Customer Experience vs Customer Service

'People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.' Maya Angelou

Customer experience (CX) refers to the shopping experience solely from the customer's personal perspective. Planning for superior customer experience requires empathic imagination of everything Jane sees, hears, etc after each click and how it interacts with her most basic individual human needs, including those not directly related to your product.

Even if you are selling and discussing car tires, Jane's ostensibly unrelated personal needs persist. For instance, among other things, she has ongoing social needs to be validated. So while recalling her name and personal preferences do not appear related to tires, you are more likely to win her over by considering them every step of the way. All her needs must be addressed to view her holistically. 

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Customer experience is proactive. It involves meticulous planning that avoids customer discomfort. Conversely, customer service is overall more reactive because it is concerned with fixing problems related to poor customer experiences, after they happen. In fact, it is quite possible to have excellent customer service despite poor overall customer experience. For instance, if you fail to meet a customer's ongoing need for convenience by dragging out a process into something difficult, the customer may suffer lingering frustration associated with boring tedium and wasted time but satisfied by how your customer service rep resolved her specific problem. 

Achieving superior customer experience involves planning to make that process easier and to avoid the problem in the first place. For instance, after imagining Jane's experience, and even before she enters, you decide to use the right infrastructure like apps to eliminate otherwise tedious steps. Customer experience mapping can help you to identify where (potential) problems lie. It involves looking at all the stages of the buying cycle, ie from 'stimulus to ZMOT to first moment of truth to second moment of truth'.

Jane couldn't careless about her stage in your 'sales funnels'. Just like you, she is selfishly living in a bubble of her personal needs in which she does everything possible to meet them. You must step away from narrowly focusing on 'converting' her from visitor to lead at x% to prospect and then to customer at x% ... so she could buy, ... so you could meet your personal needs. To her, she's just Jane. Not only should you carefully examine your processes through which Jane goes but also those who serve her, ie your 'internal customers' aka employees whose processes should also be streamlined to avoid internal friction and confusion. See how McDonalds masters this on the backend.

No need pretending why you are in business with the usual disingenuous, creepy tactics though. However, if you can just treat her as Jane as a holistic individual while keeping all your market promotions stuff strategically woven to apparent invisibility, you may meet your needs marvelously. 

So before Jane comes in the next time, prepare. You do not just sell her tires. Letting her see your humanity, prepare to use her data (from data mining) to also sell her personal validation, convenience, understanding, expert knowledge, non-jarring interface, occasional surprise little bonuses (aka a 'plus one' product or service) and whatever you know she values. By using data of her shopping history and preferences, you can also make personalized
recommendations of new products and upsells.

Sephora is a cosmetics brand that offers preferences as personalized rewards recommendations for their tiered loyalty program.

Perfecting customer experience takes time and critical and intuitive observations of both explicit and implicit signals. For instance, abandoned shopping carts signal a bad customer experience. You must figure out the associated pain point and fix the problem at the operational design level to prevent recurrences, even when customers are reticent. Your work never ends, constantly use available tools for data analytics and predictive analytics. In other words, remain flexible and responsive to changing customer demands.

Here are examples of how you can apply the above.

• Hire front line staff with the ability for empathy and emotional intelligence. Your HRM strategies should specifically target and hone those skills on every point of employee contact through job descriptions, job interviews, training and so on.
• Train your sales team to deliver 'plus one' bonus products or services (that are relevant to your business). Among other things, this may involve empowering staff with certain decision-making authorities. For instance, sales staff may be allowed to offer gifts in the form of add-ons up to a value of $x to customers with characteristics regarding.
• Train front line staff to meet customer needs. For instance, set up backend facilities that allow your sales team to collect and review notes related to conversations and other interactions with customers. These data may be later cited, perhaps as memorable handwritten notes at the point of delivery. Needless to say, this example highlights the need for company-wide integration of the customer experience unique value proposition. So everyone, from front end to delivery departments, working directly or indirectly with that customer is on the same page.
• Be readily available when the customer needs you.

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CONTENT RELATED TO CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE (CX)

• Customer experience (CX) is interested in meeting customer needs holistically. However, since customer communication must still remain simple with usually a single strong message, establish a clear unique value proposition as an initial catch to get Jane in the door. It does not clash with the holistic personal marketing approach geared towards good customer experience.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Data mining is a very key aspect of planning for superior customer experience.
• Some forms of tentpole marketing can be a useful response to customer needs
• See how McDonalds revolutionized their production to ensure positive customer experience that delivered on expectation for fast food; food that took 30 minutes and not 3 hours.
• Customer experience is expected to be the #1 brand differentiator over price and product by 2020 (Customers 2020 Report). They can and often will leave at the slightest disappointment. Customers are more educated, savvy and vocal than ever. Reducing your customer defection rate by 5% can increase your proditability by as much as 25 to 125% (Leading on the Edge of Chaos, Emmet Murphy and Mark Murphy).
• Tiered loyalty programs can add value to the customer experience.
• Using brand storytelling for evangelism
• See how to handle customer complaints.
• Customer experience mapping.
• Some apps that can contribute to superior customer experience.
• Strategically set advanced notification and triggers on your live chat apps
• Create tags in trouble tickets   

Retention Marketing & the Hour Glass Funnel

The Hour Glass Funnel is an advanced stage of the sales funnel. Just to recap, the sales funnel strategically manages key touch points, ie points at which marketers respond to a customer's level of buying readiness with stage-appropriate motivators. Since previous posts did not delve beyond earlier touch points, this post covers a more complete list of customer touch points which are awareness, engagement, conversion and retention. In short, the purpose of the hour glass funnel deals with retention marketing, ie to retain and convert your main product customer into a loyal / repeat customer and sales generating fan / sales ambassador. Essentially, retention marketing aims to extend the customer life value (CLV), aka life time value of customers. 

