The role of the CMO is infiltrated by countless activities that one may not traditionally associate with marketing. Alongside overseeing advertising spend and analysing ROI, managing the brand reputation, tracking competitor profiles and making decisions over the social strategy, one crucial area of responsibility is crafting a meaningful customer experience. This is no mean feat, as this is ultimately the story of how your brand interacts with humans, and how it engages within the culture and community. At their best, these stories speak of fulfilment. At their worst, they can lead to frustration and even damage a brand image.
While the term ‘customer experience’ or ‘CX’ is not a new concept, it can be challenging to develop a holistic approach that integrates existing business strategies with brand culture. Customer experience is both pervasive and ambiguous, seemingly related to all activities, yet difficult to frame in one single perspective.
CX is everywhere
The first thing you need to understand is that customer experience is everywhere. It’s online, offline, in print, and in-store. It’s also in the style of your outdoor advertising, and in the tone of your communications. This pervasiveness is what separates CX from user experience (UX), user interface (UI), or any other user-based acronyms you may see floating around. As a point of distinction, UX usually refers to pixel-based experiences, and UI refers specifically to the interaction screens for those digital experiences.
CX is the story of your brand’s interaction with your audience. When your customers walk through the décor of your corporate lobby, they go back to their friends and family and tell a story about it. And when your delivery truck cuts them up on the highway, they go back and tell a very different story.
To get a sense of how pervasive CX is, think of it as a unique lens that reframes every aspect of your business and your brand. When you look through a lens on a camera, it reframes everything within the lens’ parameters and characteristics. From a customer experience standpoint, the same is true, meaning that everything is viewed through your customers’ eyes, making them the arbiter of what works and what doesn’t. They are the authors of the stories we refer to, and wherever your audience interacts with your brand, there’s a tale of experience waiting to be told.
Saying that “CX is everywhere” is more than just monitoring the points where you interact with your customers. ‘Everywhere’ also refers to your business strategy model, values and global organisational structure. From a marketing and product perspective, it’s tempting to look at CX as an addition to an existing model, bolted on to give you a boost, but not warranting changes to your core strategy. CMOs may believe that they have everything figured out, and that CX is a validation step, simply requiring a few tweaks to the experience. This is not the case, as every aspect of a business can and, in most cases, will come under scrutiny.
Perhaps you’ve targeted customer experience in your acquisition, engagement, and transaction models, but what about delivery, service and support? Thinking about these areas could introduce a whole new set of KPIs to measure against, such as monitoring time spent on site (session length), reduction in customer support calls, repeat orders, as well as online reviews and social media buzz. A CX glitch in just one of these areas can throw off all the rest. It’s important to keep in mind that digital transformation as an impact event can change the entire ecosystem of a business.
Fortunately, thinking about CX in a pervasive way does not have to topple any business like a house of cards, or shake it like a snow globe. What comes with great customer experience is the opportunity to move from a one-off customer journey and one-stop purchase, to a long-standing and high-quality customer relationship. While for many CMOs the idea of being positioned at the forefront of crafting this experience may be daunting, they also have the chance to create a brand that is deeply loyal and highly profitable.
By Daniel Giordan, Partner CX & Interaction Design at Wipro Digital.
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