Customer perceptions of their experience are formed over time and at every touch point where the customer interacts with a brand. And it can extend beyond the direct interaction with the company and include indirect interactions with a third party supplier or even shippers. Customers perceive a good experience with a company if they are able to obtain the product or service with minimal effort on their part for a reasonable price.
Customer experiences, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores are important. Many brands make a considerable investment in building out a physical presence. Today, more than ever, with increased online competition there must be compelling reasons for customers to buy at the store beyond just “touching and feeling” the product. Additional motivating factors can be; helpful and knowledgeable staff, in-store promotions integrated with online offers as well as an inviting atmosphere.
A “good” customer experience is when the customer believes they are treated well, processes were efficient, the product worked as advertised and they received what they expected for their money. A “great” customer experience is experienced when the sum total of all the interactions during the journey were extraordinary and went beyond the customer’s expectations. Some companies are challenged with providing a consistently good customer experience and others are at the stage where they want to go from good to great. In order to get on the path to improvement, brands must ask themselves the probing question – how are we delivering against our customer expectations?
The five challenges and implications for brands in a socially connected world are:
- Understanding the Customer Experience Lifecycle. The customer experience lifecycle typically starts when the consumer receives an advertisement, a marketing offer, or sees displays of packaging on shelves, catalogs or even a referral by a friend can be considered an appeal to purchase. These awareness-consideration phases gain market awareness, garner interest and compel the consumer to consider buying.
- Managing Customer Experiences throughout the Customer Lifecycle. A growing concern for many companies is having limited knowledge or control of their customers’ experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Yet research on customer experience demonstrates that because many competing brands are so similar and the price among them so close, the only real differentiator available is the customer experience. Brands inherently create a particular customer experience, implicitly and explicitly, sometimes intentionally but often unintentionally.
- Deciding When (and When Not) to Take Action on Customer Feedback. Almost all businesses collect feedback from their customers. The problem is that few incorporate that feedback into their operation or follow up with customers on their concerns. This is often discouraging to the customers that provide feedback in good faith that it will be used by the brand.
- Consistently Delivering Customer Experiences That Positively Affect Your Brand. With the advent of social media, ecommerce and global Internet shopping, your customers are always just a click away from purchasing from a competitor. While some customers, on occasion, will buy a company’s products or services even though they have had a bad experience along the way, this has become the exception not the rule with the variety of choice now available in the market. The old mentality of “build it and they will come” worked in the past if the company devised a way to completely lock up the marketplace. However, locking the market is no longer possible in today’s globally connected competitive landscape. Companies need to pay attention to the customer experience they deliver because customers will post their experiences online and affect the opinion and shopping/purchasing habits of other customers.
- Going Beyond the Loyalty Stage to Drive Active Advocacy. For many years, one of the primary goals for brand marketers has been driving customer loyalty and thus one of the 20th century customer experiences goals was to create loyalty (i.e. generating higher customer lifetime values as customers are consistently delighted and buy more over longer periods of time).
The above is an excerpt from the Empathica’s latest whitepaper “Social CEM: Moving Beyond Customer Loyalty to Customer Advocacy.” To learn how to use Social Customer Experience Management to transform your business, download the full whitepaper.