Guide

The Enterprise Guide

to Building a Better
CX Stack
Guide

Table of Contents
3 Bring Order to CX Chaos

5 Make Every Team Member a

CX Champion

6 Customer 360: Create a Single Source

of Customer Truth

7 Audience Segmentation: Understand

and Reach the Right Audience

8 Journey Orchestration: Drive Results

Across the Customer Lifecycle

9 Real-Time Experiences: Create

Real-Time Experiences That Matter

10 Discover the Power of Data

in Motion
 | T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K

Bring Order to
CX Chaos
Every enterprise organization is on a journey to The challenge organizations
transform customer experience for the better face today isn’t one of
— and that journey begins with your CX stack. capability — it’s one of agility,
adaptability and efficiency.
Brands have nearly 10,000 marketing
technology solutions to choose from when
building their stacks. The average enterprise
company has 364 software-as-a-service Business teams need to access and take action
applications alone, with each team using be- on customer data to discover audiences and
tween 40-60 tools. orchestrate experiences at scale. Technical
teams need to extend and enhance existing
In short, the capability gap has been closed.
technology investments to manage data gover-
So why is the customer experience gap getting
nance, costs and performance. And both teams
wider? Research shows the majority of brands
need to do so faster and smarter.
significantly overrate their CX performance
when compared to their customers. Customer experience is powered by customer
data. No matter how advanced or compre-
It’s because the challenge organizations face
hensive your CX stack is, if customer data is
today isn’t one of capability — it’s one of agility,
trapped between the competing priorities of
adaptability and efficiency.
your organization, the result is internal chaos
that keeps CX transformation out of reach.

To provide extraordinary customer experiences,

you must put your data in motion. This starts
at the center of your CX stack, with the foun-
dational capabilities we call the CX Hub.

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 | T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K

Execution Systems

Customer Experience Hub

AUDIENCE CENTER JOURNEY MANAGEMENT

CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM REAL-TIME CX

Data Sources

4

Make Every Team Member
a CX Champion
The CX Hub is the core of your CX stack — the
axis around which all operations revolve. Every
data source flows to it and every execution
system flows from it.
It’s made up of four capabilities: customer 360,
audience segmentation, journey orchestration
and real-time experiences.
Each capability is interconnected, feeding the
others in a continuous loop that helps you op-
timize customer experience using the various
tools in your CX stack.
To maximize speed, flexibility and scalability
across your stack and drive the best results
with your CX strategy, your CX Hub should be:
Agile
Your CX Hub should give your business teams
the power to directly access customer data to
self-serve their use cases, as well as activate
it across any system or channel. This will help
marketing, sales and customer service teams
move quickly and save technical teams from ad
hoc requests.
| T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K
The CX Hub is made up of four
capabilities: customer 360,
audience segmentation,
journey orchestration and
real-time experiences.
Adaptable
Your CX Hub should give your technical teams
the power to add or expand capabilities with
modular solutions that integrate with all data
sources and channels, as well as decide where
customer data is managed. This will help engi-
neering and operations teams future-proof your
CX stack and maintain control of data security
and privacy.
Efficient
Your CX Hub should give your organization as
a whole the power to automate expensive and
time-consuming manual processes, as well as
quickly query and activate large and complex
data sets. This will help all teams more effec-
tively carry out business-critical tasks and free
up time to focus on higher-value work.
5

Customer 360: Create a Single
Source of Customer Truth
A customer 360 that provides a comprehensive
view of your entire customer base is critical
to your CX Hub. It’s the foundation of audience
segmentation — the process that makes per-
sonalized experience orchestration possible.
While a customer 360 is never complete —
it’s ever-changing and must evolve as new cus-
tomer data and channels are added to it over
time — it’s the starting point for everything that
follows.
Create your customer 360 in the way that
makes the most sense for your organization,
whether that means buying a customer data
platform (CDP), using your own cloud-based
data warehouse or taking a hybrid approach.
| T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K
Create your customer 360 by
buying a customer data
platform (CDP), using your own
cloud-based data warehouse
or taking a hybrid approach.
Every organization will have unique wants and
needs, depending on its data infrastructure
and internal technical resources. The goal is
to maintain control of your data storage and
processing while making the most of existing
investments and avoiding capability overlap.
As long as you can plug your customer 360 into
your CX Hub to power audience segmentation
— and by extension journey orchestration
and real-time experiences — it doesn’t matter
whether you buy it or build it.
6

