Customer experience is extremely important.

A negative customer experience can lead to a bad review, a digital revolt, a real-world boycott, etc. As people more quickly judge experiences they also are speeding up the time it takes to spread the word to others about their experience. This can quickly lead to a negative snowball heading towards your organization.

I was always taught that the customer’s always right. As an adult, I know this isn’t always true. I prefer, “the customer is always respected and their opinion is valuable.”

This past weekend, my wife and I waited at a restaurant for more than an hour after we placed our order. Our waiter knew we were unhappy as our food was taking forever. He sent the manager to us. Maybe he figured he wasn’t going to get a good tip, so why deal with an unhappy customer. Maybe he just knew it was the right thing to do. While we waited, my brother-in-law texted. He’s in the service industry and suggested asking if they thought their service was acceptable.

At first, I laughed at his suggested (we did not ask), but after thinking about his question and the series of events since entering the restaurant it made sense. Our waiter knew it was taking a long time. He apologized and proactively sent the manager to our table. I appreciated his proactive approach and when we left, I left the same tip I would have had we not waited so long for our food. 

I work with a lot of organizations who have different customers. Often, I stress to them all the time the value of customers and their feedback. The importance of putting them first. Replacing the, ‘I think’ comments with the, ‘my customers want’ comments.

It takes a village.

Hero Digital recently posted an article about how a CX-oriented team should start with the tech team. It’s something I discuss all the time with my team and the organizations I work with. Silos are great for storing corn, but not so good for making decisions and creating memorable experiences.

This Hero Digital post provides three key ways to make this happen.

1. Provide a personalized customer experience.
2. Enable instant customer responses.
3. Become data driven.

These three tips sound simple, but they’re often harder to implement in reality.

I work with an integrated agency. This means our teams work closely together to understand the impact our work has across the board. Our development team understands the impact their decisions have on the marketing team. The content team understands the recommendations they provide will require development and marketing support. Our hosting and dev ops team knows the impact their configurations have on user experience and more.

When teams work together across disciplines it can create a dream team.

A valuable investment.

I’m often asked is how I measure success when it comes to the softer, brand building campaigns and pushes. Things that don’t have a direct ROI (Return on investment) that can be measured in dollars or donations.

It’s a valuable question that many organizations are asking. Hero Digital posted an article that explores how to prove the business value of a customer experience investment. When data across various touchpoints are combined and analyzed together well-informed decisions are easier to make. We need to remove ego and insert data in the process. Customers can be fickle, which is why it’s important to never stop looking at data and analyzing trends.

Structured process.

I start all projects by working with organizations to define success together. If we all believe success is the same thing, then we are all working towards a common goal. Success doesn’t mean vague phrases like get more clicks or grow audiences. It may start with this, but adding a number to these goals makes them real. It means that we have something to track against and that everyone is on the same page.

Once success is defined, we start to work backward. What will it take? How long? How much of an investment? We ask questions that allow us to put a practical plan in place. One that everyone agrees with.

The key component for all plans is data.

If I’m trying to get people to fill out a 3-page contact form and I’m only tracking ‘form load’ and ‘form submit’ how will I know when people drop off?

Collecting the data is important, but being able to analyze it is also imperative. If I’m only looking at a segment of the audience I may be missing valuable information. My team likes Google Data Studio and Power My Analytics to pull data from various sources into a single efficient reporting platform.

Data and reporting show us what has worked in the past, but multivariate testing allows us to be more nimble.

Truly successful marketing includes a cycle of testing, tweaking, analyzing, and repeating. IT means collecting the right data across platforms. Setting clear goals.