Marketers, like CMO’s, need to move a notch higher to enhance the connected customer experience strategy because it is no longer about low prices and product features due to ever-high competition driving every company to gain an edge over the others.
If you want to drive more web traffic, higher search rankings, and more leads and sales then you better have a connected customer experience strategy.
With so many channels and touchpoints, you need to understand the customer journey.
What is a customer experience strategy?
What Is a Customer Experience Strategy? If customer experience (CX) refers to the total of every interplay a customer has with a company, both pre- and post-sale, the customer experience strategy defines the actionable plans in place to deliver a positive, important experience across those interactions.
The Core of Your Connected Customer Experience
CMO’s acknowledge the essence of digital transformation, the pinnacle for successful enhanced customer experience, but due to the demanding responsibilities CMO shoulders, most are still grappling with this move.
Digital transformation is what every CMO needs to make every strategy unique and different from the competitors while intriguing the customers. The CMO is a pertinent figure who should possess good technological and data skills because, in the current digitalized world, there is no room for incompetence.
Every marketer should have ample information about customers, which will guide him or her in developing models to enhance the experience of the customers.
CMO’s are best suited to make data-informed decisions on customer experiences. Retaining customers is paramount because the loss of one customer is assumed to result in the loss of six more customers who can influence 6000 individuals on social media.
Your connected customer experience will drive more leads and more sales.
You are also a customer in elsewhere, and you want to be served satisfactorily. Do the same for your customers. We take you through the following ways a CMO can create a connected customer experience to bring new leads to your business within 3months:
- Re-Acquisition of Customer features;
- Tracking Customers Journey;
- Data and Creativity;
- Collaborative Effort;
- Championing Customers’ Voice through Engagement;
- Set the Pace
Re-Acquisition of Customer Features
By now, you can tell the processes different customers go through before they can make a purchase. However, you might be missing the challenges they encounter or the entire customer experience.
You can use an online form to understand the customer better and upload brief and attractive forms to encourage filling and upload. You can develop a buyer scale from the feedback extracted from these online feedback forms. Use the buyer scale to compare the costs, risks, and effort.
It is paramount to bear in mind that the weight of the scale differs at different conversion levels. Technology can help workaround the different profiles of customers by adopting the role of a growth hacker.
Multiple marketing campaigns in different channels can run for a month or more until the CMO identifies what works, what doesn’t, and stick to that which works.
Tracking Customers Journey and Your Customer Experience Strategy
An audit of the customer’s journey can help to address some frustrating dead ends that customers encounter. Some of these dead ends are trivial but mean a lot to a client; if a company cannot be trusted in a simple task, it becomes difficult to gain confidence in its ability to credibly fulfill more important tasks.
If you haven’t done an audit, do so now. Your connected customer experience will tell you what your target audience wants.
Customers interact with a business through various channels, and CMOs must ensure that all these channels are flawless. This goal is achieved through effective communication systems that serve to link the CMO with the customers.
Effective communication channels through integrative technology allow you to install real-time feedback and reporting systems through which instant modifications are made to enhance marketing campaigns and associate customer experiences.
Marketing campaigns are important determinants of sales leads, and the experiences of customers during this time matter a lot. Automated communication systems help to identify emerging issues and solving them in time to build a positive image.
Moreover, communicating to customers about the issues and actions taken to address them builds brand trust and displays how you value them. Businesses that have walked away from their issues in the past have gained negative image and destroyed customer trust resulting in reduced SEO ranking.
The CMO should adopt the role of a storyteller to resonate with the experiences of customers. A storyteller would come in handy when a customer has had a bad experience. The CMO should relate with the customer to indicate how the company would ensure to improve current and future experiences that would give no room for complaints.
The CMO should use negative customer experiences as the basis for story development by repackaging them, adding positive elements that show commitment to improvement and value for customers that should resonate with the company’s marketing campaigns, values, vision, and mission.
Data and Creativity
Effective strategies are informed by data that should be analyzed and interpreted correctly, something that most marketers find challenging.
If you have a CFO or other data expert, link him or her to the CMO so that they can work together and develop feasible and effective strategies that resonate well with the company’s revenue and marketing expenditure.
Marketers mainly rely on their creativity to come up with a subjective solution; hence, the use of objective data might pose a serious challenge. As the business owner, therefore, you should see to it that your marketer receives the needed support to help him or her interpret data objectively while applying subjective solutions.
Collaborative Effort
Large companies suffer from isolation, as departments tend to be further apart. You will find that the data scientist’s office is a floor above or several doors apart from the marketer’s office; yet, the two should work collaboratively together.
Such independence is associated with no communication that thwarts a marketer’s ability to develop effective and creative solutions. CMO’s have a high ranking at the managerial level; thus, they can steer the development of a collaborative culture to allow a collective view of data and give everyone the chance to improve customer experience.
As the person deemed to develop the business’ marketing strategy, the CMO should obtain all the relevant and useful information that can help nurture customer relationships with the company from fellow staff members.
Every process and step a customer undergoes in your organization determines his or her perception of your brand. The attitude of your employees is also a reflection of the brand. Thereby, working collaboratively as a team ensures that the customer’s journey is seamless to build a positive brand image.
Align Staff Values to Customer Needs
The CMO does not deal with every client directly. Other staff members are also involved in this endeavor. As such, it is important to ensure that the communication channels are effective so that all the frontline staff dealing with clients directly can relay accurate information immediately the CMO unleashes it.
The same applies to the frontline staff who should have access to sensitive information immediately it is obtained to ensure a change in their interactions with customers.
