Is The Martech Really The Problem?

It’s a familiar scene: the martech is slow, the team’s frustrated, and a new platform looks like the obvious fix. Mark and Chantelle spend this episode of The CX Equation making the case that it usually isn’t – and working through what’s actually going on instead.

A lot of it comes down to how the existing tech was set up in the first place. Legacy platforms like Adobe Campaign or Salesforce often carry years of IT dependency baked into their implementation, which makes newer, lighter tools look more capable than they necessarily are. Add in patchy data, teams working in silos even when they share the same orchestration tool, and knowledge gaps left behind by people who’ve since moved on, and the platform starts carrying the blame for problems that were never really about the platform.

The same scrutiny gets applied to AI. Every vendor claims to be “AI-powered” at the moment, which makes it harder, not easier, to work out where it genuinely helps. The distinction they land on: a specific, well-defined use case is worth pursuing; “we should have an AI strategy” isn’t.

In all cases, the platform is rarely the biggest thing standing in your way. Usually it’s what’s built up around it and that’s a harder, but more useful, conversation to have first.

Listen in if you want to understand:

• Why most martech complaints aren’t martech problems
• Why legacy platforms carry old decisions, not just old code
• Why bad data breaks every platform equally
• Why team structure often does more damage than any missing feature
• Why AI-powered isn’t the same as AI-necessary
• Why you should build the business case before you build the shortlist

Catch the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you usually tune into your favourite podcasts.

[00:00:16] Mark: Welcome back to the CX Equation. I’m Mark, joined as always by Chantelle. And today, we’re doing a special one with just the two of us. There’s so much hitting the market right now, new platforms, new AI capabilities, new promises, and we felt like it was right to do an episode on something we see constantly in our work with clients. Someone’s unhappy with their martech. Teams are frustrated. Things are slow. Things are broken. And the answer on the table is, “let’s get a new platform”. Sometimes that is the right thing to do, but a lot of the time, it really isn’t. So today, we’re getting into how you actually know the difference and what you should be asking long before you ever talk to a vendor. So, Chantelle, let’s get straight into it. What’s the biggest mistake organisations make when they’re looking to invest in new martech?

[00:01:05] Chantelle: Firstly, I think you briefly mentioned in the intro, there’s so many new things and new capabilities that are being released at the moment by different vendors that are these new shiny things that are meant to, according to the sales team, solve all of these organisations’ problems. And I think the biggest mistake that people are making are assuming that those problems are caused by the technology that they already have. I think if you were to really delve a bit deeper and look into what issues they’re having with their marketing automation technology, their processes, their ways of working, their data, anything surrounding the sort of customer experience, then more often than not, it’s not a technology problem or a capability problem. It can be an array of different things. The main headline for this is that most orgs lead with the platform and not the problem, and that’s what we see a lot with clients when we work with them.

[00:01:54] Mark: It’s tricky, isn’t it? Because sometimes something genuinely new comes along, and it does have a capability that if you were to utilise it, it could bring new benefits. You don’t always know the art of possible with what you’ve got until something else comes along, but I would say more often than not it’s a promise from a sales team when, actually, maybe your existing tool could do it, or you’re not even getting enough out of your existing tool to take advantage of the new things in the new tool either. You’re not set up in the way to unlock that value just yet. So, yeah, I think it’s easy to be taken in, and it’s not wrong to not consider new capabilities. But, yeah, don’t get taken in when you’re not actually ready to, uh, take advantage of that new stuff.

[00:02:37] Chantelle: Yeah. Exactly. And I just to give a bit of an example, to give some context, for instance, a hot topic at the moment is improving campaign lead time, so how long it takes from brief to build to development to deployment of a campaign. And some of these legacy platforms, like Salesforce, like Adobe Campaign, have been implemented in a way which means that they’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the tool. So the marketers come to their data teams – they have such heavy dependency on their IT and data teams – and it takes them a really long time to get any new data in, or new segmentation or new audiences, so they, as a marketer, can’t be agile. So they’ll look at a light touch CDP or a tool like Braze and go, “well, they’re telling me that it could be really quick and that I can activate audiences super quickly”, but I can bet those processes in Adobe Campaign exist because of legacy stuff and because Adobe Campaign has been implemented in a certain way, which means that they need the tech dependency. Whereas if it was implemented in a different way, then it might have the same benefits that they’re seeing from tools like Braze and these more marketer friendly tools. So I think that’s an example where the technology has that capability, but it hasn’t been implemented in a way historically to enable marketers to be agile. So, yeah, lots of common issues that come up that means it’s not a technology issue. Another classic one is data – as I just described with that example – if you get bad data in a platform, it’s gonna be bad data out. And even with tools like CDPs or tools like Bloomreach, or Braze, if your data isn’t in a place where it’s ready and easy to consume and use by marketers, then it’s not gonna fix your problems with audiences and segmentation.

