E-Source

7 Concepts to Deliver the “Experience” in Customer Experience
By Will Reese

It’s pretty clear to most marketers a good customer experience drives loyalty, and—when applied consistently—can build both professional and consumer advocates for a brand. If you think of experience as a noun, it can be defined as “something that happens to somebody.” Frequently channels are added as a proxy to marketing programs to increase the number of “somethings” that can happen. But, additional channels aren’t the complete answer.

When planning a customer experience, it often helps to think of an experience as a verb, meaning to “feel something.” Your customers feel something about your brand and, in this increasingly social world, are more frequently communicating these feelings to others. Remembering these seven concepts can help you work the feeling back into your customers’ experiences:

1) Consistency: Define the feelings and value you want to convey for your brand, agnostic of channel. This will help you establish a consistent customer commitment across channels. Consistency will reinforce your brand value to customers and allow you to more consistently track customer satisfaction metrics across those channels.

2) Integration: Once you have a consistent approach established, you have the opportunity to connect the experiences together—allowing your customers to seamlessly transition between channels. Integration further enables consistency by sharing customer data centrally so each channel responds appropriately to customer needs and does not become repetitive for the customer.

3) Choice: Integration enables customer choice. Allow customers to choose where they interact, how often they interact, and by which channels they prefer to communicate. Extending choice to customers ensures you engage them on their terms and removes some preconceptions. Choice becomes a driving factor of acting transparently.

4) Transparency: You cannot control every experience. Establishing a standard of transparency allows you to be an active participant and influence a broader range of your customers’ experiences. Greater transparency of key product facts combined with opportunities to directly connect with the brand begins to foster customer trust—a strong driver of customer brand sentiment.

5) Interactivity: The best experiences in life end in “ing”: doing, going, trying. Many experiences only focus on one word: reading. Think about the actions your customers want to complete along the way when engaging with your brand, and ensure your programs encourage these actions. Building customer-driven interactions into your brand experiences helps support message retention and provides valuable customer insights.

6) Content: Content is still king. The best-planned experiences suffer without quality content aligned with customer needs. Focusing on core content that lives across channels reinforces consistency and message retention. Greater attention to health literacy for patients and visual learning for professionals can create meaningful, differentiated content. Taking a modular approach to content deployment also helps deliver cross-channel opportunities to track and analyze customer influence.

7) Context: If good content is delivered with poor context, it reduces its impact and detracts from the experience. Partnering content with strong context delivers messages complementary to their environment that actively work to remove attitudinal barriers. Actively map your content elements to the delivery context to ensure you deliver on the matrix of possible combinations with consistent impact. Additionally, contextual mapping helps identify key performance measures to monitor through ongoing research and program analytics.

The digital channel is just one venue for socializing your brands. You can create a strong competitive advantage by elevating the quality of the customer experience delivered with a brand message, within a consumer program, or within a professional service. With a renewed focus on these seven concepts, you can deliver quality customer service experiences that reflect your brand well.

Will Reese is Chief Innovation Officer of Cadient Group, an interactive marketing network focused on the healthcare industry. He welcomes comments at will.reese@cadient.com.