How to: Build a customer experience-led business image

Build a customer experience-led business

With digital transformation accelerating, marketers have more choice than ever before in terms of how they reach their audiences. On the flipside, customers also face more information every day and are empowered to be much more selective when it comes to the B2B brands they’ll engage with.

All customers have a voice now, and they waste no time using it. In order to set themselves apart, brands are increasingly challenged to create compelling experiences that communicate the value of what they do to the specific needs of the individual customer, connecting with their audiences on a more emotional, relevant and engaging level.

We are, in effect, in the era of the ‘experience-led business’ – what we’re calling the third wave of enterprise business. The first was that of the enterprise back-office in the 1960s, when digital technologies started connecting all of the enterprise back-end systems.

The second wave was that of the enterprise front-office, enabling a whole new way of talking to customers and managing the sales process – the 1990s era of ‘CRM’.

Now we’re in the third wave, one driven by rapid advances in technology that are fundamentally changing buying patterns among customers. In this era, we need to understand we are no longer in the business of selling products – our brand is no more than the sum of the experiences our customers enjoy (or indeed endure).  In the age of choice and customer empowerment, it’s the experience that matters most.

And marketers are taking notice. As part Adobe’s Digital Trends report earlier this year, 7000 marketing professionals were asked what their single most exciting opportunity was in the year ahead. The top three responses were ‘optimising the customer experience’, ‘creating compelling content for digital experiences’ and ‘data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual’. 

So how do we make this work? There is no silver bullet, but here are a few guiding principles:

1. Becoming masters of data – across the organisation

Data remains the connective tissue of the customer experience, and the Digital Trends survey indeed revealed that making sense of data to shape and personalise customer experiences is top-of-mind for businesses.

But data access cannot remain the sole privilege of individual departments within the organisation, whether CRM, IT or marketing. Providing data visibility to the whole business – in effect, ‘democratising’ data across the organisation – is becoming fundamental to driving continuous, consistent customer experiences that can be adapted or evolved in real time to meet customer requirements.

The challenge is about simplifying the availability and interpretation of data to enable organisations to derive actionable insights rapidly and dynamically. All of us within the organisation should be the ultimate guardians of the customer experience, not just marketers or CRMs. 

2. Tackle the content challenge

We’re in the midst of a content explosion – brands are required to produce increasingly large volumes of content in an era when customers demand that it’s more personalised and useful.

Content creation is now considered by brands as a key opportunity when it comes to customer experience. In the survey, it was ranked as one of the top three opportunities for 2016 and also for the next five years.

But success with content is as much about having the right design and production tools as it is about improving workflows across the organisations to make content development dynamic and responsive. And it’s also about speed, with ‘content velocity’ now a recognised imperative.

3. Think multi-channel

Customers now have more choice than ever in how they define their digital journeys and interactions. They can enter the brand journey from any of a number of different touchpoints.

A recent survey revealed that half of marketers consider up to 13 distinct touchpoints – ranging from physical events, websites and mobile apps, to advertising, email and social channels – as central to the customer experience.

Increasingly, brands need a single integrated view of customers – as individuals, not abstract entities – as they move across these various channels. Customers expect you to know them, regardless of what channel they happen to be on – and to deliver them an experience that is continuous, consistent and compelling irrespective of where they are.

4. Mobile-first

The move to mobile is happening faster than anticipated and profoundly changing entire industries. For many customers, brand experiences and services now begin and end with mobile.

For marketers, the challenge is about removing complexity around mobile – in effect, making it easier and faster to build mobile applications and enabling a holistic view of the customer journey, irrespective of device.

5. Technology should be transparent

For customers, the medium is not the message – the experience is. We should not be flogging technology for its own sake. Customers don’t care about process, or about how the experience is delivered to them – they just care about the end result. They want to be delighted at every turn. Throughout this journey, the experience should not be centred on the technology – technology should stay transparent.

6. Breaking down silos… and a whole shift in mindset

But the biggest challenge for B2B brands when it comes to delivering great experiences is not just about budgets or deploying the right technology – it’s organisational. Take content, for example: content today is rarely the product of just one team or function within the organisation. Increasingly a bigger set of people – strategists, writers, designers, coders, UX experts, platform specialists, CRMs, sales reps, even external parties such as partners or suppliers – can all have a say in content creation.

Knocking down the walls within the organisation and promoting the right level of collaboration between these parties becomes critical to success.

More broadly, many organisations need to adapt culturally to an environment that rewards rapid testing and prototyping of ideas in order to meet customer demands for personalised, always-on experiences.

Silicon Valley’s much vaunted ‘fail fast’ approach – constant testing of ideas in order to eliminate failure as much as possible from the system – is becoming the norm, and many organisations need to be culturally ready for this massive change in approach.

So, plenty to think about and learn, but in the era of experience-led business, there’s never been a better time to be a B2B marketer.

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