[00:04:17] Mark: So how would you go about actually figuring out what is the problem? Where would you begin in going? What’s the bit that’s actually broken that we need to fix?

[00:04:24] Chantelle: I would do a bit of a root cause analysis. So ask yourself questions like: What’s taking a really long time? What’s the manual process? Start with the operational efficiencies. What do I have to do day in, day out that takes up a huge chunk of my time as an individual, that should really, with the technology out there, not take up that much time? Where are the biggest dependencies? So like I mentioned, at the moment, there’s these big dependencies on technical teams or data teams. Is there any way that we can improve the process around it, or the data model, the data structure, the way that data is being passed between systems so that we don’t have to go to them for ad hoc requests every single time we want new data? And how can we fit a strategy around that as well? So yeah I’d start with asking yourself, where do the biggest problems lie within that whole journey from coming up with the idea of what you wanna build to actually executing it and deploying it? And that doesn’t just include the technology – like I said, that includes the processes around it. Obviously, you work with clients a lot on the strategic side and helping them improve their ways of working. What are some common mistakes or issues you see in that side of things?

[00:05:32] Mark: I would say there are two bits to it so sometimes, you might go into a client, and the challenge is that it’s taking ten weeks to get, like, an email or an outbound CRM campaign out the door. Sometimes that is the tech, or at least the tools within the tech aren’t available, and so I have a lengthy manual process to go and find my audiences and extract lists and put lists into different platforms and move things here and there. If they’re the challenges, sometimes they can be solved by the technology because you have a better way of selecting audiences or you have a better way of passing things between teams. What I actually find most of the time, is that challenges in how teams are working together isn’t to do with the tech; it’s the way they’re structured and the way that their objectives are set and the way that they collaborate. So I’ve seen businesses decide that they want to go omnichannel, and they want to deliver a seamless customer journey across outbound CRM emails, push notification, WhatsApp, and what’s on the web page, and what’s going out in paid media, and so on and so forth. And you can get an orchestration system or a decisioning engine, and you can plug all of the channels into the orchestration system or the decisioning engine. But if your team still works separately, and then the CRM team use that central system to send their outbound CRM, and they do that differently to how the web team use it to build their web personalisation, and they do that differently to how the paid media team orchestrating their paid media, the tech’s not joining anything up. It’s just the same box being used differently by different teams. And so until you find a way of getting your teams to think together and work together, it’s really not going to help. And then I do find as well, back to what you’re saying about data, the process is tricky. It’s not the tech that’s causing the trickiness. It is the fact that that team is responsible for data, and they have to do it in this way. And, therefore, if I take out my existing tech and put in a new tech, if that process with the data bit over there is still the same, my new tech can’t add any new value because it’s still an issue, I haven’t got to the fundamental part. So, yeah, I really do think it’s about taking a look at what’s the objective, what are we trying to do, and and why are we struggling. And then you’ve either got to make the decision as to whether it’s connections between data and technologies or whether it is looking at the team and the ways of working and how we bring those people together to streamline it all.

[00:07:53] Chantelle: Yeah. And sometimes even if it isn’t an issue with the data, the data is always involved, obviously, as the foundation of any tech implementation, but sometimes it is just the way the implementation has happened. So whether there was time constraints or there was other integrations issues that were involved or whatever it may be, sometimes it just hasn’t been implemented in the best way it could have been, or that vendor has released new capabilities which no longer fit in with whatever way you implemented this technology originally. Again, if we’re talking like Adobe and Salesforce, the legacy players, people that have those have had those for so long, like, years and years. We’ve had clients that have had Adobe for, like, fifteen years. So, obviously, if you’re not adapting and changing as new capabilities come along, the way that you’ve initially implemented it will have outgrown the vendor’s own capabilities. So I think it’s also about taking check of how your existing tech has been implemented and adapting with the new capabilities over time rather than just writing them off. And more often than not, that knowledge gap is where lies the issue. People think they have to get new technology because they just see Adobe Experience Cloud or Adobe Campaign or whatever you’re using as this whole thing that if they’ve been working there for fifteen years and they originally implemented it, it’s hard to see the changes that are made over time because you’re just working on the same thing day in, day out, and you’re sort of not up to speed.

