Focusing customer experience strategy

 By Clare Mitchell Crow

Many multi-channel businesses are now convinced that making an investment in tailoring their customer experience strategy is time, effort and money well spent. They’ve seen for themselves that improving the experience of customers has a demonstrable impact on engagement, as well as commercial activity if that is part of the goal. So what should be the next step for these businesses? Should they simply maintain the measurement, analysis and improvement of experience for the broadest possible range of customers? Or is there potential for some of those businesses in focusing their efforts on their most strategically important customers?It would be naïve to believe that some companies aren’t already identifying segments of their customer base that represent the largest proportion of commercial profit, in some form or another. It’s a relatively simple process to isolate and track customers by certain criteria – their postcodes perhaps, their membership of a loyalty scheme, their past purchase record, or a particular behaviour they display during their interactions. These triggers could be used to deliver an enhanced, or at least different, customer experience. Perhaps they should be guided towards particular offers or incentives that have been selected to appeal to their profile? Or maybe their interactions should be monitored so that they can be contacted by virtual or human agents if their purchasing journey is aborted for any reason? These are intriguing possibilities with plenty of potential.

But what triggers would make companies invest in a more focused customer experience strategy? The recent recession’s impact on purchasing has led to many businesses tracking behaviours that, superficially at least, have less tangible monetary value. Some customers that aren’t buying still display a level of engagement and loyalty with businesses that is worth noting for future interactions. Of course engagement can mean wildly different things to different companies, depending on their particular goals for customer journeys. Businesses and customers naturally have different measures for a successful engagement. A customer’s goal may be to achieve a discount, whereas the goal of the business may be to secure a sale in return for loyalty scheme membership and demographic information. Generally speaking though, the more a customer engages with a website, the more those businesses can then find out about their ongoing involvement with the brand.

Focusing customer experience strategy goes further than the long-standing ‘if you liked this, you might like this’ e-commerce device used successfully by Amazon and many other online retailers. Instead it might entail offering distinct website access or functionality based upon customer history, or even what they choose to input or how they navigate during a single session. It’s all about giving the right customers the most value. One example might see a chat-window or voice call popup offered to top level customers that seem to be having trouble completing a particular action. Human-based interactions that, for example, ensure a customer has understood a process, installed a product correctly or been able to upgrade a service, are highly valued by loyal customers, and can be linked to financial rewards by a savvy business.

So what research methods would allow businesses to identify particular types of customer and target their strategies accordingly? Expert ethnographic research would certainly be an effective way of informing customer experience strategy by capturing information about customer behaviour in context, and it can be used to discover how those individuals reach purchasing decisions or interact with websites and other touch-points online and off. Likewise, analytics of website journeys can help businesses to understand their customers’ online behaviour and steps that contribute towards purchases. It’s possible that using analytics customers can be mined further, profiled, and even ranked according to the value a business places on their interactions. In addition, if the channel exists, studying call centre data can provide deeper understanding through feedback and reasons for contact.

Many companies are developing their existing customer experience strategies, yet very few are likely to go public on whether, and how they are choosing to target key customers. What is certain is that if a business is weighing up the decision whether to take this route right now, they must first ensure they have a research and analysis platform in place that enables them to make those informed changes in strategy – putting building blocks in place to gain that deeper customer understanding will pay rewards in years to come, as investment can be tailored to those that are engaged, loyal and therefore (hopefully) offer financial reward.

Back to October Newsletter