Audience Segmentation:
Understand and Reach the
Right Audience
Audience segmentation that helps scale speed
and intelligence across business teams is es-
sential to customer experience, making it argu-
ably the most important part of your CX Hub.
But audience segmentation is about more than
mixing and matching audiences — it allows you
to discover and engage new audiences through
predictive analytics and automation.
Prioritize self-service data access for your
business teams built on advanced analytics
so they can go beyond surface-level data and
target customers based on behaviors, prefer-
ences and more.
| T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K
Prioritize self-service data
access for your business teams
built on advanced analytics.
Everyday business users need a user-friendly,
no-code interface to easily uncover and acti-
vate customer insights. From there, they can
improve personalization with granular audience
segments, proactively manage costs through
smarter audience targeting and identify both
high-value opportunities and potential risks
using predictive models.
But keep in mind that audiences won’t be of
much value if they’re not consistently updat-
ed or integrated with and activated across
channels as part of orchestrated journeys and
real-time experiences.
7

Journey Orchestration: Drive Results
Across the Customer Lifecycle
Journey orchestration that helps business
teams manage customer experiences from ac-
quisition to retention across channels is crucial
to your CX Hub — it’s what allows you to acti-
vate audiences into personalized experiences
no matter where your customers are in the
buyer’s journey.
Along with real-time experiences, journey
orchestration is also key to understanding how
your CX strategy is performing, giving you
the insights you need to fine-tune your strate-
gy and iterate on learnings.
Make sure your business teams can schedule
an unlimited number of multi-step customer
journeys across all channels and touchpoints,
as well as test, measure and report on
journey performance.
| T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K
Make sure your business teams
can launch an unlimited
number of multi-step customer
journeys across all channels
and touchpoints.
Effective customer journeys align with the
wantsand needs of your customers, who may
engage with your brand across multiple chan-
nels and in various ways depending on where
they are in the customer lifecycle. By using
customer insights gained through audience
segmentation, business teams can quickly and
easily create sophisticated journeys for dif-
ferent audiences, channels and stages of the
customer lifecycle.
But don’t forget to put your journeys to the test.
Experimenting with different journeys — then
measuring and reporting on the results — will
help you optimize experience orchestration
over time and maximize positive outcomes.
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 | T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K

Real-Time Experiences:
Create Real-Time Experiences
That Matter
Real-time experiences that help business Help your business teams provide
teams engage customers in the right place and intelligent real-time experiences.
at the right time are a vital part of your CX Hub.
They give you the chance to not just satisfy,
but surpass expectations by meeting custom-
Great customer experiences aren’t just fast —
ers in the moment.
they’re made-to-measure. In addition to
But speed isn’t the only factor to keep in mind. contextual, real-time event data, they should
Real-time experiences are your chance to show be based on insights captured through
your customers you understand their needs audience segmentation.
with personalized, relevant interactions, and
Using automated omnichannel triggers that
this requires them to be built on the full cus-
pull from both historical and streaming data,
tomer profile.
you can make sure real-time experiences
Help your business teams provide intelligent truly resonate with customers and drive
real-time experiences no matter where or when the best results.
customers engage with your brand.

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 | T H E E NT ER P R ISE G UIDE TO BUIL DING A BE T TER CX S TAC K

Discover the Power of

Data in Motion
The capability gap has been closed — it’s time Break down organizational silos,
to close the CX gap. eliminate inefficient processes
and empower everyone to exceed
By making sure your CX Hub provides your or-
customer expectations.
ganization with the speed, flexibility and scal-
ability it needs, you can unlock the true value
of your CX stack.

Even the most sophisticated CX stack will This will help you break down organizational si-
come up short if the CX Hub it’s built around los, eliminate inefficient processes and empow-
doesn’t serve the diverse needs of your er everyone to exceed customer expectations.
organization. Give your business teams the
With an agile, adaptable and efficient CX Hub,
ability to explore and action on customer data.
you can put your data in motion and enable
Allow your technical teams to maximize the
everyone to drive growth through extraordinary
value and impact of your technologies. And
customer experiences.
help both teams do it better.

Discover how you can build a better

CX stack with the AIQ CX Hub

Get in Touch
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AIQ brings order to CX chaos.
Our Customer Experience Hub empowers
everyone to be a CX champion by giving
business teams the freedom to explore
and action on customer data while
helping technical teams regain control
of where data lives and how it’s used.

Learn more at actioniq.com