[00:09:17] Mark: Sometimes what you will have can actually do more than you realise. Right? And you just don’t know all of those features or you don’t know the right way of doing it. So I’m gonna pick on two vendors. So Adobe and Salesforce, two great enterprise platforms with loads of features and capabilities within them. I’m not a technologist. I have seen clients migrate from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Adobe Experience Cloud and vice versa. And to me, they can both do a lot, and they can probably both do quite similar things. And so if I’m moving from one to the other, is it because the last one couldn’t do it, or is it because I just didn’t know how to get it to do it, or I didn’t implement it in the right way? And if I didn’t implement it in the right way and I haven’t learned from those mistakes, how do I not implement the new one in the wrong way as well? I guess, how do we figure that stuff out?

[00:10:08] Chantelle: I think it’s hard to do it when you’re in the middle of an implementation because it’s one of those things where you’re like “we should be doing this”. It’s also gonna be a completely different team that reimplement it. So as an organisation, over the years, you have technology and information is gonna be dropped along the way. So say, like you said, you move from Adobe to Salesforce, that knowledge of what the initial issues were might not be full because people have left and because they’ve had that technology for a really long time. So I think there does need to be an exercise of “why are we getting this new technology? What do we actually wanna improve on? And where there lies the issues in the old technology? But that is easier said than done. I’ve worked on a million implementations where you have the perfect plan and the perfect way and a perfect solution design of how you wanna implement a system, but then you come up against budget and you come up against time restraints and you build it with workarounds, and because this team can’t deliver this thing on time, you do things a bit differently. So whilst you want the perfect picture and you want it to be a perfect implementation, there are trade offs. So I think it is easier said than done, but saying that it’s always worth it in the long run. And I think sometimes we can lose sight of that bigger picture, and often people go, “oh, we’ll worry about that down the line. Our license is coming to an end. We just need to shift everything as it is at the moment”. But there needs to be somewhere in between where you’re not implementing things in a way that, yes, it’s like a quick fix now, but also on top of that, it does open up opportunity to reach some of your more advanced strategic stuff down the line and change things as you go along. So it’s a hard balance to keep, but doable.

[00:11:45] Mark: In really big businesses, you can often then find I’ve got my users of MarTech, my marketing and my digital teams. And then I’ve got the people that implement it that live in IT. How much of a problem is it that sometimes implementations are maybe run and governed too much by IT without enough involvement from the end users?

[00:12:08] Chantelle: This does happen a lot. I do think I’ve seen it over the last few years changing a little bit and I think that’s down to how many more vendors are in the market now and how much more autonomy marketers are being given through these vendors. So, historically, there was huge tech dependencies – there had to be technical teams that implemented them and then use them day to day to be able to navigate these platforms – but now we’re seeing platforms that are built for marketers, so they’re the target audience. They’re the target people that the sales people are talking to. And so I think the gap is closing. But even with that, I do think there is a tendency to buy these tools, and like you say, the CRM teams, marketing teams, are the ones that make the decision to buy these tools to make their day to day life easier and to achieve their goals but then it gets handed over to the delivery teams. And while they are market friendly tools, they’re implemented in a way that makes sense from a compliance perspective, the cleanest technical solution, all of these different things that they don’t have any context around how the marketers wanna use it. And so they might implement a data model or bring in data in a certain way that doesn’t make sense to marketers. So I’ll give you an example. Last year, a couple of years ago actually, I implemented Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) for a client, and the technical teams were very involved. We did work closely with marketing teams – I was sort of there to bridge the gap between the two of them – but initially, the way that they wanted to bring in data, whilst it fit in Zeta solution architecture in the way that they handle data, the actual values of the fields that they were bringing in were technical codes and technical values. And we said, “a marketer’s not gonna understand this”. Let me give you an example: I’ll make it really simple, like gender. If you have code zero one two to mean male, female, not specified, that doesn’t make it easier for a marketer to go in and create a segment and go, I want gender equals zero – that just doesn’t make any sense – so let’s translate it in a way so that it reads better, and it’s easily digestible day to day. So we did do that. They didn’t go down that road, but we had the processes. We had the right people as part of the delivery team that could inform what it should look like in the end, but they are the mistakes that happen.