Goal 1: loyalty or repeat sales

Remember, it is many times cheaper to convert an existing satisfied customer. In fact, loyal customers are highly likely (roughly to 70%) to refer your business to friends. Furthermore, loyal customers are 10 times more valuable than new ones as it relates to revenue. Remember then 80-20 rule? It applies. Stats suggest that loyal customers can account for as much as 80% of a company's revenue. Businesses use many techniques that include loyalty programs. Imagine, you may even include a loyalty pipeline in your CRM.

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Goal 2: evangelism
Unlike the work of a paid sales team, marketing evangelism involves the promotion of a brand not for the promoting person's self interest but for a third party, the brand. Evangelists have a genuine believers in your brand (as opposed to going through the motions in a lack lustre transaction of sales pitch for remuneration). These very valuable customers contribute to the customer acquisition efforts of your business. Naturally, the product must add real value to convert someone into a marketing evangelist. The value should extend beyond the single benefit narrowly associated with the product. For instance, your customer becomes an evangelist when his experience is holistic because, not only was the product very valuable on many levels but so too were the different aspects of his experience like customer support. Furthermore, the passion can be developed by the product's ability to help people to accomplish something that supports larger dreams, political or social will and so on. For instance, kitchen gardening products may be associated with empowering people with healthier lifestyle (something they dream of within the context of genetically modified food and the associate health risks). Marketing evangelists essentially widen your sales funnel in that they reach more leads. They offer social proof which is highly persuasive. In fact, it is more persuasive and therefore more effective in converting prospects into customers than your self praise. See case studies of how companies encouraged evangelism by implementing ambitious referral programs.   

  

Summary of the major stages of the sales funnel

• awareness (make prospects aware you exist)
• engagement (educate the researching lead)
• conversion (make a sale by promoting product value to leads on the verge of buying)
• retention / referral (encourages customers to be loyal, ie to buy again and or evangelize your products and business to others)

Retention Marketing DOs (for loyalty)

• consistently deliver quality goods and service
• be responsive to their (changing) needs
• respond to understanding and resolving problems of dis-satisfied customers. Use what you have learnt as a new FAQ item
• create value like useful content

Retention Marketing DOs (for referrals to others / widening the sales funnel)

• use loyalty programs that encourage customers to engage with your brand in exchange for rewards. (It is also useful to implement that simultaneously increases customer acquisition through referral programs that are designed for loyalty. See the FreeAgent case study.)   


• encourage the customer to interact with your community
• use social media
• for forums, give clear instructions / calls to action regarding where and how to start. 
• Example: encourage members to create a member profile
• encourage the customer to evangelize your products and business via
• product reviews. This involves videos and images. In fact, the latter is useful for lookbooks
• company reviews
• encourage the customer to recommend your products
• using your affiliate program

Retention Marketing Tools

• Facebook groups (not Facebook pages). Allow prospects and customers to be members. Encourage the customers, especially the satisfied and successful ones who can showcase the success they enjoy as a result of your products and or services, example they could post some record of earnings / savings per month.  Company reviews and video interviews can also be posted when customers have positive things to say. Additionally, your prospects can ask questions to the more experienced buyers.
• Wedding registries

Other Retention Marketing DOs

The process is not necessarily linear in that a customer may skip past stages within this and even the basic sales funnel. You must therefore be mindful of their path through the stages and communicate appropriately. For instance, someone using your wedding registry jumps from the top of the basic sales funnel all the way to the bottom of the hour glass funnel and is not necessarily ready for your webinar sales funnel communication.  

 

CONTENT RELATED TO RETENTION MARKETING WITH THE HOUR GLASS SALES FUNNEL

• Brand awareness & brand awareness srategy 101
• Loyalty programs are still relevant that use forms of emotional marketing are more likely to succeed with modern consumers than 'earn & burn' programs.
• Tiered loyalty programs
• A sure way of converting customers into evangelism is customer experience that not only meets customer needs holistically but exceed expectations. This encourage customers to tell a story which essentially translates into building your brand awareness & brand awareness srategy 101
• After deciding on this new funnel, create the tasks in a retention / renewal sales pipeline and or evangelism pipeline in your CRM program for your sales representatives. For instance, the renewal pipeline can include elements like loyalty cards.
• Sales funnels. There are several types of sale funnel. Here is a great introduction
• Using brand storytelling for evangelism
• Broadcast email campaigns: an Amazon case study
• Facebook groups for retention marketing