Need to modernise MarTech stacks for integrated customer experience: Apoorv Durga

For a seamless omnichannel marketing experience, marketers need to identify customers across different channels and engage in the most effective manner, said Apoorv Durga, Vice President, Research and Advisory, Real Story. He was speaking on ‘How to Drive Value from Your MarTech Stack’ at the e4m MarTech India Conference 2023.

Durga highlighted the importance of a right MarTech stack for an omnichannel experience.

While MarTech (marketing technology) stack is the set of technologies that marketers leverage to enhance their marketing activities and make difficult processes easier, omnichannel is a term used in ecommerce and retail to describe a business strategy that aims to provide a seamless shopping experience across all channels, including in store, mobile, and online.

“There are issues with omni-channel. Sometimes when you order groceries online and pay for it in advance, you are later told that some of the items were out of stock. With so much tech available in 2023, it is surprising how companies find it so difficult to sync their online and offline inventories. This issue of different channels not being in sync with each other appears quite often.

“MarTech stacks have been growing over time. The number of tools has exploded. Despite that we still cannot do a lot of things properly,” Durga said.

He also pointed out the shortcomings in the MarTech stacks used during 2010-2020, saying that it restricted the enterprise-wide experience to being platform-specific.

“For an omnichannel experience, you need to do certain things like uniquely identifying customers across different channels. Then you need to decide when and what to do with them, in terms of their preferences, context etc. Once that is decided, you send them offers, discounts, relevant news and so on.

“You want to be able to analyse this so that you can increase the effectiveness of the future campaigns and all of this is done in a planned way,” he said, while adding that in India, the omnichannel customer experience is “really broken”.

Elaborating on the issues with omni channel experience based on the MarTech stacks during the decade beginning 2010, Durga said that engagement services like outbound marketing, content, ecommerce and social media management are like the legs of the stack and become a hindrance.

“They (engagement services) are like legs to stand up on, and each of these is like a silo in itself. Each silo has a set of services like content, data, rules, planning and analytics. That is the major hindrance in any omni-channel,” he said.

He said that in such a model, the data gets stuck in back-office repositories, is inconsistent and certainly not actionable across channels. Such silos lead to platform specific experience and not enterprise-wide, Durga added. “Hence, customers don’t enjoy an integrated experience. It is disjointed, isolated and inconsistent customer experience,” he said.

Recommending an architectural shift in the model, Durga said there is a need to be “legless” and modernise the MarTech stack.

“The MarTech stack of the 2020s needs to be more composable. It is essential. There is a need to modernise the stack by killing the silos, promote omnichannel consistency by discouraging content experiences and rules tied to specific platforms. Also, re-evaluate the necessity of having those capabilities at the digital experience layer.

“Move essential services away from channel-specific products and embrace a lower-level approach for key services to achieve a true omnichannel integration,” Durga noted.