In today’s highly competitive marketplace, a stellar customer experience is critical to the success and survival of any business. It is the cornerstone of modern brands and has become the expectation amongst consumers who demand excellence. Unfortunately, many CMOs report serious customer experience disconnects within their organizations and struggle to deal with them properly.
No matter the industry, it is common to see legacy marketing processes and systems that were designed around what marketers think they know about their audiences rather than what those customers are actually telling them through their interactions.
With a myriad of channels and a deluge of related data, really understanding who your customers are and what they need is paramount to marketing success. That's where a consistent customer experience - bolstered by meaningful, real-time data - can help. To establish experience consistency, marketers must:
- Create systems that deliver customer feedback in real time to the right teams.
- Identify and alleviate customer pain points.
- Fill gaps in current organizational processes and develop new processes to meet the needs of audiences.
Here are five common customer experience disconnects and the steps CMOs can take to help solve them.
Disconnect 1: Focusing on the product or business need, but not the buyer's journey
Marketers agree that a customer-centric organizational structure will help foster customer loyalty and brand advocacy. However, many marketing teams are still organized around the products themselves and focus on where they typically market (channels).
Solving the problem:
- Focus your strategy on the buyer's journey.
- Learn about the buyer's journey by developing your company's buyer personas and journey archetypes.
- Learn about those buyer personas by researching how they behave (use your existing data to drive you forward!).
Disconnect 2: Disconnected customer data
The road to a customer-centric marketing department is paved with reliable data. Unfortunately, many marketers report problems with data collection systems that don't "talk" to one another. These systems need to integrate in a way that ensures seamless communication between relevant teams, based on a customer's place on their buyer's journey.
Solving the problem:
- Map your revtech stack and identify the gaps in data collection/flow.
- Make sure each stage of the buyer's journey is backed by reliable data and relevant content.
- Invest in the tools and expertise to properly interpret and act on the data you collect.
Disconnect 3: Departmental silos
The marketing department is not the only department that should be worried about and working to solve customer experience disconnects! Improving the customer experience should be a cross-departmental effort. The customer data from various touchpoints can help to inform the work of other departments including sales, customer service, content production and more!
Solving the problem:
- Align strategies to develop cross-departmental buy-in.
- Communicate regularly with other departments whose work directly impacts customer touchpoints.
- Establish a process for sharing the data you are collecting from customers. Develop systems that deliver data to the right departments to help anticipate customer needs and facilitate quick, high-quality responses to feedback.
- Establish service-level agreements that define who is responsible for acting on feedback.
Disconnect 4: Lackluster content
Whether it's a blog post, the welcome/on-hold message when they call, a digital ad or a text message, your content needs to help customers solve a problem and lead them to you as the solution. This means aligning content across your website, blog, social media posts, email marketing program, and any other customer touchpoint.
Solving the problem:
- Develop a robust content strategy that integrates across all customer touchpoints.
- Scour your feedback and customer data to identify customer pain points and develop content that removes them.
- Continually test your communications to find the optimal tone, content, format, frequency, etc.
Disconnect 5: No KPIs for customer experience
After you set up a strong customer data collection system, you must establish how you plan to measure success. When transitioning from a product-based structure to a customer-centric structure, your key performance indicators will also transition further away from traditional advertising metrics to digital marketing metrics.
Solving the problem:
- Identify and adopt relevant customer-centric KPIs such as retention rate, complaint resolution, wait times, etc.
- Develop a roadmap for the next 6-18 months for successfully improving those KPIs.
- Assess your KPIs regularly - at least once per month. Be ready to pivot as needed.
Get Started Today!
If any of the above disconnects resonate with you, then it’s time to make the changes needed to address the problems. If not, you’ll need to work with your team to identify the most critical disconnects within your organization and start applying some of the suggestions outlined in this article. Soon, you’ll be in great shape to fill the gaps in your data and processes.
Remember: Creating a consistently stellar customer experience is absolutely crucial. It ensures that your business is able to respond appropriately to customers, and it can also delight them!
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