Digital culture has taken over more considered customer service strategies, leading to poor experiences, according to a new report called The Customer Engagement Stack, by independent analyst Aarron Spinley.

The report identifies three distinct customer engagement layers: offer integrity, service, and experience.

According to Spinley, a former SAP and Thunderhead executive, “The main misadventure has been a general confusion between marketing and customer service, an obsession with and yet broad incomprehension of the term ‘experience’, a distorted reliance on a data culture, and the over-indexing on customer surveys.”

Spinley says he wants to challenge populist movements around personalisation, ‘experience management’, and the pervasive creep of short-term digital marketing into customer operations.

He told Mi3, "The root causes is that we are training digital teams to try to trace every interaction that they have with the customer as a sales interaction or as part of the sales process. There's no virtually no interest in the actual intention of a customer or what they're trying to get done. It's always manifests as sales hacks, sales messaging, and spammy, chatbots."

"People forget, we're in the embryonic stage of a digital age. And most of the concepts that go into marketing come from vendors creating use cases to sell the software. They don't come from marketing science rigour or peer reviewed work.  You get a lot of adoption of digital marketing concepts into what should be service channels simply because the teams that are operating in those two areas are one in the same team."

Part of the problem, he says is that as neither marketing or customer management have barriers to entry, both lack consistent professional discipline. As a result the spread of marketing-based digital tactics has degraded customer operations. 

“There has been a marked increase in CX investment from major brands all around the world as it relates to the technology, yet net outcomes for customers are worsening,” Spinley said. That should tell us something. Research shows consumers are incredibly annoyed by pushy sales interventions, comically bad chatbots, soul destroying call centre wait times, and an inability to get things done quickly and easily”. 

Spinley says it is foolish to assume that technology can be applied as effectively to a relatively nascent discipline like digital marketing with the same efficacy it can be applied to other parts of business. 

"In the industrial space you are applying technology to well understood and well tested work processes created over years. In digital marketing they are just throwing whiskey all over the floor."