5 Customer Experience Requirements Your Marketing Team Can't Satisfy

Customer experience management is the marketing team's responsibility for most retail companies. Many aspects of customer experience do fall in the marketer's realm of expertise, but in order to deliver truly exceptional customer experiences, you must look beyond the marketing department.

Marketers can only deliver an outstanding customer experience when they build them on top of the right organizational processes and back-end systems. Otherwise, an experience is just a pretty face.

Data must be cleaned, organized and stored in the right systems. Processes must be linked to the appropriate systems and streamlined. Team members must be empowered with the right information at the right time. It's the only way they can represent your organization in a manner that will delight your customers.

This is omnichannel customer experience management. It's imperative that the modern retailer looks at customer experience in omnichannel terms. To do so, you must go beyond the marketing team, implementing these five key requirements:

1. Endless aisle: This term describes giving consumers the perception that you carry infinite inventory. You cannot literally carry infinite inventory, but you can use drop-shipping to avoid ever showing that "out of stock" message to a customer. Drop-shipping means that you outsource fulfillment for some or all of your orders to your suppliers. You effectively become the middleman, avoiding the need to carry what the customer bought. With an "endless aisle," the customer experience is improved on the shoulders of your inventory management and supply chain teams.

2. Real-time product availability: Closely related to endless aisle is the ability to provide real-time product availability. Consumers and employees should always have a clear picture of what inventory resides where. Weekly, daily or even hourly updates are not accurate enough. Knowing inventory status in real time improves the customer experience by avoiding those awkward moments where your customer thought they were buying a product, but then found out you actually don't have it. Again, the experience is improved with work by the inventory management and supply chain teams.