More than three quarters (77%) of marketers in the UK feel that technology has made it harder, not easier, to personalise experiences for customers, new research by Acquia finds.
Effective personalisation can boost revenues by up to 15%, and while 70% marketers are planning to spend more on technology this year compared to last, 65% feel that the technology they’re dealing with is far too complex to create a good CX, and 84% admit they can’t get marketing technologies to work together. To address the problem, 88% of marketers want to take an open source approach to building their CX platform. These findings are part of Acquia’s inaugural annual global report entitled Closing the CX Gap: Customer Experience Trends Report 2019, which assesses the state of customer experience. Acquia VP of EMEA marketing Sylvia Jensen said: “Our research has found that marketers are not being strategic with their marketing spend — but I can understand why. The martech industry is so big now, and there’s so much overwhelming tech choice, that marketers are building their stack with various point solutions that don’t integrate, which makes creating the personalised experiences customers want extremely difficult indeed. “Marketers are also struggling to get a return on their investment with big ‘all-in-one’ platforms because those vendors are slow and are struggling to integrate new functionality themselves. “It’s no wonder many of the largest organisations in the world are looking to future-proof their business by going for open source API platforms instead, where they can benefit from an army of developers racing to solve marketing’s tech problems through code.” More than 5,000 consumers and 500 marketers across the UK, France, Germany, North America and Australia contributed to Acquia’s report, which is available to read for free on the Acquia website.