Customers expect experiences that reflect their needs whenever they access your brand. Eric Parkinson, director of user experience at Garrigan Lyman Group, explains how to make sure they’re satisfied
A lot of attention has been directed towards the concept of ‘customer experience’ during the past several years. Though the central tenets of this concept are not novel, new discoveries have been made about how to best influence your customers as they navigate an increasingly noisy and decentralised environment. Customers now have control over how and when to receive content from brands, so traditional modes of analysis that focus on funnel metaphors or top-down, demographic-based marketing models must be updated.
Unlike traditional campaigns, which develop a relationship with customers during a finite time span, a campaign with a mature customer experience model is designed to discover those needs across a longer-term lifecycle. This lifecycle is called the ‘customer experience journey’.
Prospects and existing customers access your brand and product information across different channels, jump freely between them, and engage with your brand and products with different sets of expectations and needs depending on their current context.
For this reason, you should not expect television advertising to be effective when it is grafted into online contexts. Likewise, when your audience members are in a mobile setting, the content you deliver needs to be succinct and offer clear value. Understanding these customer journeys will allow you to design sharply targeted offerings.
Any marketing endeavor that strives to design stellar customer experiences must identify the target audience’s context-specific needs and evaluate all potential online and offline solutions against them. Though customer experience journey models vary, I believe the following considerations are universally applicable.
1. Awareness
How will your key target audiences experience their first touch point with your brand or product? Where will these first impressions of your brand or product occur?
2. Consideration
What are the typical research and evaluation activities your customers will engage in when deciding whether to commit to your brand or product? What type of content and/or interactive experience will you provide? Are these best suited for traditional desktop or laptop experiences? Be prepared to develop and provide mobile-optimised or mobile-specific content.
3. Transaction/engagement
In the case of ecommerce, the ease-of-use and security associated with your transactional experiences are key. Are your customers abandoning your conversion paths? If so, have you identified what their pain points are? If ecommerce is not a central undertaking, then customer engagement with your content is crucial. Are your customers viewing your online videos to completion or using your interactive demos to their full capacity?
4. Onboarding
Your customers’ experiences within the first weeks or months after transacting or engaging with your brand or products are crucial since these will determine whether they will evolve into long-term customers. Do you provide immediate gratification for your customers after conversion?
5. Support
Providing avenues of continual communication and help for your customers during their interaction with your brand and product strengthens your relationship. In addition, the perception of a strong support experience during a potential customer’s consideration phase strengthens the likelihood of conversion.
6. Loyalty
How can you cultivate brand and product loyalists who are invested to such a degree that they distribute your content? Do you offer loyalty programmes with tangible benefits to keep your existing customers happy?
Thinking about these six considerations and designing corresponding experiences that match your customers’ needs requires a shift in thinking toward an ‘outside in’ approach, and as content consumption fragments and decentralises, it’s of vital importance. Your target audience’s mental models should influence your marketing planning at the ground level. This will have repercussions across your organisation since it will require you to broaden your customer experience thinking across disparate sectors of your organisation and foster an environment of collaboration.
This is no easy task, of course, and it is no surprise, then, that companies such as Starbucks has demonstrated its commitment to customer experience by formalising its practice across its organisations. There is no reason this approach cannot be leveraged in B2B.
If this is the new landscape, new-school marketing must become keenly aware of customers’ goals and needs across different touchpoints, recruit internal stakeholders throughout the organisation to the cause, and launch new, relevant and exciting initiatives.
