IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining the elements of successful experiences

Listening and responding to consumers’ expectations

Understanding the complexity of customer experiences

Executing compelling experiences with today’s technology

Developing consistent experiences online and off-line

Mapping out a touchpoint journey that gets customers to yes

In business, and all aspects of life, how you make people feel during interactions is more memorable than the tangible goods you might deliver. We often remember our childhood birthday parties with friends, birthday cakes, and fun fames, but you may not remember the gifts. This concept illustrates the importance of integrating meaningful and memorable customer experiences into each step of a customer’s journey with your brand.

Customer experience strategy simply refers to how you involve customers and prospects with your brand, how you serve their needs and meet their expectations, and how you deliver emotional fulfillment that leads to sales and loyalty. With or without all the software applications to help you execute successful journeys, creating and executing customer experiences can be very simple and affordable.

This chapter covers the basics of customer experiences that matter most to consumers across categories and provides actionable insights that allow small businesses to deliver outcomes that are similar those of their large brand counterparts. You’ll gain insights about what customers expect from brands beyond the goods or services purchased, the role of artificial intelligence and other technology for identifying best practices for customer experience programs, and how to execute fulfilling touchpoints for every step on a customer journey from introduction to sale.

Moving from Reactive Customer Service to Proactive Customer Experiences

Before marketing technology allowed brands to personalize communications, promotions, and interactions to customers’ needs and transactions, brand experiences were simply determined by the quality of products and service, friendliness of staff, and fair market value for goods or services purchased.

Today, and likely for the long-term future, customer experiences are determined by all of that as well as the following:

• Convenience and promptness of filling needs or resolving issues
• Additional value beyond the products or services offered
• Customization of pricing and terms
• Personalization of communications, offers, and promotions
• Alignment with values and social issues
• Involvement with developing future products and experiences
• Emotional fulfillment of each interaction

Another word for experience is involvement, which is exactly what customer experiences need to be built upon. Customers want to be involved in defining how they engage with brands, not forced into relationships that seem to be all about selling something to them rather than providing a mutually beneficial relationship.

Successful experiences involve customers in

• Having conversations about what they need, want, and expect from your business category
• Defining individual goals and overall outcomes
• Setting pricing and contract options
• Selecting products and services they need or don’t need
• Personalizing promotions and communications
• Developing future product features and ideas
• Creating communities of like-minded people with similar values

As you can see, the customer experience is far more complex than just monetary transactions for goods and services. Success for any business, large or small, in any category, is dependent on the emotional fulfillment you deliver in addition to products or services that garner high satisfaction ratings.

As you develop customer experiences you and your team can execute, think about how you can involve consumers in your brand and your values, and how you can be more involved in helping them make wise, informed decisions, whether or not those decisions lead them to choosing your business.

Your customer experience is akin to your customer journey. You need to outline the steps from a lead being introduced to your brand to becoming a loyal customer. Each touchpoint along the customer journey needs to align with relevant communications, calls to action, content, offers, and incentives. As customers engage in or ignore the touchpoints of the journey you define, you’re able to identify your hot, warm, and cold leads and assign your resources accordingly.

Creating Experiences Around Personal Relevance

More and more, consumers are holding brands to the same behavior and attributes they expect of their friends and family. Our friendships tend to last longer with people who care about us, listen to us as much as, if not more than, we listen to them, and proactively support our personal goals. Engaging with people who care about and listen to us on good days and bad days is one of the most fulfilling aspects of the human experience. It’s also increasingly the most fulfilling aspect of the consumer experience.

Several consumer polls show that as many as 91 percent of consumers across categories say that listening to and understanding their individual goals is the most important attribute of customer service for earning repeat business. But there are other things you can do to make your customers want to come back. According to a report by Genesys, a software company that sells customer experience technology, other attributes of customer service that consumers rank among the most important include:

• Listening to me and genuinely trying to understand my needs
• Knowing my account history and current activities with the company
• Not making me repeat myself by being transferred around the company’s support departments
• Understanding my intentions and proactively offering solutions
• Understanding and acknowledging my frustrations and other emotions
• Greeting me by name

With an affordable customer relationship management (CRM) system (for more on CRM systems, see Chapter 11) and a customer communications platform like live chat, small businesses can affordably deliver the same level of customer experiences big brands do. Interactions that spark purchases and long-term loyalty often require nothing more than the human touch, and small gestures of kindness. Consider just how expensive it is to call a customer by name. (It’s not.)

Customer experiences can be built upon sophisticated data mapping and artificial intelligence (AI) systems that tell you customers’ purchasing intent, shopping patterns, product interest, purchases, and more. Or they can simply be built upon touchpoints designed to deliver the kind of experiences customers ask for, which are really as simple as the attributes listed in the Genesys report.

As you think about how bigger brands may be competing with you for top satisfaction rates, repeat purchases, and lifetime loyalty, consider some further insights from the Genesys 2021 State of Customer Experience report.

Genesys asked consumers and customer experience leaders at leading consumer brands, “Which of these do you/your company value the most in a customer service interaction?” The gaps between what customers want and what they actually get leave the door wide open for small businesses that may not have all the AI insights or data fields as their big brand competitors.

Voice interaction, email, and live chat, listed by consumers as the most valuable methods of brand interaction, are now more affordable for small and midsize businesses than you may think. For example, some CRM systems include free live chat functions with your email and data management services. The cost is then determined by what you pay your staff to interact online with customers who visit your website.

Consumers also state that Facebook Messenger and What’s App are among the most popular social media apps used for customer service interactions. Again, that’s good news for small businesses, because both apps are easy to use and affordable.

