For the past two weeks I’ve been on the road,
speaking at a string of marketing events and conferences. I’ve discovered two
things:
1.
After about a week, I
start to fiercely miss my little dog Abby.
2.
Sometimes the chasm is
deep and vast between what’s being said on stage and what the audience feels
capable of.
After one high-profile keynoter finished
sharing her impressive vision on stage last week, an audience member seated to
my left turned to me, panicked. “We are so far behind,” he said. I could see
the fear in his eyes.
If you’ve gone to a marketing event recently,
maybe you can relate:
·
Every other company
already seems to be customer-centric and data-savvy.
·
Everyone else seems to
be stacking their martech stack higher than yours.
·
Everyone else seems to
be opting hard into omnichannel when you’re still trying to do something great
with ... well, uni-channel.
Friends:
Breathe in. (Deep inhale.)
Breathe out. (Cleansing exhale.)
Relax. You got this.
Here’s the deal:
Everyone feels behind in something.
Everyone feels like they need to more
effectively harness customer data and insights. Yet much of that data is
fragmented and squirreled away in various nests throughout the organization.
In a recent conversation, my friend
Christopher S. Penn quoted an IBM stat: "80% of
all corporate data is so-called dark data, meaning it's not analyzed. In
marketing, that figure spikes to 88%."
Everyone is trying to wrap their arms around
the experience economy and the customer experience mandate, which holds that
customers don’t just want products and services: They want seamless
experiences.
The result of all of
this? Uncertainty. Worry.
Which is in part why half of us are freaked
out that we don’t know as much as our peers, according to the MarketingProfs Marketer Happiness
Report.
So where to from here?
I believe that all of this uncertainty is
ultimately good news for marketing.
The hyper focus on serving the customer spells opportunity for marketing leaders: 90% of organizations view the CMO as the connective tissue between the different business functions of IT, marketing, sales, and customer care, says Accenture.
The hyper focus on serving the customer spells opportunity for marketing leaders: 90% of organizations view the CMO as the connective tissue between the different business functions of IT, marketing, sales, and customer care, says Accenture.
But the opportunity comes coupled with some
anxiety, too, as my deer-in-headlights conference friend articulated.
That's especially true for small and
medium-sized organizations with limited resources, time, and a foreboding sense
of doom that they’re being left far behind.
So here are a few practical steps you can take
immediately to start embracing a more customer-centric mindset. Or—as I heard
time and again at marketing conferences over the past few weeks—to begin
embracing the new experience economy.
1. Conduct a customer
experience audit.
Customer experience audits can easily become
complicated and too detailed. There are a hundred vendors that can do it for
you, too.
But we’re intentionally going to keep things
contained, simple, and manageable. (Breathe in, breathe out.)
Interview a few of your prospects and
customers about their experiences with your brand, both pre-sale and post-sale.
Pre-sale, ask questions around awareness,
nurturing, and decision to buy (or not):
·
How did they hear of
you?
·
What was their first
impression of their first interaction?
·
Did that square with
their impression of interacting with you later?
·
Why did they decide to
buy? Or not?
Post-sale, inquire about overall satisfaction,
loyalty, advocacy:
·
How delighted are they
by you? Or not?
·
What would make them
look elsewhere?
·
When they talk about
you, what do they say?
Listen more than you talk. Note what problems
or opportunities surface. Look for patterns.
The most important
follow-up question is, why do you feel that way?
2. Undercover Boss
your own brand.
Sign up for your own service. Opt-in to your
own email list. Place a call to your support center. Interact on your social
channels. Ask a customer care rep what patterns they see day in, day out.
Your goal here is to gain insight into the
customer experience.
Your goal is to be pathologically empathic to
your customers. Why? Because:
Empathy is the
Miracle-Gro of a thriving customer-centric business.
3. Omni-audit your
channels
In traditional marketing-speak, “omnichannel”
means that we seek to give our customers a seamless and unified experience via
multiple channels.
Omnis (Latin for “every” or “all”)
traditionally has sought to unify the experience a customer has with
you—whether the customer is interacting online from a desktop or mobile device,
by phone, in person (or by catalog, social apps, or whatever).
But today, omnichannel isn’t just an
advertising or a technology or shopping play. It’s more broadly the brand
experience that a customer has with you across various platforms and channels,
every step of the way. It integrates technology, data, content, and
communication efforts across an organization to deliver a seamless experience
to the customer or prospects.
In other words: What
your customer experiences over here also matches what they experience over
there.
When all touchpoints are aligned, it’s a
powerful thing. And when they aren’t, your customers and prospects end up
feeling uneasy and disappointed at the mismatch.
Haven’t we all had the experience of an
amazing brand with a disappointing user experience or rude customer service
person? So take a hard look at all of your customer channels and customer
touchpoints.
And, when you do, pay particular attention to
the voice and tone of your messaging.
Does your email newsletter feel like it comes
from the same company as your Instagram feed? Does your YouTube channel have
the same perspective as your in-store experience? Does your FAQ page jibe with
your packaging?
Every channel has a different audience and a
different vibe. And that’s okay. But the point is to be sure that your voice is
consistent, even if your tone changes to match the circumstance.
Ask yourself:
·
Is the in-person
experience you’re offering customers and prospects matching the brand you’ve
cultivated online?
·
Have you strategically
aligned the digital and physical elements of your brand to deliver a seamless
customer experience—through a store you own, a retail partner network, or
anyplace you are meeting customers face to face?
·
Have you identified
your brand voice? Are you consistently using it across all digital and physical
channels, from your website to your emails to your packaging?
Final thought
Listen, I know these three “simple” steps are
actually quite time-consuming. So try one. Move to two. Then three.
Big changes start with small steps, as a
Pinterest quote will tell you. The point is to keep moving forward: left foot,
right foot. Breathe in, breathe out.
Avoid parking yourself in the same spot,
because, to quote Will Rogers: “The road to success is dotted with many
tempting parking spaces.”
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