
Active Roster
Media
Sponsors
Title search:
✖
formerly Lynn Hunsaker, Chief Customer Officer - ClearAction Continuum In Part 1 of this series, we focused on the management of your customer experience holistically. Below in part two, we address CX interdependencies and importance of strong communication and coordination. Customer experience is not limited to an interaction. Cumulative perceptions, interactions, circumstances and judgments add up over time to form “customer experience” for each of our prospects, customers, partners, suppliers, and stakeholders. This means customer experience is longitudinal, i.e. developed across a long period of time. Here’s how you can ensure longitudinal value in customer experience: 1) Manage Your Brand Promise What does your brand promise? There’s the official statement, and then there’s everything else that’s communicated, both formally and informally. Everything we suggest, and the way we do it, becomes our actual brand promise in customers’ minds. And that’s all that really counts. What’s in our minds matters little in comparison to what’s in customers’ minds. Two essential things for marketers to know about customers’ minds are how their goals and your company’s actions affect your brand promise: Customers’ Goals Your Actions 2) Know What Behaviors You’re Training How do your offers affect long-term customer experience? There’s the immediate purchase or engagement behavior, and then there’s the customer experience value quotient. This is a ratio in customer’s subconscious. The numerator is everything they’re receiving, and the denominator is price paid to you, plus their time, effort, stress, and subsequent costs. Customers pick up cues from offers about who and what you value most, and how that affects their customer experience value quotient. Here’s a self-assessment: How Marketing creates great customer experience 3) Expand Your Influence Marketing communicates value, yet upstream functions create and deliver value. As the owner of market intelligence and the communicator of the brand promise, Marketing should strive to keep the value equation in-sync. How Marketing creates great customer experience: Recognize interdependencies and forge strong communication and coordination with other functional areas. In Part 3 of this four-part series, we'll focus on going beyond deal marketing, nurturing relationships. Lynn Hunsaker
“Your local B2B community of marketers and business leaders focused on professional development and
effective strategies to
Driving Business Growth”Is the Value of Your Marketing Both Transactional and Longitudinal?
How Marketing Creates Great Customer Experience - Part 2 of 4
Customers’ interpretations of brand promise are framed by the goals they’re trying to achieve – not just in the moment (transactional), but what they’re combining your solution with in the broader context of their endeavors (contextual). A customer that’s aiming to fill a gap (urgency and necessity motivation), for instance, is likely to interpret your brand promise a bit, or a lot, differently than a customer that’s aiming to expand their capabilities through your solution (opportunistic motivation). By segmenting customers based on their overall goal, you’ll identify their expectation sets. Meeting or exceeding expectations is the definition of satisfaction or delight. How Marketing creates great customer experience: Clearly identify expectation-sets for the end-to-end customer journey of each customer-goal-segment.
Actions speak louder than words. The “how, when and why” of your marketing efforts implies a lot to customers. It’s said that about 80% of communication is nonverbal. Transparency has increased, and customers see through intentions, read between the lines, and connect the dots to a greater extent than companies typically realize. Just as important: you’ve communicated the brand promise, but how much do you know about how well your company is delivering on it? Are you monitoring customer service dispositioning reports? Are you paying attention to customers’ complaints and constructive criticism in all available voice-of-the-customer reports? If not, your brand promise may be creating distrust, and your marketing budget will be taxed in the future with greater efforts needed to overcome that. How Marketing creates great customer experience: Like any human-to-human relationship, managing the match-up of actions and words is the key to building trust and loyalty.
Tailor your offers to each customer’s goals, keeping their customer experience value quotient in mind. This will increase ongoing rewards to them and to your company.
Chief Customer Officer
ClearAction Continuum