Beyond Products: The Power of Customer Experiences

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by Samuel Pordengerg Feb 18, 2023 News
Beyond Products: The Power of Customer Experiences
  • Consumers buy experiences, not just products. By providing a unique, personalized experience, businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors and increase customer loyalty.
  • Wanna hang out? Building relationships with customers is crucial in creating positive experiences. Companies should focus on engaging with customers and understanding their needs and preferences, as well as providing excellent customer service.
  • Tech's not the focus. Technology plays a key role in enhancing the customer experience, but it should be used strategically to complement the overall experience rather than being the focus. Businesses should aim to create a seamless, omnichannel experience for customers.

Marketing leaders are responsible for bringing together the many elements of the customer journey needed to get there. One way they can do this is by looking at the customerholistically.

Every Step Along the Way of the Customer Journey

Your thought leadership content, website, emails, webinars, demos, sales calls and all the customer success processes are all part of marketing.

All of these experiences combine to create a bigger experience, reinforce the brand and establish your value.

Customer experience is more than just a business. This is an important opportunity for B2B. The customer experience is important to generating revenue. Three key metrics are improved by it.

  1. Customer acquisition.
  2. Customer retention.
  3. Expansion of business through cross-sell and upsell.

This creates evangelists who spread the word and attracts more customers.

Customer Engagement Efforts in a Changed World

Online and offline efforts are part of today's approach. One of the reasons is that the way we do business has changed. Digital is now accepted by customers as normal. You can't bring things back to how they were.

That's a good thing. The customers are different because they aren't the same. You must change with them. If you don't, you'll miss out on a chance to reexamine your marketing efforts and find new ways to get things done.

If you apply this thinking to your vertical as a marketer, you might be able to turn this change into a competitive advantage at every stage of the buyer's journey.

Customer journey mapping is a how-to guide.

Making a Point — a Touchpoint — Along the Customer Journey

The experience has to be at every point of contact.

  • Consistent. Can you coordinate across all channels to remain on message and on brand?
  • Personalized. Can you customize the experience based on each customer’s unique history and context?
  • Timely. Can you give the customer the experience they need when they need it, at each stage of their journey?
  • Relevant. Can you measure the meaningfulness of your content to determine whether it’s driving engagement and creating action?
  • Seamless. Can you track, recognize and follow the customer across the omnichannel?
  • Frictionless. Can the customer complete their journey effortlessly, or do they experience frustration, disconnection and confusion?

What do you think the journey looks like? What happens when it flows? It can look logical on paper. It might look like a meandering river with multiple turns, diversions and splits.

The customer engagement value model connects the system of record to a system of action that gradually builds a view of the customer while delivering a meaningful and compelling experience.

customer engagement value model

Customer actions can be tracked in your engagement activities. Does your system follow up each customer action with a next step that will take them further along their journey? The customer may be asked to reenter duplicate data with too many interactions.

We have probably all had to call customer support for cell phone services.

They make you repeat the data when you ask for support. Even though you are calling your cell phone provider, from your phone, on their account, on their network, they still want you to enter data that they already have. We've all felt this while on hold and wondered why. You are asking me the same thing over and over again.

The company has made their customers jump through more hoops than necessary.

The article talks about how to make the customer journey more data driven.

There is a reason for a better customer journey, but we need to go beyond eliminating duplicate contacts.

We can deliver exceptional customer experiences if we build a growth engine that is set up to steward data and use it to drive meaningful action. We can build a journey that supports real-time reactions to individual customer needs, but also identifies and addresses needs the customer hasn't yet articulated.

We get close to the customer through marketing. We can get closer to the ideal customer experience when marketing has the right data tools.

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