Yesterday, Oracle announced that it had signed an agreement to acquire Maxymiser, a leading provider of cloud-based, website optimization software.

I asked Aberdeen’s Omer Minkara, the Research Director focused on contact center and customer experience management, what he saw as the most interesting thing about this news.

“I think what we see here,” Omer said, “is that both end users and vendors are still trying to get marketing data right. Only 4% of companies out there are satisfied with their ability to use customer data. It’s not about needing more data. It’s about being able to turn that data into actionable insight and executable strategies. This acquisition speaks to this need and shows that Oracle is listening to what the market is asking for.”

In Oracle’s presentation about the acquisition, they emphasized Maxymiser’s ability to “optimize the customer experience” and, to demonstrate why that’s important, cited the following statistics: 89% of marketers believe that customer experience is key to long-term differentiation, but only 20% believe that their company delivers an experience that is “industry-leading.”

What is that 20% doing differently? Omer’s research has demonstrated that these Best-in-Class firms are doing the following.

1. Managing the Customer Journey

“Companies that are Best-in-Class when it comes to customer experience,” Omer explains, “realize that the customer is on a journey and that you can’t just deliver messages ad hoc across channels. Instead, you have to make sure that those messages are consistent and relevant to the specific channel the customer is using.”

Adopting this customer journey mindset and managing it accordingly yields real results. According to Omer’s research, companies who excel at customer experience management report a 6.5x increase in their Net Promoter Score and a 2.5x improvement in their return on marketing investment.

 2. Integrating Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service

In order to facilitate the coordination of messages across channels, you need to enable collaboration across functions within your organization. This often means the adoption of a single system of record so that everyone in marketing, sales, and customer service is looking at the same data and seeing the same interactions.

“If a customer called into customer service or had a live chat interaction with someone in support,” Omer says, “your marketing team is going to want to know that happened.”

3. Referral Marketing

Companies don’t collect customer data because they simply love data; they collect it so they can track meaningful customer behaviors and, above all else, identify their best customers. Why? Because great customer experience involves personalization (the ability to facilitate personalization was one of the benefits of the Maxymiser acquisition that Oracle specifically highlighted), and personalization means treating different customers differently.

When you know who your best customers are, you can begin catering to them directly, making them feel special, and, ideally, growing them into advocates for your products and services. And, as it turns out, companies focused on customer experience management are 81% more likely to have a mature referral marketing program in place.

4. Understanding the Right Metrics

Finally, what distinguishes Best-in-Class companies when it comes to customer experience management isn’t that they track interactions and collect data, but that they pay attention to the right interactions and collect the right data. In fact, they are 22% more likely than lagging companies to have clearly identified and defined the metrics that matter.

This makes perfect sense. If you are trying to maximize something in order to increase conversions or sell more widgets, you need to know what to maximize. If site traffic for example has little or no impact on order creation, for example, maximizing site traffic just isn’t going to move the needle.

You need to know what’s right, to do what’s right.

It’s Not Just About Technology

Although this Oracle/Maxymiser story is a technology story, consistently delivering a differentiating customer experience (or at least ensuring that customer interactions meet customer expectations) isn’t just about technology.

“At the end of the day,” Omer said, “getting customer experience right is about both culture and technology. If you don’t have the right culture, you might not be measuring the right things or sharing information across functions or collaborating with your counterparts in sales and customer service.”

“Technology can’t make all that happen,” he continued,”but it can facilitate collaboration and support cultural change. This acquisition, as I see it, gives marketers more of the technology they need to execute on strategies that feed this collaboration.”