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of planned customer engagements over time. However, just like in marketing the bottom line needs justification and customer experience activities need documentation. support of the complaint and compliment volume tracker for numbers and nature. It is from these very customer outputs that marketing may tap in and measure the response to product or service adequacy. Measurement of customer willingness to recommend via the net promote score, or service levels achieved via the customer effort score, whilst indicative of satisfaction levels, requires the added If measurement and the metrics derived thereof are important to guide decision making at a corporate level, then both the marketing and customer experience strategies should benefit from harmonized thought and synergistic strategy efforts! The core structure of any great marketing strategy will have the customer at the center of focus. The strategic themes, objectives, activities, and targets will revolve around customer acquisition, customer interaction, and customer retention. Whether the marketing angles in the strategy are addressed from research, business development, public relations and communication or brand awareness perspective, ultimately the target audience for these activities is the customer. It therefore calls for support from the ‘people’ driven arm of the organization, whose sole focus is to ensure that anything and everything to do with the customer is done with excellence – the customer experience team. Winning customer experience strategies on the other hand, need to take into account that internal departments all work towards delivery of great customer service along the chain that eventually lands at the external customer. In the same way that the strategies these departments put in place must focus on delivering internally, towards seamless customer experiences both ways, so must the marketing and customer service departments ensure that their strategies ‘talk’ to each other. Being specific entities that are designated custodians of the customer and for whom customer contact is not only the highest, but the most sensitive, the call to action is loud. And to reiterate the earlier question - are there any fundamental differences between the blue print and framework for the development of a winning marketing or CX strategy? The answer is no … not at all! Carolyne Gathuru is the founder and director of strategy at LifeSkills Consulting. She has several years of experience in customer experience strategy development and training. You can commune with her on this or related issues via mail at: [email protected].