Mastering the Customer Experience

Focusing on the customer is not something new. Customer Relationship Management theories embraced in the 1990’s hold true today – the operational, collaborative and analytical aspects of the ‘CRM Ecosystem’1 still need to be adopted and adhered to. However, Customer Experience Marketing (CEM) is a subset of an organization’s overall customer experience management strategy and drive to become customer-centric. CEM is about managing every single part of the interaction and experience a customer has with the organization; from the visual experience of advertising, to the actual experience of interacting with a website, customer support line or physical layout of a branch office, even to the standard of the product or service delivered.

CEM tackles marketing at a human and emotional level, causing the customer to feel not only connected, but delighted and loyal and able to be a consistent advocate for the brand. This customer centric approach helps create the only true competitive advantage a company can achieve outside the commodity battle involving the features and price of their product or service.

There is much evidence to suggest that customers will take their business elsewhere after even one isolated bad experience, and CEM tackles this fragility of customer satisfaction and relationships. John McKean, Executive Director, Centre for the Information Based Competition, drives home this focus on customer experience, “70% of the reason we buy anything is based on how we are treated as a person during that experience.” Marty Brandt from Truebrand, concurs saying simply, “Everything you do or say affects your brand,” which underpins the importance and value of managing every aspect of your brand. Today the marketing department therefore must either lead, or be part of, the Customer Experience Management strategy so that when it comes down to the part marketing can play in creating and interacting with customers through marketing and sales processes, a personalized experience based on acknowledgement, trust and respect can be orchestrated for each customer.

To get to this advanced position on the customer experience journey, marketing, information technology and organizational competence must be developed, or else this capability will never be achieved. There are many potential points of failure in delivering a great customer experience, It is futile for marketing to do an excellent job if they are, for example, to be let down by the customer service team, billing system or an executive who drags the brand though the gossip columns of the newspapers.

The primary strategy to support CEM that marketing needs to implement is the generation of a core competence in Customer Information. This competency requires mastery of three components: data gathering, analytics and insight distribution. It is impossible to truly understand customers on a one-to-one human level unless we have the appropriate data, and also the ability to analyze, interpret and act on that data to improve the marketing and buying experience. These components all have data, technology, process, and skills implications for the marketing department.

First, to feed marketing analytics and deliver actionable insights, it is necessary to gather appropriate data. This means bringing data into a master repository, managing that information for accuracy and completeness, and making it available for analytical and execution processes. This doesn’t simply involve marketing data such as customer contact information and campaign history. To drive CEM the data must reflect everything the organization knows about a customer, their purchase history, behavioral information from their website and customer service interactions, financial metrics, and data enhancements from third party marketing service providers.

Once a complete picture of the customer base is prepared, marketing can set about to run processes that track the success of CEM efforts, identify new opportunities and predict customer responsiveness. Successful implementation of the marketing analytics capabilities will hinge on acquisition of appropriate reporting and analytics technology, as well as developing staff skill sets to create and interpret analytical insights for the organization. Building skill sets and a focus around the analytics of marketing will help drive the competence of the marketing organization.

The final step is to turn the intelligence generated by analytics into activities that drive CEM. In order to act on and execute this intelligence, and to ensure every aspect of a customer’s interaction with an organization is planned, monitored and nurtured, it is essential that marketing is able to intelligibly coordinate and integrate its processes with those of other customer facing departments.

Marketing needs to commit to building the right infrastructure. This may involve employing or training marketers with the right analytical skills, investing in a marketing technology platform which provides an integrated set of applications built on top of a single data architecture or sourcing a business partner able to add their domain expertise in data management. For example: the correct infrastructure is intrinsic to the success of marketing’s management of the entire customer experience process.

Marketing is a journey to master this fundamental, differentiating, intellectual property of an organization – Customer Information. So while marketing is on its competence journey the rest of the organization needs to be on theirs, from a leadership, culture, people, organizational, process, technology and information perspective.

1 METAGroup (Acquired by Gartner in April 2005), developed this conceptual architecture