Applying Technology for Memorable Customer Experiences

Many large companies use complex technology to monitor just about every behavior and purchasing trend possible among individual consumers and segmented groups. That technology includes predictive analytics, real-time monitoring of consumer purchasing intent, agent-assist programs that spark upsells and cross-sells, and even sentiment analysis. Data mined from multiple systems creates in-depth insights on individual consumers, personas, and segments, generating a lot of data for marketers to sift through, analyze, and act on.

Taking Customer Experience Beyond Service

Customer involvement with a brand is much more than transactional activities and customer service, and customer experience strategies must be viewed the same way. Successful strategies, no matter how complex or simple, are all built on the same foundation: personalization.

Creating Customer Experiences Around Brand Communities

Developing online and off-line communities is a critical part of an overall brand experience. Online communities bring people together in digital settings to share ideas, insights, and tips for solving common issues and satisfying individual needs, or just to have conversations. For example, Reddit is a massive online community that supports thousands of smaller communities in which people can connect with others to discuss their hobbies, interests, values, and passions. It has more than 430 million active monthly users among its more than 100,000 active communities.

Communities can exist on Facebook pages, in LinkedIn groups, and other social platforms. Essentially, a community exists when individuals engage with the same content and start chatting about it. You see this with podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, topic specific Facebook pages that focus on politics, cities and towns, and even true crimes, and such.

Once you start posting content on a channel and start engaging people in conversations about your content, the trick is being able to keep it up. Doing so will bring you more followers and potentially more business leads. Letting it slip and become yet another new program that never gets to a second edition can hurt your credibility and cause people to stop engaging with you on other channels.

Browse conversations and hot topics on sites like Reddit, social sites, and your own community pages to see what consumers in your space are interested in and to monitor any mentions of your own brand, both positive and negative.

Off-line communities gather people around volunteerism, issues, causes, and movements, just like online communities do. The difference is that followers and supporters actually meet in a physical place and get something done when they meet. Brands can organize a team of volunteers to help with the local food bank, highway cleanup, service trips, and more. Back to TOMS Shoes, not only did they build a brand around a movement, but they also invited people to form communities in their top markets by coming together for a Day Without Shows to celebrate the impact they have on others’ lives. Building brand communities in local communities can take on many different formats. Be creative and find one that works for you.

If you create a community of caring within your company by empowering employees to provide customers the appropriate care, service, and resolutions they expect, customers are more likely to continue doing business with you and tell others about their positive experiences. When customer service staff makes customers feel like friends, loyalty goes up and so do the positive online posts and comments about your business.

Mapping Out a Touchpoint Journey from Introduction to Lifetime Value

Although there’s no standard recipe for creating the perfect touchpoints for every step in the customer journey, the ingredients that are essential to a successful outcome include the following:

• Relevance: Communications via email, posts on social media pages, and discussions in online forums must provide relevant information and guidance on the real and actionable needs of customers, not brag sheets about your excellence.
• Decision support: Content marketing should provide guidance, especially for complex decisions associated with purchasing technology, software applications, automobiles, and similar items.
• Incentives: Like you, customers are juggling a lot of different things in their lives. They won’t always be able to follow up on new purchases as quickly as they may want to. And some of them get bogged down with hours of product research and need a reason to make a quicker decision. Offer incentives for completing transactions or continuing to do business with you instead of shopping the alternatives.
• Decision validation: The journey doesn’t stop once a decision to purchase from you has been made. You need to provide validation to keep the enthusiasm alive during a customer’s initial trial with your brand. That enthusiasm can lead to additional purchases, repeat sales, and qualified referrals.
• Satisfaction checks: Periodic customer satisfaction surveys blanketing your entire customer base isn’t an effective part of the customer journey. You need to reach out individually and ask customers to rate their experience with you. This helps you identify new opportunities as well as customers at risk.
• Rewards/tokens of appreciation: Offering customers even small tokens of appreciation or rewards for ongoing business goes a long away. Customers that gain rewards are more likely to come back, and those that feel appreciated are more likely to refer others.

• Community: Providing customers an opportunity to engage with a community of like people is key to new and repeat sales. Organized religion is an example of the strength of communities of people with similar goals, values, and needs. A brand community, like a religion, should be designed to provide members hope, service, support, and meaningful connections.

  Brand communities build connections that pay off in many ways. According to research by Sprout Social:

  • 57 percent of customers who feel connected to a brand will increase their spending.
  • 76 percent will continue to choose that brand over a competitor.

Once you develop events, customer service experiences, marketing content, and other action items that connect with your customers and prospects, you can create a touchpoint journey that keeps contacts on a path to yes.Figure 3-1 shows the touchpoints for a customer journey, from introducing a lead to your brand at a trade show or similar event, to qualifying the lead for next steps like maintaining awareness, nudging them toward a proposal, or nurturing them to closure.

The key to building a successful touchpoint journey is to involve all members of your team responsible for any actions inherent in the journey. All team members need to buy in on the process, understand their responsibilities and your expectations, and commit to executing them consistently.

There are many ways to map out customer experiences, touchpoint journeys, and the steps and protocols for serving customers’ needs, meeting expectations, troubleshooting, and resolving issues and complaints. You can map out your own journeys in a spreadsheet or word processing document you create in a platform like Excel or Word.

A customer journey is only as good as the content you share and the service you provide. You need to continuously create compelling content that provides value to customers and is more than a promotional message about your features and benefits. Rely on decision guides, industry reports, case studies, customer reviews, information about reward programs, and more. These types of materials help you show what’s in it for the customer if they choose to do business with you.

Remember, too, that although you can automate email messages and content to be delivered according to triggered schedules, you need to provide the human touch with phone calls — and, when possible, live interaction — to check in and assess customer satisfaction, needs, and additional opportunities. No matter how sophisticated digital technology becomes, we need to connect with each other beyond the screens of our phones and computers.