The term ‘Customer Experience Management’ means different things to different brands. Peter Duffy, marketing director at easyJet describes it in Marketing magazine as “flawless delivery and great value” whilst, Gartner describes it as the “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet, or exceed, customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”
No matter how it is worded, 89 per cent of marketers agree customer experience is core to the success of any business, according to recent research conducted by Sitecore, in partnership with Brand Republic. The research also examines all stages of the experience, from a consumer’s first interaction with a brand, through to nurturing long-term customers, and finds that brands are less likely to focus on the early and later stages.
So what does great customer experience management look like? And most importantly, what steps do businesses need to follow to deliver the very best experience to their customers and help to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy and ultimately, sales.
Now, more than ever, customer interactions with brands are occurring through digital touch points.
This means it is down to brands to deliver a seamless, multichannel experience - customer experience management platforms can not only provide a single view of the customer, using data connect, collect and predict their needs, but can then go on to actually manage the experience across channels.
The Sitecore research reveals that in order to achieve great customer experience management, brands must ‘own the experience’ and a good first step is to assess a brand’s capability is to establish where the brand places themselves at one of these seven stages of ‘digital maturity’:
At the three phases within the ‘Attract’ stage, a brand’s digital activity revolves around a basic brochure-ware website with the main purpose of driving traffic to the site. At the ‘Convert’ stage, companies begin to use their websites to drive sales, and move to having a mobile presence and gaining interaction and engagement through techniques such as email bulletins.
Customer experience moves to another level for brands at the ‘Advocate’ stage, who then begin to use insight data to personalise and predict each individual customer journey, automating and providing a seamless customer conversation across channels.
The research indicates that, in order to ensure continued success, brands must show a willingness to adopt the tools and align internal processes needed to take ownership of customer experience management. Only when a company has a handle on all steps of the journey, is it able to establish where business is won or lost and, ultimately, create a great customer experience.
By Shawn Cabral, Marketing Director at Sitecore UK.
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