3.

Remember, NFTs, blockchain and the like are just technologies—a means to an end, not the end itself. Sit aptly put it this way: “When someone asks what music you listen to, you don’t say MP3s.” 

Likewise, the way brands unlock value in Web3 isn’t to put out projects for the sake of it; it’s about working in partnership with your customers to better serve their needs. Web3 has ignited consumer mindset shifts across trust, products and ownership, and now’s the time to follow suit—because when you do, you’ll gain a stronger, more nuanced relationship with your base.

The time has passed for flashy, disconnected activations or the cash grabs that once earned fleeting attention. How can brands relate to the tastemakers, innovators, entrepreneurs and investors of tomorrow? Now is the time for brands to build their understanding of what motivates people in this space, and how their continued activities will reshape the brand-customer relationship for the better.

Learn more about our end-to-end Salesforce capabilities, from discovery to strategy to activation and optimization, here.

In this episode of Meet Me in the Metaverse, host Ashley Musumeci, Director, Go-To-Market at Media.Monks, sits down with Jordan Cuddy, Chief Client Officer at Jam3, and Avanthika Ramesh, Senior Product Manager, NFT Cloud at Salesforce, to explore how building a resilient data foundation will help brands get a head-start into the Web3 future. Watch and listen below.

In this episode

2:13: Customer engagement changes in Web3

5:48: Ensuring long term value and utility of your Web3 activations

11:24: Choosing the right platforms

16:27: How to build people’s trust in brands

21:33: Activating responsibly

24:23: Change management needs

Solving the Web3 identity crisis.

Web3 offers new customer touchpoints, and with them come new kinds of personal data like anonymized wallets or communication in new channels. But elements of privacy and consent that were required in Web2 engagements still carry over into Web3, says Ramesh, introducing an identity crisis for brands to solve. “Even if you are bridging Web3 and Web2 data to bring all these identifiers about a consumer together, it’s really important that the user opts in and provides consent to merge these identities,” she says. This challenge has led to the release of new, Web3-connected CRMs from businesses like Salesforce who aim to solve the need for a full, 360-degree view of the customer.

For brands who want to engage meaningfully with consumers in the space, Cuddy encourages starting with a purpose. Jam3 helped Adidas take its first, sneaker-worn step into the metaverse to build hype for its new collection of Ozweego shoes. “What our strategy team found was that there was a shift from ‘Where can I go in the metaverse’ to ‘Who can I be in the metaverse.’” The team realized that options for self-expression in the metaverse were often limiting. Ozworld Alter Ego, a generative platform that creates a unique avatar based on personality and style, made perfect sense for a brand focused on self-expression through fashion.

As brands seek a unified approach to their data-driven marketing, a strong Web3 strategy makes for a valuable addition to their existing data foundations. From experimenting with new channels to developing your own platform like Complex did, there are many ways to test and learn your way to Web3 success. And by delivering experiences that people value, you’ll incentivize customers to share data that will help strengthen customer relationships.

Eager to learn how to build solid data foundations in Web3 and beyond? Catch the full episode of Meet Me in the Metaverse above.