Understanding the emerging trends in Marketing

Customer Experience MarketingBy Prof. Sherene Aftab

Customer service Experience – Introduction.

• Great customer experiences are the result of countless deliberate decisions made by every single person in your organization on a daily basis. To align those decisions, employees and partners need a shared vision: a customer experience strategy.

• When most people talk about strategy, they’ve often got a road map or some sort of plan in mind. But your customer experience strategy is actually a description of the experience that you want to deliver. Without that beacon, employees are forced to set out on a random walk, and their decisions and actions will inevitably be at odds with each other, despite all best intentions.

1. Customer experience marketingDefinitionCustomer experience is what arises from an interaction between an

organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. Customer experience is measured by individual’s experience during all points of

contact against the individual’s expectations. I. Forbes says that customer experience is the "cumulative impact of

multiple touch points" over the course of a customer's interaction with an organization. Some companies are known to segment the customer experience into interactions through the web and social media, while others define human interaction such as over-the-phone customer service or face-to-face retail service as the customer experience.

II. A company's ability to deliver an experience that sets it apart in the eyes of its customers will increase the amount of consumer spending with the company and inspire loyalty to its brand. According to Jessica Sebor of Fast Company, "loyalty is now driven primarily by a company's interaction with its customers and how well it delivers on their wants and needs.

Why customer experience is important

1. It eases customer acquisition, drives customer loyalty and improves customer retention 2. Increases customer satisfaction. When a customer is WOW’d by the experience and has

their expectations exceeded, it increases customer satisfaction.3. Reduces customer churn. People want to buy from places that make them feel good.

Creating an experience that is memorable and enjoyable for the customer will help to keep them coming back for more and not churning away.

4. Create a competitive advantage and differentiation. No longer can you compete on price, customers want more, and they want emotional connections with the companies they deal with. Create that experience that keeps them coming back for more. This will create a point of differentiation that you can use as a competitive advantage.

5. Creating a positive customer service is an important tool to remain competitive in a business offering - customers are savvy and have the power choose between competing companies, which offer varying levels of customer service from poor to excellent. consumers would pay more for a product or service to ensure a superior customer experience.

6. Increases sales and revenues 7. Builds stronger customer relations.8. Increases customer advocacy and referrals9. Fosters repeat customers and customer loyalty.

Example of Holiday Inn – Case 1• In the majority of its 750 properties with on-site restaurants, the iconic hotel chain was losing

dinner customers to casual restaurants like Outback Steakhouse and Chili’s. Even worse, it was losing breakfast customers to nearby gas stations — and you better believe that Holiday Inn got worried when gas stations started to provide better breakfast options than it did.

• So what did Holiday Inn do?• Well, I’ll tell you what it didn’t do. It didn’t start randomly making one-off changes to the menu

or the pricing. Instead, Holiday Inn stepped back to define a customer experience strategy.• It rooted that strategy in four brand attributes: inclusive, purposeful, social, and familiar. It

clearly defined that the experience was for “everyday heroes” — midscale business and leisure travelers who are self-sufficient, unpretentious, and sociable. And, as they were working on this, it realized that eating and drinking were just part of a bigger picture. Hotel guests also wanted to have fun, relax, and connect — and they wanted to seamlessly transition among all of these activities.

• Holiday Inn summed all of this up in a customer experience strategy that it called the Social Hub, and it described the experience that it wanted to deliver: “We give guests flexible options so they can be themselves. That way, they don’t have to leave the hotel to get what they want. They can find it at the Holiday Inn

These are the activities

• Once it had a customer experience strategy, Holiday Inn was able to translate it into specific touchpoints that aligned with each of the main guest activities and with the brand. For example, to make the bar area even more social, it added perpendicular peninsulas to act as magnets for people to gather around. And it installed Apple computers in the hotel business center for aesthetic reasons. But to make the computers feel more familiar, it installed Windows on those machines because it knew its guests weren’t typically Mac users.

• Consider for a moment all of the people involved in pulling this experience together: architects, interior designers, IT technicians, chefs, servers, and receptionists, just to name a few. In order to create theright customer experience — one that worked for the hotel and its customers — all of the initial contributors and ongoing service providers needed a common vision to align their work. And that’s what the Social Hub strategy provided.

