By Keith Overa
Whether you’re looking through the lens of a marketer or consumer, it is clear that the way we seek goods and services has undergone significant change over the past couple of years. Coming out of the pandemic, McKinsey estimates that approximately 75 percent of consumers continue to switch brands. Today, 64 percent of B2C customers and 80 percent of B2B customers1 expect brands to interact consistently with them across all touchpoints in real time.
As companies evolve to meet the changing needs of consumers, the next wave of digital transformation will be shaped by their ability to create integrated, moments-based journeys for individual consumers. As a result, organizations across industries are moving away from an outsourced approach to marketing and advertising and instead building their own marketing systems based on first-party data. Technology is the key to realizing the value of that data and developing personalized end-to-end experiences across the consumer lifecycle.
Spending on marketing technology continues to increase
Throughout the uncertain economic circumstances caused by the pandemic, marketers still allocated more than a quarter of their budget to technology and 68 percent of CMOs expect their investments to increase2, particularly for the adoption of agile platform capabilities that support future growth and change.
As organizations adopt technology-driven marketing strategies, Microsoft partners have a tremendous opportunity to sell, deploy, configure, and customize the services that make up the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform (MCXP). The market for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform is up almost 50% year over year, with a partner opportunity of $7 in services for every $1 licensing.
There’s a playbook for growing your CX practice
The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform (MCXP) is the only platform designed around the business-to-everyone model of customer experience. By bringing together applications from across Microsoft such as Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Advertising, and more, the MCXP provides a single integrated solution stack that customers can use to address multiple scenarios at a global scale.
To give partners a launchpad for creating or growing your customer experience practice, we’ve created the ultimate CX practice playbook to provide ways you can help your customers build customer-centric marketing systems to address their most pressing scenarios.
Alongside use cases, real-work implementation examples, and more, the CX practice playbook share best practices from partners and digital agencies who have used Microsoft solutions to break down data siloes and empower marketers to unlock meaningful insights in real time.
Here’s a sneak peek of partners’ top 10 learnings and best practices for growing your thriving CX practice: