Customer experience can be described as general feelings customers have when interacting with a brand.
But there are dozens of more specific nuances that go into how that experience was actually created. For example, customers could base their experiences off of one or more interactions they had with the brand’s various touchpoints, including:
- Website
- Texts
- Service personnel
- Emails
- Media ads
- In store
- Products
- Social media
While these various touchpoints all represent the brand as a whole, they often function in silos across large organizations. Such a disjointed marketing structure might be able to produce some good brand experiences for the areas they represent, but lacks the ability to deliver a great holistic customer experiences.
Organizations that operate in silos often aren’t able to really deliver what consumers want from their overall brand experiences. This is because their disjointed processes and customer communications result in each team focusing on their needs and not taking into consideration what the person may or may not have already experienced from other areas of the brands marketing efforts. They tend to push out campaigns and content based on products instead of focusing on what their customers actually need and where they are in the buyer’s journey, which can result in diminished, disjointed, or overwhelming experiences.
Reverse engineering the customer experience
To deliver better overall brand experiences, companies need to reverse engineer how they go about creating them. And that starts with an overall shift in their organizational structure to become more customer centric in all their marketing activities.
They also need to determine whether their technology, processes, and forms of communication they currently deploy can support exceptional experiences, or if they need to be further automated and revamped to produce the more integrated experiences consumers demand.
As a marketing leader, it’s your role to champion a more customer-centric corporate culture and mindset as you look to reverse engineer the customer experience. You need to spearhead a new approach.
After all, it’s no longer about your brand–it’s about your customers. What business problems are you solving for them? What needs will they have in the future? Those questions should drive every action and decision across your organization. For this new approach to be successful, there must be internal agreement about what those customer needs are.
Realign marketing into CX teams
In a traditional organization-centric marketing model, many people, groups, and departments own a piece of the customer experience – sales, corporate marketing, regional marketing, field marketing, customer service, etc.
Evaluate and realign those roles into new CX teams based on various high-touch areas of the customer journey, including sales, onboarding, or issue resolution. These areas are not just monetize-able touchpoints, but also where it’s important to offer great CX throughout an entire process.
With your new CX teams aligned, you can direct them to develop a new mindset of developing content, campaigns, and interactions around the customer’s buying journey, not your products. Outline how these new processes will work and ensure all new team members are on board to fully optimize your CX efforts.
By aligning organizational goals with marketing strategies and ensuring everyone is on the same page with plans, budgets, and expected outcomes, you can build solid, supported brand experiences that boost results, increase market share, and optimize outcomes.
Optimize Technology for CX
Marketing Operations Management solutions also bring order to the customer experience process by streamlining and automating operations from ideation, planning, budgeting, creation, and management to distribution, reuse, archival, and optimization. An integrated platform of Digital Asset Management (DAM), Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and Content Marketing is required to optimally execute all the behind-the-scenes work in marketing operations that’s involved in creating great customer experiences.
Further, you can utilize more niche distribution, analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to get better control over all those behind-the-scenes activities. For example, they can help expedite these processes by auto-tagging content, predicting which content will resonate with customers, recommending specific content to use, or determining which content isn’t performing well.
Once you have the processes and technology in place to reverse engineer the customer experience, you will have a better chance at making the necessary shift from product-centric marketing to customer-centric campaigns and creating exceptional overall customer experiences.
For more insights on enhancing customer experiences, listen to our recent webinar, “Content and the Customer Experience: Best Practices for B2B Marketers”.