If the CMO realizes that certain channels are not operating effectively, he channels the information immediately so that the staff members can engage the clients in sharing their sentiments about their journeys to aid in the overall improvements.
Empowering the frontline staff about issues of interest enables them to gain more insight into the customers’ journeys and relay the same the CMO who engineer the development of suitable and practical solutions. Such workflows help to attain sustainable improvements.
It is not only a matter of appraising employees on their performance but in their ability to create a customer-centric culture that enhances the customer experience. Setting targets and comparing them to the buyer scale will help to determine if the employees are doing enough to enhance customer experience or not.
While focusing on the output of the employees, it is also important to acknowledge their efforts and offer rewards to staff who go the extra mile of enhancing the customer experience.
The CMO, who is part of the management, plays a crucial role in the recruitment of the marketing staff. It is paramount to ensure that the knowledge and skills of this team are in alignment with the goals of the business where the customer is involved.
It is at the recruitment stage that a CMO can identify candidates to aid in establishing a culture he or she aims to create. It might sound like a cliché, but I feel I must emphasize that the customer is the center of your business. Every action and decision should be made while factoring the reaction of the customer due to the highly competitive business world.
Championing Customers’ Voice through Engagement
The use of technology to engage customers is effective in defining the value of a customer while focusing on advocacy and referrals. Technology helps customers to gain immersive experiences in the physical world.
But be very careful here with customer experience strategy and technology. You must do testing on all workflows and be sure they are mapped to your customer’s journey. Think about an omnichannel environment.
Museums are using this technology, and it has produced great results, encouraging more people to visit these museums. A similar strategy can be applied in your physical environment where you can have a 3-D screen to engage customers in the products and services you provide.
Engaging customers in realistic expectations is paramount to avoid disappointments from exaggerated promises that are not in line with the expected product or service.
Understanding the value of a customer by not solely focusing on their lifetime value makes you realize their worth beyond monetary terms, motivating you to go a notch higher in enhancing their experiences. Happy customers help to bring in new prospects that drive sales.
Also, through the technology front-line staff can understand various aspects of the brand to personalize and enhance engagement with customers that attain customer loyalty.
When engagement is done in the right manner. The marketing staff is able to discern customer needs even before they start them. Technology helps to achieve this by assessing and comparing customer purchasing behaviors and trends and the CMO intervenes as a futurologist and trendsetter.
The CMO figures out such needs based on the current customers’ purchasing behavior. Customers engage with a direct line of staff through various social media platforms as a way of embracing technology.
CMO’s should borrow from Hyundai’s example where Hyundai has epitomized their customer’s interactions, making it the number one preferred car dealer. Customers seek credibility and efficiency, and a systematic online system that allows them to go through all the concern levels in one go does the magic.
After posting all products, and their features and prices online, engage customers by answering all their questions, processing the payment and needed paperwork, and delivering the product. While some international companies have resorted to this technique, some pitfalls here and there frustrates a customer. Efficient online services build trust and loyalty.
Set the Pace and Your Customer Experience Strategy
The CMO is responsible for the customer experience strategy. The CMO should create the environment he or she feels is suitable to enhance the customer experience. The CMO can steer the creation of a collaborative culture and a positive attitude that entails interacting with customers in a professional and friendly manner.
However, you should not expect that giving too much importance to your customers and ignoring your employees will set the pace you seek. CMO’s should be on their toes, finding the newest technology to enhance the experience of both the staff and customers.
Also, he or she could use technology to take up different roles that enhance the customer experience. CMO’s realize that digital transformation is what they need as a means to provide solutions.
The CMO will hardly interact with a customer directly, but by setting the required pace, the customer experience and interaction with the brand in all realms of a company should be consistent.
Why Focus on Better Customer Experience?
All the strategies discussed above are meant to build brand positioning and customer loyalty. It takes a lifetime to build an empire but a second to bring it down. Your business would not survive a day if there were no customers.
Working relentlessly hard to enhance the experience of your customers is your moral duty so that they do not convert. A CMO who waits to see what happens will be overtaken by his or her competitors who are working to ensure that customer experience is always changing to stay on edge.
If you are not on your toes far as your customer experience is concerned where customer profiles and data should be your tools, you can lose your brand overnight. Watch out and adopt the strategy that works for you now as you seek for enhancement in the future. There are customer experience strategy templates on the Internet that will download your customer experience strategy to pdf.
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Fletcher Kennith is an experienced writer from paper writing service and professional blogger with over 5 years of experience in marketing, business development, and sales management.
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General FAQ’s
What is a customer experience strategy?
What Is a Customer Experience Strategy? If customer experience (CX) refers to the sum of every interaction a customer has with a business, both pre- and post-sale, the customer experience strategy defines the actionable plans in place to deliver a positive, meaningful experience across those interactions.
Why is a customer experience strategy important?
It’s important to ensure positive customer experience, so customers build brand loyalty and affinity, evangelize your product or service and refer their friends, and leave you positive customer reviews that will help your business retain revenue and earn new customers.
What is a customer strategy definition?
Merkle defines customer strategy as “a data-driven approach to maximizing the financial value of customers by combining a deep understanding of customer needs, behaviors, and value with the ability to engage specific customers optimally at various touchpoints across the entire buyer journey.
How do you create a customer strategy?
Here’s how to create a customer strategy?
1. Define Your Target Markets. Market segmentation is the process of defining distinct customer groups based on specific characteristics, such as psychology, demographics, education, and geographic location.
2. Determine Your Customers’ Needs.
3. Understand Your Customers.
4. Develop Strategies.
5. Solicit Feedback.