[00:14:23] Mark: We’re not saying IT teams are the problem here. Right? We’re saying it’s the communication between marketing and IT teams and making sure that the right people are involved so that the people that are using platform right actually able to hit their objectives.

[00:14:37] Chantelle: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:14:39] Mark: And often, maybe not often, but definitely more than uncommon, I have seen those objectives aren’t even clear. Like, why have we bought this thing? Did we buy it because it looked exciting? Did we buy it because a salesperson did a good job of selling it? Did we buy it because someone had it in an old business and they liked it? Like, whereas going “No, the objective of this platform is to enable these use cases because these use cases will allow us to target these customers and then grow revenue or improve retention or serve people in channels that we can’t serve them today and grow reach”. I’ve many times seen when you say, well, “so what are the success criterias, the objectives of this implementation?” It’s not written down clearly. We must do it for under £1,000,000, and it must take twenty weeks, and it must include these channels. It’s not the end goal, and I don’t know why that so often gets lost in translation.
[00:15:36] Chantelle: Sometimes that success criteria is as simple as our annual license cost needs to be x amount or it needs to be lower. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated success criteria. I want like, I wanna save money on the licensing. That’s easy enough to know. I wanna speed up my campaign build time. It doesn’t like you say, they just need to spend the time upfront deciding why they’re doing it. And, actually, if it is use case driven, which should be, see if you can achieve it on your current tech first. If it’s not like a cost saving thing or a resource thing, it’s just a I want this new capability. Let’s see if we can do it on our existing tech first.

[00:16:10] Mark: You’ve talked to them about “so I’ve got to the end of a license”. That is an obvious point to make a decision. Right? Do I stick with what I’ve got or do I upgrade it? Maybe what you’ve got isn’t working so well. So how can you tell if you’ve maybe you’ve outgrown your current platform because you’ve advanced as a business and maybe the innovations within that platform haven’t kept up with the pace that you’re maturing at? Or maybe you’re just underutilising it. Maybe it has pace, and we’re going back to that knowledge gap. How would you go about figuring out what’s the situation? Have we outgrown it? Are we underutilising it and we need something else?

[00:16:43] Chantelle: I think you’ve got to forward think a little bit. Obviously, there’ll be current issues that you wanna fix, but I think that question specifically, you wanna ask yourself, will the technology that we currently have help us achieve our business outcomes in the next, like, three to five years because it costs a lot for implementing new technology. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of resources. If you are investing that time, then you need to make sure that it’s suitable for your long term plans as well as your now. I do think there is such a thing as I wanna achieve this specific use case, and therefore, I want to invest in a piece of technology to help me achieve this. If you can keep the costs low, though, I don’t see any issue with having different things. It’s that whole question of composable versus one stop shop. Right? I think you can also make smaller decisions. But, again, it’s all wrapped up in budget, etcetera, in the short term. But I think if you are investing a lot in technology in general, then you need to make sure that it’s future proof as well. Otherwise, you’re just gonna be going through this conversation in a few years again. And, also, before you jump to acquire a new piece of technology, what do I need to do to make sure that I’m ready to implement it before then? And there’s gonna be a million things that you have to do before then. I think those exercises will help you. In terms of if you’re checking if you’re underutilising your current technology, I guess, use case driven as well. Look at what you wanna achieve and investigate whether you can do that either via the vendor or via any third parties or even yourself. A lot of these vendors now have really good documentation and resources to enable you to to figure out where you can do stuff. So I just do a bit of investigation around that. Rather than just leaving it as an open question, get specific on what you actually want to achieve, and you’ll figure out whether you’re underutilising it. And dedicate time to that as well, to training and enablement of these new platform because, like I said, things are evolving really quickly at the moment. Vendors are constantly releasing new things. So so, yeah, get in contact with your account managers and ask, is there anything new that we haven’t currently got access to that we can find it out a little bit more about? I’m sure they’d offer it up willingly anyway, try and get you to spend more money.

