Customer Experience Blueprint

Driving customer-centricity is a challenge that goes beyond marketing. To create and deliver the best experiences to customers we need to think across all service and sales touchpoints and how they all fit together.

At Merkle, we provide specialist expertise to unpick these challenges and understand where you may have gaps in data, people, or technology and help you prioritise the right projects and workstreams.

What is the CX Blueprint?

Customers today are looking for authentic and personal experiences with the brands and businesses that they engage with and buy from. The digital and business transformation required to meet this demand can seem daunting at first, because a true customer-centric focus will affect all areas of the business

At Merkle we have developed a maturity assessment approach that is designed to understand where your business is now, what you need to adapt and how to get there.

We believe that true customer centricity requires maturity in six foundational areas:

Vision and Customer Strategy: Setting the desired future state for customer experience
Data Enablement: Access and usage of quality and connected data
Technology and Orchestration: Developing the right technology capabilities and set-up
Experience Activation: Activating highly relevant customer experiences and journeys
Analytics and Optimisation: Evaluating success and transforming insight into action
Organisation: Having the people and ways of working to be able to create a more connected experience

What makes us different

Working with Merkle’s consultancy differs from hiring a standard consulting firm. Our maturity consultants can always tap into the knowledge of different specialists across capabilities within the business, hence we can give both strategic and tactical recommendations.

But foremost, we are practitioners and outcome obsessed, meaning we make sure any recommendations we give or roadmaps we build are highly actionable. This was recognised in Merkle’s inclusion in Forrester’s Customer Database and Engagement Wave 2021 report, which identified Merkle as an agency partner that can help marketers deploy a data and marketing tech strategy that moves towards 1:1 customer conversations and challenges organisations to “re-think your status quo in a good way”.

How we work with clients

Our aim is to truly understand your business and the challenges that you are facing in the context of your long-term objectives so we can deliver clear and tangible outcomes for your business.

This involves us speaking to a variety of stakeholders across teams to unpick the current business objectives, and strategy, and to identify challenges and gaps that the teams face across our six pillars. In addition, if you think that your tech set up needs reviewing, our technical specialists can also evaluate it. The evaluation includes performing Martech/ Adtech assessments, reviewing your data blueprint, analytics strategy, and architecture, and assessing ways of working. In order to achieve impactful outcomes for your business it is vital that you have the right objectives in place. If required, we can take an in-depth look at your vision, core objective setting and audience strategy. To ensure that our evaluations are robust, and your progress can be compared over time, we have created a structured score card to aid us.

By knowing what is important to you, and what outcome you are trying to achieve, we will use our findings to build out a prioritised roadmap for implementing the solutions, determining how we measure their success and what the dependencies are. The assessment can take as little as five weeks for brands, seeking high-level advice.