The game has changed, and consumers are in charge of the rulebook.
We share unprecedented access to information thanks to the internet, which has dramatically increased demand for the resource we use to process that information: our attention.
As our lives have grown more information-dense, so has the value of our attention to businesses who compete for it. Coupled with the cascading effects of global digital literacy, the precision of modern advertising, and new tools that enable businesses to measure engagement at every stage of their customer journeys, this generational spike in the value of our attention has forced businesses to reimagine traditional approaches to brand and product development.
The experience economy
Coined at the turn of the century by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, the idea that we have migrated from a service-based economy to an ‘experience economy’ is the insight that underpins most customer experience practices. The explosion of customer experience research, strategy and analytics frameworks was a response to the shifting priorities of late ‘90s consumers; we were becoming more attuned to the emotional connections we had with products, our experiences of them, and the memories they left behind.
Consumers stopped caring about how many layers of metal their saucepans were made of. Aesthetics aside, variations in the material qualities of a saucepan are inconsequential until we draw a connection between those qualities and the cooking experience we expect the pan to deliver. It’s only once that fourth layer of copper promises to protect us against the frustration of scrubbing scorched onions off a cheaper pan that the make-up of the metal starts to matter.
Customer experience management (CXM)
Customer experience (CX) is the holistic sum of every touchpoint and interaction a customer has with a business. CX shapes the way customers approach future interactions, informing brand perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. CX is end-to-end and omnichannel; meaning it encompasses the full lifetime of a customer’s engagement and is experienced seamlessly across digital, physical, and social interactions with a business. A customer-centric approach is critical to the success and scalability of any service-based business, but all businesses have opportunities to optimise the experiences they deliver.
Take the example of a boutique cafe. Their sensational service and house-roasted coffee might offset their terrible online store, but our impressions of the business’ maturity and overall usefulness to our lives take both experiences into account. While we might still bring friends for brunch, we’ll go elsewhere when ordering coffee beans online. Even the most loyal customers are unlikely to notice when they eventually improve their online experience – if your first visit didn’t match the quality you’ve come to expect in-store, why would you go back?
Effective customer experience management (CXM) addresses these situations by seeking to understand the needs and behaviours of individual customers in relation to their engagement with businesses. The cafe owner who is in tune with their customers and has access to various forms of online and offline feedback is in a better position to identify that a certain segment of their audience (long-term regulars) needs to be informed about the new website in a way that acknowledges their past engagement. From there, they may have staff strike up conversations about the website with regular customers or incentivise visitors to give the online store a second chance through a promotion.
Customer-centric brand development
Consider for a moment that your brand is the sum of four key components: the unique nature of your identity; the boldness of the promises you keep; your consistency in exceeding customer expectations; and the impact of the stories you tell. Approaching brand from this angle allows us to understand it as an output, not an input: the result of organic and emotional processes which exist in the minds of consumers, not on the pages of any style guide or strategy document.
Brand strategy, design and positioning are essential components of your brand’s identity, providing invaluable cues that inform how a brand and those who represent it should appear, communicate and behave. Businesses with strong brand identities and compelling stories centred around their customers’ needs are consistently those who come out ahead in the marketplace of attention, but those who fail to consider the experiential components of brand risk leaving value on the table if the experiences they deliver aren’t living up to the hype they generate.
This is the role of CXM. When you invest in mapping out bespoke customer journeys for each segment of your customer base, develop frameworks to track customer satisfaction over the full lifecycle of their engagement, and leverage the resulting insights to continually craft and optimise customer experiences which meet or exceed the expectations set by your brand promises, brand equity is the natural result.
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