Digital marketing leader, and SCS instructor, Sandra Pacitti shares how the customer experience is key to business success.
Creating a customer experience that drives loyalty and retention can be tough at the best of times. Given today’s business challenges, organizations are struggling to meet their customer’s expectations.
In fact, fewer than 35% of customers are satisfied with brands according to the 2022 Brand Relationship Design report from R/GA.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Here are some key customer experience management strategies to consider.
1. Know Your Customers
This is the most important piece of advice that I can give. It can be tempting to rely on anecdotal information from within your organization about your customers. This creates a false picture of your customers, and worse yet, may be used as a basis to build business strategies on.
The best way to know your customers is to listen to them. This can be done through surveys, feedback forms, comments on social platforms, ratings, and call centre logs. It’s also important to supplement this by talking directly to your customers to expand your understanding.
With this research you can start to build a true picture of your customers. It will help you to understand what you’re doing well and where you could be better. Documents such as customer personas and customer journeys are a good way to document your findings and make them memorable to employees.
2. Fix The Easy Stuff First
What are your customers telling you is challenging in dealing with your organization? Start with this list, and then look to the items that can be fixed most easily to deliver positive impact to your customer experience and bottom line.
Working across functional areas to make these improvements is a must. This collaboration ensures ownership of customer experience across the organization. More importantly, it makes sure that your customers have a consistent experience no matter what channel they interact with or where they are in the customer journey.
Communication is also key. Be sure to show and measure success quickly. This will demonstrate how customer experience management is driving business results and creates the foundation for more investment.
3. Excel At Employee Experience
An outstanding customer experience begins and ends with engaged employees who feel ownership for delivering a consistent and reliable customer experience every time.
It’s imperative for organizations to make the effort to ensure employees understand the importance of their role in delivering customer experience. Doing the right thing for customers must also be rewarded through compensation, incentives, and recognition. Today more than ever, organizations need to invest in a people strategy that delivers an outstanding employee experience.
Customer experience has changed. 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services according to Salesforce’s State of the Customer Report. With customer realities forever transformed, delivering a positive customer experience is more critical than ever.
Sandra Pacitti is a strategic digital and marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in delivering industry-leading customer experiences. She is currently Director, Digital Channels, Marketing Technology & Creative at PwC Canada where she leads digital transformation and the adoption of new marketing technologies. She holds the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) designation from CXPA. Sandra has overseen the creation and implementation of digital marketing roadmaps for major financial services firms in Canada. As team lead, she was responsible for the launch of the Mackenzie Investments website that was named the Top Canadian Website for Financial Advisors by kasina. She is well versed in all aspects of customer experience management, digital marketing and marketing technology strategy and implementation. In her past roles she has been responsible for creating and delivering training on digital marketing best practices, standards and policies.
Sandra teaches our Customer Experience Management (CXM) course, starting this fall.