[00:19:02] Mark: So then the big thing at the moment, obviously, coming to new capabilities. We’ve got AI. We’ve got advances in in AI, and what AI is offering us. My huge frustration in any client is “How do we use AI?” Like, you don’t need AI. You don’t need to use AI. Let’s come back to what we’re trying to do. So it’s taken me ten weeks to get a campaign out the door. Maybe AI can simplify that because it can automate how we’re writing briefs or automate the way we select customers so “great, I’ve got a purpose. AI needs to smooth my process.” Maybe it’s about “I can do more personalisation than I could before because, actually, there’s new tools that are just making it much easier to put in kind of a core version and turn that into other things and speed that element up”. But how do we know what we’re solving with AI? Do we need AI right now? And how sometimes I reckon there’s use cases that people are looking at getting AI to do what don’t even need AI to do it. Right? It’s been there all along. It’s just, uh, so how would you go about talking to a client? Like, what’s the AI stuff, and what should we be doing with it?

[00:20:05] Chantelle: I guess, first, you wanna define what problems you’re trying to solve for and what use cases you want to implement. And then from then on, if a tool which uses agentic AI or whatever type of AI, then is the solution to that because it makes your life easier day to day or it can do better predictive modeling or decisioning than what you’re currently doing in house or anything like that, then I think that’s when you make the call of what technology you should use. But as you said, the “I want to implement AI” isn’t a good enough reason to implement or to onboard a new technology vendor whose sole sales pitch is “ We are an agentic AI platform”. You shouldn’t implement that just for the sake of it.

[00:20:49] Mark: How do you cut through that? Because we’ve done a couple of conferences recently, and every single stand says AI powered. And every technology now, even the ones I’ve had for a while, say that they’re AI powered. How can everything be AI powered all of a sudden when seemingly some of it hasn’t really changed? What’s the AI powered bit? How do you cut through the BS?

[00:21:08] Chantelle: Yeah. I think, again, implementing it for specific reasons is gonna be how you cut through the hype. But I think a lot of, in the martech space, anyway, a lot of the new capabilities around AI are agentic stuff. So being able to create workflows that run automatically to reduce your manual workload, so there is a lot of good in it, It’s not all bullshit, but you are not gonna get anywhere, and you’re not gonna see the benefit of it, unless you have specific use cases defined. If you’re just gonna say, for instance, at the moment, Adobe has rebranded actually, a lot of them have rebranded to it’s called Adobe CX Enterprise, and the whole premise of it is that it’s one singular place for all of your Adobe products to execute use cases through all of your Adobe products that are all integrated in one place, and you can do that. You can use their AI assistant to chat with them, or you can create these workflows or agents to do various jobs throughout their technology. One thing is, I imagine, in order for that to work, to get the most value out of that, you probably have to have a lot of the Adobe products in the first place. The composable thing isn’t gonna work if you buy into a specific vendor’s, well it’s not gonna work as well if you buy into a specific vendor’s AI capabilities because if you’re using a CDP outside of Adobe, then I believe, at the moment, it’s gonna be more difficult to plug in because, obviously, they’re gonna value their own products, and they’re gonna have better integrations with their agentic AI offering than any ones outside of that.

[00:22:40] Mark: So the other thing I would say, when most businesses are on some form of maturity curve, right, some businesses are very sophisticated in their marketing and advanced in their automation and personalisation, and some aren’t there yet because they’re smaller businesses. They don’t have the budget. They’ve not been around as long. So what you are trying to do with AI, make sure it makes sense. So back to a really tangible use case for AI. Right now, I’ve got really manual process. I’m writing briefs in Excel. Um, I’m sending that over. Someone is manually extracting things, so on and so forth. If AI can help speed up the brief creation or can read a bit of the brief and send it to the right place or extract bits from places. And so all of a sudden, two weeks of manual process becomes one week of slightly manual with lots of AI automation. Absolutely go for it. Whereas if you’re going, oh, the latest advances in AI allow me to do personalised insight based on segmentation that an agent goes and finds the right customers and so on and so forth, that’s great if you’re already a mature organisation that knows that. But if you’re still kind of at the start of the maturity curve and you can’t even get a second version of an email signed off because you’ve got to go through lengthy legal processes, and no one’s aligned on what we’re trying to achieve. Don’t start trying to do AI based decisioning and advanced stuff because you’re just not ready for it. As cool as it sounds, you’ve got some fundamental things to fix before you’re kinda there. So don’t get lost in the sexiness and the hype of all of the latest innovations. Really figure out what it is that you’re trying to achieve. And if AI can help you do that better, absolutely go for it. But it’s a world that’s changing fast and it’s expensive. Right? We still don’t fully understand the cost of all of these tokens, what things are really gonna cost businesses in a year or two’s time. So I think jumping on the bandwagon for the sake of going, we’ve got an AI strategy or we’re now using AI is a foolish endeavor in my opinion.

