THE BASICS OF A GREAT CONSUMER EXPERIENCE
In 2015, Gartner, predicting a consumer experience battle, stated that 89% of companies surveyed believed that they would be competing based solely on the consumer experience. As of 2019, that prediction has become the reality — With few exceptions, as products, services and pricing become more and more homogeneous, the consumer experience has become a business’ primary differentiator.
The Connected Consumer
The modern digital landscape has transformed the way in which we expect to interact with businesses, making today’s connected consumers much more challenging to please.
In the not-so-distant past, shopping channels would generally have included the brick-and-mortar establishment, phone and mail order. The ability to comparison shop was limited to how many establishments you were willing to physically visit, how many catalogues you were willing to flip through, and/or how many calls you were willing to make. Today, everything is at the consumer’s fingertips, via any one-of-a-number-of-communication channels, and decisions that may have previously taken days to arrive at, can now be made in minutes. While the addition of employing the latest in digital communication technology is important for any business, it’s critical not to lose sight of how to consistently promote a good consumer experience in the first place. For this we need to revisit the basics.
“No matter how advanced technology becomes, it will never replace the importance of the customer experience. Technology is merely a tool designed to make that relationship easier to forge and maintain.” — iQmetrix
Revisiting the Basics
Below we briefly revisit three must-do, back-to-basic touch points that today’s businesses so easily lose sight of in the rush to compete digitally.
1. Framework Your Company’s Journey
Marketing experts correctly emphasize the importance of creating a framework for the consumer journey; however, a company must remember to start with its own framework first, and that begins with establishing and implementing a defined set of company values. From these values the company journey can be mapped and implemented.
Many businesses have a website page dedicated to sharing their mission and vision for site visitors. Yet, it doesn’t matter how well a company articulates these values if they aren’t actually making the effort to achieve them.
While a mission statement defines a company’s core purpose and intended focus, a company’s vision statement represents the ideal of its ultimate goal. Though an ideal by its very nature is defined as an impossible state of perfection, the vision statement can become a powerful impetus for long-term positive growth simply in a company’s attempt to reach it. In sum, a vision that is pursued, via set routines and company practices, (its journey) will help shape the way in which a company thinks, the way it moves forward, and ultimately what it becomes.
2. Engage Your Employees
In a recent article, Managing Your Company’s Brand with Employee Engagement, we noted how a company’s front-line employees (customer service/support & sales staff) play a critical role in managing a consumer’s experience. Their access to customer feedback, and the way in which they handle that feedback is key to a business’ reputation. Well-trained and professional front-line staff can do much to negate bad feedback. Conversely, impatient, disengaged and improperly trained support staff have the power to damage an otherwise stellar product or service.
The ability to achieve a positive consumer experience increases dramatically when management makes the effort to ensure that their front-line employees are engaged. Engaged employees are more likely to pass on that same effort to the consumer. You can read the full article HERE for some tips on how to increase employee engagement.
3. Make it Feel Like Home
“We have a need for a place that is called home. Home provides security, control, belonging, identity, and privacy… ” — Graham Rowles, Professor at the University of Kentucky
In the Wizard of Oz Dorothy closes her eyes, clicks her heels together three times and repeats “There’s no place like home.” She is then magically transported back to her home in Kansas, surrounded by the familiar and down-to-earth people she loves and trusts. That sense of trust and security are the cornerstones of the consumer experience. In spite of a competitor’s lower prices or fancier gadgets, a consumer’s loyalty is greatly increased when they feel cared for and have trust in the people they do business with.
For instance, if a close family member came to your business with a vague idea of what they wanted, your intimate knowledge of them would make it easier for you to determine a tailor-made solution to fit their needs. Most likely, they leave that interaction knowing you 1) had their best interest at heart , which gave them a sense of being cared for, and 2) this in turn bolstered their sense of belonging and identity within the “family”. The sheer power of feeling cared for and understood will never be supplanted by the latest in technology.
This make-it-feel-like-home approach can be weaved into the interactions you have with your non-family consumers. Building a relationship, one interaction at a time, while remembering specific consumers’ wants and needs doesn’t have to entail laborious record keeping. There are many digital tools available to make the gathering of important data easier to forge and maintain, and for you to make use of it instantly.
Wrapping It Up
The customer experience is “intentional, purposeful and consistent” as stated by Diane Magers, CEO and chairman of the board of the Customer Experience Professionals Association.
The need to not lose sight of the most important basics (i.e., your company’s vision, employee engagement and making the consumer feel as if you have their best interests at heart), are the most critical aspects in procuring the desired consumer experience. Technology is there to assist in the building of business-consumer relationships, not create them.
