What Do CXM Consultants Do, Exactly?

What is “CXM Consulting”?

CXM consultants work with organisations to understand their customers, identify areas for improvement, and implement strategies to enhance satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

It’s a specialised kind of business advice focused on optimising your customer experience (CX) activities. That’s a broad remit. CX covers everything you do for and with customers – the sum total of the brand-customer interactions spanning the customer journey. Customer experience management, then, is how you manage these interactions. It’s the combination of customer-centric strategy, data management, marketing technology and customer intelligence that enables your team to deliver the experiences people want.

Essentially, our role as CXM consultants is to help you build stronger customer relationships by connecting the dots across every touchpoint to create positive, personalised experiences.

From Personalised Selling to Personal Experiences: What’s Changing in CXM?

Today, most brands aspire to tailor marketing messaging and sales offers to customers. They use what they know about customers to target them. If they’re good, they’ll reach customers with the right message on the right channel at the right time. But here’s the problem: the marketing landscape is changing. Your customers’ needs are changing. People are sick of being sold to. They want autonomy and respect. They seek connections. They want brands to demonstrate a level of care in the relationship. In short, they want to be the centre of everything.

Customer centricity isn’t a corporate tagline. It’s something you need to demonstrate at the coalface by creating meaningful, personalised experiences. Figure out how to do that, and they’ll reward you with loyalty that you can measure against business goals.

Why is CXM consulting valuable?

Great customer experiences are paradoxically easy to see and hard to define. To deliver them, marketers need:

• • Clear goals
  • Reliable data
  • Robust martech 
  • Capable colleagues
  • Agile processes

Underscoring all of this is organisational strategy. When CXM goals align with business growth objectives, and your systems and structures support personalised marketing at scale, CXM builds tangible value.

The numbers: Why customer-centric brands are more successful

We’re talking about moving from product-centric marketing to customer-centric relationships. Here’s why it’s good for business.

• • Experience-driven businesses have 1.7x higher customer retention rates, 1.6x higher customer lifetime value, 1.4x faster revenue growth and 1.5x more satisfied employees. (Forrester, 2021)
  • Consumers will pay 7-16% more for a better experience. 43% will pay a premium for convenience, while 42% will reward a welcoming experience. (PwC, 2018)
  • Companies that excel at customer-centric CXM see 15% higher sales conversions, 30% lower customer service costs and 20% higher customer satisfaction. (McKinsey, 2022)
  • Increasing customer engagement can deliver 10%+ profit increases, 66% higher sales growth, 25% higher loyalty and 20% higher customer confidence. (Gallup, 2024)
  • Engaged customers represent a 23% premium in share of wallet, profitability and revenue compared to the average customer. (Gallup, 2024)

Our Approach to CXM Consulting

Putting customers first is nice. It also needs to be good for business, or you may as well give away free money. We’ll work with you to develop the capabilities to solve business challenges and deliver tangible value. 

Our approach is practical, data-driven and strategy-led. Here’s how that might look in practice, with the caveat that every client is different.

Business Challenge 1: Understanding Customers as Individuals

The key to personalisation at scale is understanding your customers on a deeper level. We help you gather and analyse customer data, revealing insights that get you closer to audience segments of one.

Required capabilities: A clear, customer-centric CXM strategy

• • Aligned targets and KPIs
  • Segmentation and audience strategy
  • Developing “always on” customer journeys
  • Accessing market insights

Business Challenge 2: Using Data and Analytics to Deliver Personalised Experiences 

Personalisation isn’t optional. It’s expected. This goes beyond addressing your audience by name in an email. It means personalising offers, orchestrating unique journeys and interacting in real time. You need good data to do any of this. Data analytics is how you know which experiences are win-win, which aren’t working, and what to try next. (The next challenge is automating this so it happens across multiple channels and at scale.)

Required capabilities: Data science and analytics

• • Measurement framework
  • Reliable real-time performance analytics
  • Advanced modelling
  • Flexible marketing attribution models
  • Data visualisation and reporting

Business Challenge 3: Connect Seamless Journeys Across Channels

Now that you can personalise customer experiences, the next step is scaling up. That means stringing together individual personalised marketing into a seamless multi-channel journey. Customers interact with brands across a multitude of channels. They usually don’t follow the path you want them to. Any friction in the journey could see them lose interest faster than you can send an abandoned cart email.

We’ll work with you to upgrade existing tech, integrate separate platforms and implement new solutions that connect the customer journey. As a tech-agnostic CXM consultancy, we’ll always try to improve your current solution before recommending a new tool.