[00:24:39] Chantelle: Yeah. Also, going back to the whole new technology doesn’t automatically solve your problems just because I think there’s been a few examples I’ve seen recently of just because someone’s implemented an AI tool or a single AI tool that organisation should use across the board doesn’t mean that people will use it. I think people, a lot of the time, they want to learn, but their day to day is still bogged down by the manual processes and that no one has time and everyone’s really busy. And so they actually don’t the adoption of the tool is just as important as the decision to implement it. Because if you’re gonna pay for that tool, you wanna make sure people are seeing the value individuals are seeing the value out of it so that they can also get on board. And it’s adopted well throughout the company, and it’s not a waste of time and resources to implement.

[00:25:24] Mark: The other thing I think is interesting about AI at the minute is what can you do yourself versus, or with help from maybe more niche providers and more niche service providers, versus what should you take advantage of that maybe the big vendors are giving you? Because Adobe and Salesforce and Bloomreach and Braze are all bringing in their own AI capabilities. But do you want to be tied into what the vendor can offer, or are there things that you can actually develop yourself that can sit on top of technology and you have a bit more control over and they become your IP over time? And I think we’re all still figuring out that as well as to where’s the right point to invest and what’s the right things to be doing.

[00:26:03] Chantelle: From, uh, my current opinion, this changes all the time because there’s new things that are released all the time. But what the vendors are offering, a lot of it is what is useful to an individual day to day. So if you have an AI chatbot on, I don’t know, Braze or Loomi on Bloomreach or whatever it is, and you say, “what was the performance of this campaign?” You can type in plain English, and it will give you a report on it. For me as an individual, that’s really useful because I don’t have to go away and create a report or create a dashboard if it’s, like, a lower level one. But anything that needs company, organisation, or team wide context or needs to be governed in one place because it’s useful to share amongst the team rather than an individual task, then it makes sense for that to be in one governed place. Also, if it’s using multiple data sources or multiple platforms, then that makes sense to be in one place. Yes. Everyone’s kind of offering very similar things at the moment, so it’s hard to get through the noise of what works for you to figure out what works for you.

[00:27:00] Chantelle: So we’ve talked a little bit about what mistakes we see in organisations and things to look out for and a little bit about the need or the want for new AI capabilities. But we wanna give you a bit of a practical guidance and takeaways on the kind of framework that we would use to really figure out whether you should invest in new technology or you should improve the capabilities of your existing tech and invest more time and money in improving that. So we’re gonna talk you through a little bit of a framework that we might use to figure this out.

[00:27:32] Mark: So I think you need to start with understanding what is it you actually want to do, and then which bits of that can you do with your existing technology versus which bits are there gaps in the capability. And when I say what can you do, there might be things that you can do, but they’re a bit complicated. They’re slow. They’re manual. They are frustrating for your teams. They are resulting in not quite as good customer experience. And this is probably where it is good to understand the art of the possible. Because by doing that, you can say, well, what is it that we want to be able to do versus what are the elements that we can do? So to try and keep that practical, it might be that we want to be able to send out CRM in outbound channels such as email, SMS, WhatsApp, and have the same offer, the same message decision across those channels that’s based on the customer. And then you say, can I do that in my existing technology? No. Because I have a different data source and a different tool for sending things out into email as I do for WhatsApp. Or, yes, I can because I can run my customer selection and put my right rules on top of that and decide I have the same kind of logic for personalising based on a customer segment or attributes. And so, therefore, you can then say, right. That’s a goal. Can I do it? If not, well, therefore, I might have a gap that I need to fix.

