This article was written in collaboration between Amanda Riches, Senior Director of Professional Services at Medallia and Zoe Cooper, Senior Director of Marketing Operations, Europe, NTT Ltd.
Every company around the world will agree that happy customers make for a prosperous business. After all, satisfied consumers are the loyal ones who become the best brand advocates. That being said, just a few brands have unlocked their potential to constantly measure, adjust, and improve the provided experiences.
Companies that always manage to deliver unmatched experiences recognize the importance of a comprehensive CX programme. They understand every member in the organization carries a certain level of responsibility for the result and make sure to build their strategies upon that notion.
Therefore, companies with successful CX strategies work to empower employees across all departments and encourage them to act and innovate on behalf of the customer. In my opinion, marketing teams have a unique insight into how customer experience influence retention and revenue. With this knowledge, they can mobilise the entire organization around these deep insights.
Here are the five main ways the marketing team can – and should – influence an organisation’s customer experience strategy.
1. Using customer feedback
Perceptions of the brand’s website, advertising and even marketing events impact customers’ experience before they even officially become ones. Marketing teams have crucial insight into these processes and can help build a holistic picture of the customer’s experience with the brand as the relationship evolves. Moreover, they can leverage customer feedback to develop value-added services.
2. Delivering the brand promise
Over the past year, we learned that strong emotional connections are the foundation of long-lasting loyalty. To establish these meaningful relationships with the customers, companies have to listen and constantly check whether their brand vision is still aligned with what customers need.
For instance, it’s not uncommon for a miss-alignment to occur between marketing or sales and the ensuing onboarding processes. To win the deal, the sales teams may choose to apply concessions during the sales cycle. However, if they later fail to deliver on the promises they made, the customers are set up for failure. In the long term, this is a recipe for disaster.
3. Personalizing communication
Every marketer can vouch for the importance of creating personas to help understand specific customer segments and provide more personalised communications. It can be game-changing to gather and understand all available customer feedback signals such as surveys, information captured by indirect feedback, chat logs, call centre transcriptions, and social media posts. Instead of receiving blanket communications from a brand, this more personal approach makes customers feel heard and strengthens emotional ties.
4. Activating promoters – segmenting the happiest customers
Segmenting customers based on customer experience can also help brands identify those who are the most vocal brand advocates. By engaging these consumers, brands can strengthen their existing relationships and communicate their customer-centricity with a wider audience.
The marketing team can approach dedicated users for case studies or references. This might provide valuable third-party credibility to the brand. Marketing can also activate happy customers for awards, events, and public relations.
5. Building a strong EX programme
A strong employee experience programme is about leveraging employee insights, knowledge, and ideas to create positive outcomes. It’s critical to understand employees’ experiences in the context of their broader journey with the organisation.
When built right, this kind of programme allows for a more relevant conversation with employees. For example, brands can survey employees at the end of their onboarding experience to determine if they have been suitably equipped with all the tools, knowledge, and skills to deliver on the brand promise consistently.
When it comes to achieving customer experience excellence, getting customers’ point of view is only part of the picture – the full view comes from both customers and employees. With the right mechanism in place, brands can capture customer experience and operational improvement ideas from their frontline teams and relentlessly uncover the barriers that get in the way of them delivering an exceptional experience.
Final steps in driving customer experience excellence
Customer experience and marketing have a mutually impactful relationship both with each other and with the wider business. Brands that design their experience strategies to add value to every step of the customer journey, consistently deliver on promises, and relentlessly develop their people and processes to enable continuous innovation, will become firm favourites with customers.
To learn more about how marketing can define and impact customer experience excellence, visit the Medallia blog.