In 1938, the sociologist Willard Waller identified something he called the ‘principle of least interest.’ The basic idea is that the balance of power in a romantic relationship tends to be held by the party with less emotional investment; if it falters, after all, they have much less to lose.
This principle can be applied to the marketing world easily enough. In the age of outbound, companies used to hold all the cards: clients would see an advertisement or receive their missive, and, lacking the resources needed to make a fully-informed decision or effectively shop around, would come to them – perhaps not quite ‘cap-in-hand’, but certainly eager. In the modern, digital age, things are a little different: brands have to be more proactive with their customers because they can, within seconds, find a viable alternative.
Customer relationship management (CRM) has become a favoured method of marketers looking to address this problem, but even though it’s tried and tested, the truth of the matter is that it’s not enough to simply respond to their needs anymore. If the service isn’t exactly what customers expect, it might as well not exist. Customer experience management (CXM) has recently increased in prominence – and there are several excellent reasons why.
Transforming customer care
To explain how CRM is transitioning to CXM, it is first necessary to understand that this did not happen in a vacuum. It can, in fact, be directly attributed to a wider shift in the way businesses operate – one, in large part, brought about by the rapid rise of digital and social channels.
Marketing methodology is no longer a matter of organising the rollout of outbound communications in accordance with a fixed promotional strategy. Consumer organisations have to respond promptly to customers wherever they are: whether they send an email, fire off a social post, write a text message – or call the front desk. Consequently, the lines between traditional marketing and customer care have been blurred: both are now about creating a cohesive, satisfying experience across all channels – and at all times.
Pre-emptive strikes
The evolution to CXM heavily emphasises the need to proactively create a positive overall feeling about your brand – reactivity, while still important, isn’t going to encourage customer retention on its own. The idea, essentially, is that responding to a customer’s needs is less effective than making them feel like you’ve already addressed them. In some quarters, they call this the ‘cornershop experience.’
Think about the way you interact with an independent store down the road – one where you see the owner or manager every day, and are perhaps on first-name terms with them – versus an online equivalent where your relationship effectively begins and ends with the press of an order button. The staff at the local store know your every move several steps in advance: if you regularly buy a particular brand of wine, they’ll know exactly what to recommend when you run out; if you buy a particular type of corn chips, they’ll know exactly which dip goes with it.
Bigger brands have long struggled to emulate this kind of experience: they’ve typically had far too many customers for it to be an effective use of their resources. But modern software makes it possible to scale this up and make all of your customers feel truly valued. By bringing together your disparate sources of data to form a single customer view (SCV), and investing in technologies that allow you to drive insight and automate targeted marketing messages, you can start talking to individuals based on their buying history and their behaviour across all channels: offers, friendly notifications when a sale is on – if their purchasing patterns indicate that they pick up a certain item at a certain time, you can pre-empt them with a discount and improve their overall impression of your company.
This has in turn impacted the role of the Chief Marketing Officer, who is now faced with a huge operational shift: they now need to make sure call centre employees, social media managers, and in-store staff – amongst others – are able to access customer information and provide personalised experiences, because customers are coming to expect this kind of treatment. When CXM becomes standard, don’t be surprised to see marketing undergo a similar philosophical shift. Soon, CMOs might well be calling themselves “Chief Experience Officers”, and the makeup of their departments will change to reflect this more unified approach: in the near future, discrete social media, content, email, and print teams will be far more interdependent – if they’re not simply amalgamated into one larger entity.
That said, CXM is not yet standard, and digital marketing executives still have time to get on board. While it’s still new, however, any company that can offer it will have a clear advantage over its competition. Forward-thinking marketing managers would do well to seize it as soon as possible.
By Jason Lark, MD of Celerity Information Services.
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