[00:28:55] Chantelle: And then next, you kind of wanna do a bit of an audit of how you’re using your current technology. So check the utilisation of it. You know? When did you last look at what features you’re currently using versus what’s available to use or what new capabilities that the vendor has released? Is there anything that isn’t being utilised because of a knowledge gap, because there hasn’t been training on that part of the tool? Have you got any technical debt or workarounds that have been implemented that no one knows what the solution to it is anymore? There’s been a gap in knowledge as people have left, and there’s been different people in and out of the team. That’s quite a common one with clients. Things have been implemented in a specific way years and years ago, and it runs and it does the job, but it always falls over, for instance, and no one really knows how to fix it or why it was implemented that way. So having a look at those kind of things and understanding where the technical debt lies will help you also uncover some more issues that could probably be improved.

[00:29:48] Mark: You’ve then got to think about this: is what you currently have fit for the future? It’s difficult to know exactly what is gonna happen in the next three to five years, but there’s a sense that technology is evolving rapidly. You might not be able to do something now, and that’s not important to you, but it might become important in the next few years. So make sure that you have a road map for how your marketing and customer experience is going to evolve and think about whether your current technology meets that road map. And if you do decide that you therefore want to look at other technology, make sure you’re not just getting sold by the vendor as to what they can do today. Interrogate them and make sure that they have a road map and they are transparent with you as to what’s on the plan for the next several years. Because vendors are always advancing their capabilities, and they will have a sense as to what innovations they’re bringing in in the next three to five years, and you wanna make sure that that matches to what you are currently wanting to do.

[00:30:46] Chantelle: Also, just to add to that, if you are looking at how your team is structured and how much time is available within each team in using new technology or existing technology to make sure that gap is covered as well if you were to implement new technology. The last thing that you’d wanna look at before deciding whether to get something new or stick with what you have is, once you’ve identified the problems, what’s the actual cost of these problems to the business? So how much time is lost, for instance, to manually doing things, to long processes, to delays, or to have dependencies on tech teams and the amount of time it’s taking them to implement things, for instance. You wanna put together a business case using this information, also include what risks are involved. So in your current processes, any compliance issues or data quality, anything that may come across to the customer, any issues that have happened in the past that could have been mitigated if you had certain things in place, you could document those risks. And, also, what would it be worth to the business if you were to improve the agility of how you work? So if you were to fix some of these problems and you can deliver things slightly quicker or you could focus on other things that might deliver you more value, what would that be worth to the business? Can you put a number on it? Whether that’s a cost or revenue or a time saved or however you could look at it, those are the types of things you’d wanna document it to put together the business case to either invest in new technology or invest more in people and time to build out the capabilities on your existing technology.

[00:32:18] Mark: And then my final point linking to what Chantelle’s just said, if speed and process efficiency are one of your key drivers, make sure that you understand why the process isn’t working and whether the technology is actually gonna fix it. So if things are slow and cumbersome because there are very manual processes that could be automated more or there’s a lack of visibility between teams because they can’t share things in the same place or the way the briefs get populated and translated is difficult, then it probably, your technology is going to help you with that if you make sure that the thing that you’re buying is designed to do that. However, if your problem is, well, we can’t get sign off through legal or we work in a waterfall way and this can’t start until that has happened or teams don’t talk to each other, or we don’t know who’s responsible for what, or there’s a duplication of work. That’s not necessarily something your tool’s gonna fix. And, therefore, you need to, in parallel to any decisions you’re making about MarTech, make sure you are set up as a business to actually take advantage of this new capability that you are looking at, and that could involve some team changes, some operating model reorganisation, and some process reengineering as well to make sure that the value of that martech is realised. I think that pretty much covers it, doesn’t it, Chantelle? Is there anything we’ve missed?

[00:33:43] Chantelle: I don’t think so. I think we’ve hopefully provided some guidance on tech. The headline is technology isn’t always the problem. So, yeah, hopefully, our listeners have some guidance on on whether they should change things up or stay the same. All good from me.

[00:33:59] Mark: I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this special CX Equation with just the two of us, and we will see you again next month.

[00:34:06] Chantelle: See you. Bye.

[00:34:09] Mark: The CX equation is brought to you by TapCXM. To find out more about what we do and how we can help you, visit tapcxm.com.

[00:34:16] Chantelle: And then make sure to search for the CX equation in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you usually find your podcast. Make sure to click subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.

[00:34:26] Mark: On behalf of the team here at Tap CXM, thank you for listening.