The need for customer experience strategy

By Marty Carroll

Customer experience is not a fad. Yes the terminology is bandied about much more than before but before customer experience we had customer satisfaction and customer engagement. Using the words ‘customer experience’ implies that an organisation is looking at how consumers experience the brand in a more strategic way. Indeed we’ve been gratified to see a large number of organisations really grasp the concept and value of customer experience. Some initiatives have delivered excellent returns on investment and have proven very effective, but we now believe such initiatives are no longer enough in themselves, and here’s why.Modern customers and consumers have an unprecedented ability to communicate with each other. As a result of the comments, interactions and opinions of customers published across every digital channel, there now exists a vast knowledge pool of insights into every business, and almost complete transparency in every marketplace.

Before this ‘revolution’, it was very easy for businesses to dismiss singular voices. If a consumer had a poor experience that a company did not recognise, it was reasonably futile for them to complain because they simply disappeared into a media smokescreen of customer-orientation speak. It’s hard to remember sometimes just how difficult it was for consumers to gang up and rebel over their treatment by big companies. But now the ever evolving web is continually finding new ways to exploit collective voices in order to call corporations to account. Customer opinions both good and bad spread much more quickly and with more weight than ever before. There is a new ability to harness an amplified voice capable of reaching tens of thousands or more like-minded consumers very quickly indeed.

Add to this mix numerous fresh analyst statistics that prove people are more sceptical than ever before of marketing messages, and you can quickly see that the collective consumer voice is becoming all-powerful. Measurements such as the Edelman Trust Barometer indicate that we are all far more likely to listen to our fellow consumers and peers than any amount of carefully sculpted corporate PR. Recent research conducted by Penn State University analysing more than 150,000 microblog posts showed that 19% of all posts (or tweets, mainly) mentioned brands. Of these 50% were positive and 33% were negative. What we are seeing is that people ultimately trust each other more than businesses, and readily share their opinions. They just haven’t been able to capture the opinions of others so readily before now.

Businesses are in the novel position of having to influence consumer behaviour largely through actual deeds, and not through hollow marketing. They need to positively affect user engagement through actions, and enhance customer experience by delivering on promises. Business reputation is no longer a one-way communication, and instead hinges on how companies actually behave.

All of this of course means that customer experience is more important than ever before. It’s no longer just a project that ought to be carried out. It’s now a critical strategic imperative. The task of continually maintaining and enhancing a very high level of customer experience must be integrated into the very fabric of organisations, and one-off projects or initiatives must be consigned to the past. Likewise customer experience can no longer be a task assigned to junior committees, but instead a vital strategy tackled at the very highest level and imbued in business culture. The very best manifestation of any brand will now prove to be actual positive customer experiences felt through multiple touch-points and across a range of channels, ensuring that when people talk about brand in favourable terms, it will have genuine credibility and clout.

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