Required capabilities: Marketing technology that meets your needs

• • Connected architecture
  • Automation platform that scales with you
  • Customer journey orchestration tools
  • Omni-channel activation capabilities
  • Governance and taxonomy
  • Content management system and asset management
  • A/B testing and optimisation

Business Challenge 4: Measure Marketing Effectiveness and Improve Incrementally

Proving marketing ROI is a challenge for any business. Understanding what’s working and what’s not is crucial for optimising your marketing efforts. It’s also how you earn trust from higher-ups and secure more budget next quarter. 

We help you enhance your measurement capabilities to prove ROI and implement a continuous improvement strategy. We’ll also help you stay compliant with relevant data privacy frameworks so you’re not risking a six or seven-figure GDPR infringement.

Required capabilities: Connected data that provides a comprehensive picture

• • Data management strategy
  • Robust data platforms, connections and processing infrastructure
  • First-party data strategy
  • Single, centralised, progressive customer profiles
  • Identity matching across multiple touchpoints
  • Artificial intelligence tools
  • Real-time data connections

Business Challenge 5: Manage Efficient Marketing Operations

Efficiency is the name of the game in CXM. Competition is fiercer than ever, and customers have come to expect instant gratification. Yet, you’re probably struggling with underutilised martech, disjointed processes and siloed teams. Don’t worry, most businesses do. To be truly customer-centric, your organisation might need a reshuffle. At the very least, some processes and systems need to change.

This is challenging for companies and teams used to doing things a certain way. But we can’t stress how crucial it is – your CXM strategy won’t last a year unless everyone works together.

Required capabilities: People and organisation aligned behind business goals

• • Customer-focused, CX-enabling organisation design
  • Agile and collaborative systems
  • Effective processes
  • Tailored training to empower autonomy

Case Studies: CXM Consulting in Action

Sometimes our engagement is short and sharp. We step in to help clients solve a specific problem, then back away once they’re confident handling things themselves. Other times, we provide ongoing support for years. We might act as technical experts on marketing automation platforms, troubleshoot data management processes, or continuously improve organisational systems to mature the brand’s CXM strategy. 

• We helped Walgreens design and implement an appointment notification system that reached 29m+ Americans in just 8 weeks. 

Our role combined project managers and solution architects. With Walgreens building the booking system, another company handling messaging, and us managing the notification part alongside Adobe, Tap CEO Andrew Haines said it was “like building the English Channel”.

This six-week sprint brought out our best skills. Project management, technical expertise, proactively finding solutions, resource management – all things CXM consultants like getting stuck in to.

• Our ongoing partnership with Specsavers has seen drive efficiency and effectiveness in campaign operations using built-to-scale tech and best-practice processes. 

This relationship has returned sustained value over time. Through a co-sourced model, we’ve helped Specsavers implement dozens of improvements to launch more (and faster) campaigns, improve ROI, and standardise best practices across to create a global playbook.

• We’re working with Direct Wines to streamline processes, save time on campaigns and enhance customer relationships.

A big part of this work is maturing the brand’s seasonal-heavy campaign cycle to an always-on approach. This is making customer communications more relevant and personal, while also giving the Direct Wines team more time and flexibility. 

From reworking processes so people spend less time in meetings (down from 90% of the week to <10% in one person’s case) to developing custom templates, the value is adding up.

How to Choose the Right CXM Consultant 

As the underlying factors of brand-customer relationships evolve (customer expectations, tech capabilities, competition, online privacy, buying behaviour and others), your CXM strategy must also evolve. It needs to be connected. It needs to deliver value on both sides of the exchange. It needs to be personalised, progressive and as automated as possible. 

A good CXM consultant knows how to translate all this into realistic, effective, stepped-out strategies that build value over time. Here’s what that looks like when you’re shortlisting.

Six Traits of Valuable CXM Consultants

1. Proven experience: Look for a consultant with a track record in your industry. They should be able to demonstrate a history of delivering tangible business outcomes. Bonus points if they’ve solved similar challenges with lessons that apply to your business.
2. Data-driven: Experimenting, measuring and continually improving are essential for getting results. Trust consultants who base decisions on data.
3. Tech agnostic: The best consultants recommend the tools and platforms that suit your needs and growth plans. They don’t push specific vendors. Our standard line is ‘the best technology is often the one you already have’.
4. Customer focus: There are no shortcuts to customer centricity. Good consultants evaluate how your organisation – not just your tech – serves the customer’s best interests.
5. Building capabilities: Direct support can help you get the ball rolling, but a good CXM consultant aims to make themselves redundant. Our ideal outcome is to see our clients become self-sufficient – with the understanding they can always call us for complex use cases or guidance through challenges.
6. Committed: Evolving your organisation to a customer-centric CXM machine doesn’t happen overnight. Your CXM consultant should have the capabilities and vision to mature your approach over time. And the staying power to see it through.

All this boils down to one big difference between consultants and “consultants”. One talks about good ideas. The good ones work with you to make them happen. Not once, but again and again, with a clear plan to make your team self-sufficient.