Important Elements of Customer Experience strategy

1. Focusing on the 3 Ds of Marketing - a) Designing the right experience-focused value propositions The companies delivering a truly outstanding customer experience divide customers into segments and design

experience-focused value propositions for each one. They tailor and design customer experiences for different customers. E.g. Vodaphone - Unlike traditional mobile phone companies who might segment users based on country alone, Vodafone segments their customers into high-priority global segments: “young, active, fun” users, occasional users. In designing the value propositions for each segment, the entire customer experience was at the forefront. The ‘young, active, fun’ users were offered Vodafone live!, a state-of-the-art service that provided everything from games and pop-song ringtones to new, sport and information (this was back in 2005). Occasional users were offers Vodafone Simple, which provided an ‘uncomplicated and straightforward mobile experience

b) Delivering value to the customer is put on cross-functional collaboration. For instance, the marketing team and The best companies deliver these value propositions by focusing the entire company on delivering them. An emphasis supply chain team are in line across the whole customer experience; they know and deliver a consistent value proposition.

CRM tools can help with this. They offer a way to keep all customer data in one place, and give multiple department’s access to that information. Sales people can add information which can trigger specific actions. Customer support or supply chain can jump in, know what segment the customer is in, and then deliver a customer experience that has been defined for them.

c) . Developing the capabilities to do it again and again - companies who offer superior customer experience have developed their capabilities to please customers again and again. They have systems in place to deliver a consistent customer experience over and over again.

2. Define the customer experience and keep it consistent across all touch points –The best companies recognize that customers interact with different parts of the

organization and across multiple touch points Customer loyalty is now driven by a company’s interaction with its customers and how well it delivers on their wants and needs. The customer doesn’t see the marketing department and customer support center as two different things, they simple see one brand. They demand an experience that reflects that.

To keep a customer experience consistent, Adam Feigenbaum from iCIMS suggests these tips;

• Hire right: regardless of the role, make sure your employees believe in your brand and what it stands for.

• Own the issues: make yourself a part of the solution and ensure you satisfy and upset customer.

• Empower your people: Let your team actively own the issues and give them the power to solve customer problems without having to ‘pass you onto the manager’.

• Don’t let it fester: The more time a customer sits in limbo, the worse the experience becomes. Fix problems quickly and find solutions fast.

3. Base the experience on individual customer needsTaking a hands-on approach to understanding individual customers’ needs will

help create an experience that WOW’s your customers. Exceeding customer expectations is the easiest way to create a memorable experience. Memorable experiences also develop customer advocates, who sing praise about your company to friends and colleagues. One example of a company that is particularly good at listening to customers and delivering a superior experience is Superquinn, the Irish grocery chain.

Founder and President Feargal Quinn walks each of his stores’ aisles every month, talking to consumers. Twice monthly, he invites twelve customers to join him for a two-hour roundtable discussion. He asks them about service levels, pricing, cleanliness, product quality, new product lines, recent displays and advertising promotions, and so on; he also asks what items they still buy from his competitors and why. Quinn uses what he learns to evaluate store managers and continually improve the company’s strategy and its execution of that strategy.

4. Create experiences with ‘real people’ not ‘brands’ or ‘companies’

People want to deal with other people, not brands or companies. There’s nothing less personal than getting an email from a ‘brand’ with no personalization

Here are a few tips to start using people, not brand to build an experience:

• Send emails from a personal email account.• Use names and personalization – treat them like a person not a

number.• Send follow up emails and calls based on a specific action (don’t

just blast them).• Get your employees engaged, and excited about your product.

This comes off when emailing and on the phone! A Gallup survey found 70 percent of U.S. workers were not fully engaged, which results in unhappy workers and poor brand experiences.

Implementation of the Customer Experience Marketing

1. Example by Brad rex Chief Customer Officer at Hilton Grand Vacations.

He says : I defined the desired customer experience and then commissioned a video that showed the experience in detail. It had a strong emotional component demonstrating the impact of a great experience on the customer, team member and leader. All current and new team members saw the video, so they could understand first-hand what we were trying to achieve. I would strongly suggest this tactic to take the customer experience to the next level.