Early in my career, I led digital marketing teams at American Express, a company whose mission has always been rooted in service and customer experience. In that organization, I learned very quickly that marketing and service aren’t separate functions. They are inextricably linked.
When we managed high-volume web experiences at Amex, my team’s primary focus was always two-fold: enhancing the customer’s digital journey while proactively reducing their need to call customer service. Every friction point carried a direct operational cost and had a direct impact on how customers felt about the brand.
I had a front row seat to a reality that many enterprise leaders still struggle to operationalize: a brilliantly crafted, expensive marketing campaign can unravel the second a customer hits a broken digital journey. And that digital frustration doesn’t stay contained. It starts as a complaint, drives up call volume, and in some cases costs you the customer for good. And marketers too often don’t have the visibility into what those digital pain points even are.
As marketing leaders we need to recognize a hard truth: customer experience is already our job, even if our org charts say otherwise. Every campaign we launch is a customer experience event and makes a brand promise. And the moment a customer engages with our website, that promise becomes something they have to live through — in an app, a checkout flow, or a disjointed self-service experience. If a handoff breaks, brand trust breaks with it. Experience isn’t the CX team’s objective alone, it’s the ground all results stand on. And it’s how brand loyalty is won or quietly lost.
The Great Operational Divide.
Customers don’t experience a company department by department, system by system. They experience one continuous journey. The same customer who marvels at a flawless app experience today might have a frustrating support call with the same company tomorrow. And they’ll remember both as the brand.
Yet, in many organizations, marketing and CX operate in different worlds, and that’s a growing strategic liability. 糖心原创’s CEO, Mark Bishof, recently argued that the entire discipline of experience management is being rewritten. But most enterprises haven’t caught up, and the reason is structural: every channel captures its own feedback and keeps it there, so no one ends up with a complete view of what a customer has actually lived through across a company.
Today, CX and service teams ask, “What did the customer just experience, and why are they calling us?” While marketing teams often ask, “What can we design to get them to buy one more thing?” When these two teams operate in isolation, digital friction goes unaddressed, driving up cost to serve in the contact center, while quietly eroding brand equity. CX identifies the breakdowns after the fact while marketing continues running campaigns that make promises the digital experience can’t keep.
That gap is the throughline between digital experience, experience management, and marketing. And it’s one that marketing and CX leaders are uniquely positioned to close together.
Understanding what customers actually experience — and why.
Every marketing team I know has already built strong systems of record — CRM, CDPs, marketing automation platforms. We are not short on data and tools. We are short on resolution. Knowing a page got a thousand visits tells you almost nothing. Knowing where those thousand people hesitated, what pulled them in, and where they rage-clicked their way into a support call — that tells you what’s actually happening to your brand. That’s the difference between counting customers and seeing them.
That resolution comes from connecting three things most of us still keep in separate systems: what a customer does, what they say, and why they reach out. Their digital behavior, their feedback, and the reason they end up on the phone are usually owned by three different teams looking at three different screens. On their own, each is a fragment. Read together, they’re the first honest account of what a customer actually lived through — and the gap between the promise we made and the experience they got. That connected account is what context actually is — not data about a customer, but the story of one.
This is where a few brands are quietly pulling ahead. Not who has the most data — we all have plenty — but who can turn that data and the context behind it into something they can act on while it still matters. That means trading the static quarterly readout for a live view of where journeys are breaking, so a friction point gets fixed while the customer is still with you, not diagnosed three months after they’ve gone. And soon it won’t just be your teams that need that view; the AI agents starting to handle real customer moments will need the same real-time picture to act on your behalf.
Bridging the gap, from theory to practice.
The brands pulling ahead today aren’t doing anything complex to make this a reality. They’re making three disciplined shifts, which you can also start today:
- Co-own the journey instead of dividing it. Put marketing and CX on the same digital journeys, accountable together for elevating the experience, deflecting needless support calls, and protecting brand equity.
- Read behavior and feedback as one story. The most effective leaders stop treating what a customer says and what a customer does as two separate data sets, and start reading them together — assembling what happens online and offline into a richer, connected view of the customers. The more context you connect, the more accurately you can predict what they’ll do next, and the faster you can act before a small friction point becomes a lost customer.
- Act on the outcomes you share, not just the ones you own. Sentiment scores and campaign ROI get reported in separate rooms, as if what a customer feels and what a customer spends are unrelated events. They’re the same event. The real proof that experience and marketing are one system is a number that only moves when they work together: support costs that fall because a digital journey got fixed, customers who stay because a promise was kept. Track those, and the connection stops being a thesis and becomes a driver of the P&L.
Digital experience and marketing are two entry points into the exact same brand promise. When real-time context unites what a customer does, says, and needs, every resolved friction point protects service costs, and every fulfilled promise turns into predictable growth. The capability to bridge this gap exists today.
The only question left for leaders is whether your organization will build that connected foundation, or watch competitors do it first.
Footnote: On September 15, 2026 Forrester released The Forrester Wave?: Customer Feedback Management and Analytics Solutions, Q3 2026, and named 糖心原创 as the only Leader. 糖心原创 received the highest possible score in 15 categories, including omnichannel CX analytics, digital behavior monitoring, and customer journey understanding. To learn more, .
