To make good decisions about digital campaigns, create a strategy for “close the loop engagement,” or even avoid a viral PR crisis, you need information.

Specifically, you need information about your customers – what they think, what they want, and what they expect. Only then can you cater to their needs, improve the experience they have with your brand, and win their loyalty – a correlation that, research shows, can create benefits anywhere from $39 million to $1.3 billion in just one year.

Digital Marketers, in particular, can’t afford to ignore Customer Experience (CX) data. In a world where nearly 90% of customers claim that online reviews influence their buying decisions, your online reputation is your reputation. With that in mind, do you know when your followers are online? Do you know what your most loyal fans are saying about you? What about those who are displeased—what are they saying? And the customers who use your digital channels for the most – what types of praise or complaints are they voicing as a way to circumvent your normal support channels? By understanding who your customers are and what they say about your brand, you can make smarter decisions around almost anything.

Leaders in Digital Marketing are capitalising on CX data to:

Stay ahead of the competition

Customer feedback can give you insight into the state of your industry and how you are doing compared to your competitors. When customers post on social media that they are going to switch to a competitor, you should capture their specific reasons. You might learn that they are leaving due to a specific but resolvable service fee, or you could uncover that customers prefer your competitor’s product offerings. In either case, you have data you can act on.

Check out the tweets below:

  • “Have you tried Domino’s lately? Fast, hot, goooooood!”
  • “Topshop surprised me by delivering my jeans in 1 business day, watch out world, here I come!”

If you were Papa John’s Pizza or H&M, these tweets from your competitors’ customers show that they value fast delivery. Can you improve your delivery rates to go faster than your competition? Maybe speedy delivery isn’t what you’ll find in your competitor’s online data – but you are guaranteed to uncover truths about why people are buying from your competition and not from you (and vice-versa).

When you have this kind of information, you are set to counter your competitors in the marketplace. You can offer solutions to the issues their customers are experiencing (say, offering a discount when your competition is raising prices). You can differentiate yourself by offering something better than what they are promoting. Not to mention – you can find out what they are saying about you.

Improve the digital experience

When digital marketing campaigns are inadvertently creating poor customer experiences, you can find out why through customer feedback. One grocery store realised their coupon program was lengthening checkout time and causing backups at the till. They fixed the process by offering more discounts with the loyalty card and reducing coupon usage. The result? Reduced wait time at the register.

A major consumer software provider used customer feedback to make changes in their product. These enhancements led to a 20- point increase in Net Promoter Score and a 20% decrease in customer service calls. As a result, their happiest, most loyal customers started talking about how easy the product was to use in their online feedback. After analysing this new wave of feedback, the marketing team emphasized ease of use in subsequent advertising campaigns, which resulted in a spike in sales.

Improve brand reputation

Are you delivering on your brand promises? More importantly, do your customers believe you are delivering on your promises? Your customer experience data can show you what areas you need to focus on in order to improve your brand reputation. For example, customers of a large UK-based retailer are very disappointed by how inconvenient the refund process is. They went to Facebook to express their frustrations with comments such as: “How can they take money from your debit card and refund with evouchers” and “this company is a joke when it comes to getting your money back.” If convenience and ease of shopping are values that this company prides itself on, then their customers are telling them that they have some work to do.

Where to go from here

Building an effective customer experience program includes collecting, integrating, and analysing customer feedback in order to understand how your customers feel about your brand. You can then use those insights to make smarter decisions that improve the digital, and overall, brand experience.

With 55% of customers willing to pay more for a better customer experience, you can’t afford to fall behind.

 

By Serina Aswani, Marketing Manager at Clarabridge EMEA. 

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