According to Forrester Research’s customer experience index, even improving patient experience by one or two points can have an enormous impact on patient satisfaction and a health care organization’s bottom line. It’s the proverbial win-win.

In today’s world where consumers are continuously bombarded with marketing messages; delivering the right ones, in the right context, and at the right time is essential.

We've all been there. To that land of customer enchantment and delight where a recording tells us our calls are important. In fact, we’re so important that we're typically put on hold and pushed to a self-serve website to solve our own problems. If we want to talk to a human being, there’s little satisfaction in knowing our calls will be handled in the order they were received.

Marketing has always been a front-facing department, moving at breakneck speed to plan and implement new solutions. IT has traditionally worked behind the scenes, taking a more methodical enterprise approach.

While more and more CMOs we talk to are actively engaged in partnering with CIOs on projects ranging from enterprise digitization and martech adoption to customer experience and revenue-generation programs, many are frustrated with the results.

Do you ever feel like you’re drinking marketing data from a fire hose when what you really need to improve customer experience is a narrow straw?

Until recently, marketers have been able to plan and implement their martech strategies and programs largely independent of IT.

Now, however — with the proliferation of AI, machine learning, chatbots, big data analytics and other advanced Martech 2.0 capabilities — it’s time for IT to step out of the hallway shadows and become more visible as a business driver and marketing partner.

Meeting customers and patients “where they are” is already shaping up to be the healthcare consumer and patient experience mantra of 2018. Consumers are starting to demand it as their tolerance for slogging their way through the system of care decreases.

A customer-first, omnichannel experience is reigning supreme across industries. We’ve seen it hold traction for years in telecom, media and entertainment (TME) and oft discussed, but omnichannel has been more slowly applied to other areas, such as healthcare.

Telecom and entertainment companies are facing this question right now: Do you launch a pioneering, bleeding edge virtual reality (VR) experience if you know the customer experience (CX) is going to be lacking?

NBC and Samsung took a leap with their VR coverage of the Summer Olympics in Brazil. Was it cool that they could offer the experience? Absolutely. Was the experience a good one? Yes and no. Acknowledging the novelty cool factor and the sheer courage at testing it on an event as big as the Olympics, the picture quality and timeliness of content was lacking making the experience just ok.

Journey mapping is a disciplined approach to understanding how your customers experience your organization so that organizations can make necessary adjustments to improve the overall experience. No journey map is the same from organization to organization or even from service to service within a single organization. An organization may have a “master” customer experience map with many subset experience maps for an online purchasing experience, or the service journey or the post-service journey.

Capto specifically works with the telecom, media and entertainment (TME) and healthcare industries on mapping customer journeys. While the industries vary greatly, the same process can be used to guide our client organizations through a journey mapping process.

Telecom, media and entertainment industries are crossing paths with increasing regularity in hopes of seeking a fruitful partnership. Navigating the increasingly connected, ever-changing wireless ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. Inking the deal is just the first step. Integrating technologies, teams and operating cultures are what can really make or break the customer experience and thus profits.