The Christmas season brings exceptional opportunities for digital marketers to engage with their customers: rewarding them for their loyalty and creating new experiences. The goal is to deliver a positive customer experience (CX) at all the touch points where customers and prospects interact with your brand. The most successful organisations take this a stage further and aim to delight their customers: creating an emotional bond with the brand that fosters loyalty.
Digital innovation delights customers
One example of a company that has put CX at the heart of its growth strategy is European online fashion retailer, Zalando. Founded in 2007, the organisation reached sales revenues of 1 billion Euros in the second quarter of 2016. Its focus on delighting customers across all of its touch points provide a perfect example of the impact of positive CX for encouraging repeat business. Customers are offered free delivery on all orders and free returns within one hundred days, but it is its investment in digital marketing that really stands out.
The Times reported (paywall) in September that almost two-thirds of web traffic to Zalando’s website comes from mobile devices. Customers can scan barcodes in shops to enable them to do price comparisons. Its innovative Zalon service allows customers in Germany to communicate with professional stylists over WhatsApp to get their recommendations on outfits. Mobile customers can also take pictures of clothes on their phone and use Zalando’s image recognition service to search for similar items on the website.
It’s a CX strategy that is paying off: Zalandos has seen a 90% increase in orders placed via mobile apps year on year.
Applying retail success to other sectors
While the strategic focus on customer experience management has long been associated with the retail sector, the value chain for a great CX extends deep and wide in every vertical industry and is something that all businesses should be considering as part of their strategic initiatives.
The most successful CX continuously delivers on expectation, adds value and supports cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, as shown with the Zalando example.
Every engagement is an opportunity
Prospective customers have a wealth of information available at their fingertips and will research extensively before engaging with potential suppliers. This research phase also needs to be viewed by businesses as an opportunity to engage and deliver a positive CX. Your website, blog, InfoApps, social media, print, online advertising, as well as try before you buy options, need to align with your CX strategy.
These all need to be considered as opportunities to position, influence, message and engage with potential customers in order to attract them to buy, or at least add your brand to the short list, for a deeper dive into your products, solutions and/or services.
Tailoring experiences to customers
It is also important to be able to monitor and analyse the impact of CX so that you can adapt and segment your services to meet different customers’ needs and preferences. We recently did this ourselves, when we adapted our WebFOCUS BI product to deliver a browser-based environment with self-service analytics, that enables non-technical users to independently report on and analyse customer data.
We are known and valued for offering connectors to the broadest array of BI and data analytics sources, such as Teradata, Greenplum and DB2. So we ensured that we delighted our customers by empowering non-technical business users to intuitively access and visualise their data trends. We offered this while still catering for the in-depth requirements of data scientists and database administrators. Similarly, our Business User Edition was delivered in direct response to customer requirements and with a strong focus on improving CX for non-technical business users.
Delivering consistent CX across all channels
A positive customer experience (CX) supports customer retention and is a fundamental part of any business strategy whether it’s in the retail B2C environment or the manufacturing B2B environment. Digital marketers have a crucial role to play to ensure that brands deliver a consistent experience across physical, digital and mobile touchpoints. CX is for life, not just for Christmas.
By Dr Rado Kotorov, retail industry specialist Information Builders
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