How Does Your Customer Experience Your Brand?

Customers today are dealing with a complex array of digital channels and messages. Social media, websites, mobile apps, email and in-store digital displays are all playing a part in the brand experience—and on top of this is the different types of content each of these channels distribute like text, audio, interactivity and video. From a brand’s perspective, the communication space has become so fragmented and is evolving so fast that most digital strategies are out of date before they are signed off. Many businesses trying to deal with this complexity have started to move beyond channel-based strategies and towards more holistic multi-channel customer experience strategies.

Another factor influencing the need for businesses to focus on the entirety of the customer experience, from end to end, is that they have reached a point in their development where customer acquisition is not the core measure of success. Obviously as a business is scaling up acquiring new customers is key to success, particularly for consumer-facing brands. But as a company matures, and the market they play in becomes more competitive, retention becomes as important—if not more so. Retaining and understanding current customers is the key to discovering new revenue opportunities and increasing the overall lifetime value of each customer.

This is where the customer experience strategy and design becomes vital for the business’s continued growth and success. While a marketing-focused digital strategy will focus mostly on the awareness raising aspect of the customer journey, a customer experience strategy looks at the whole process—and is designed around developing long-term relationships. As a business leader, there are essentially two ideas to get your head around if you are about to start down the path of a customer experience, or customer centric, strategy. The first is learning to think like a customer. This is not as easy as it sounds. For example, your marketing and branding will have set expectations about how they will be treated and what the customer will receive. From there, the customer will interact with your brand in some way. The result of this interaction will be the experience the customer has, and this will elicit an emotion, ranging from delighted to angry, which will determine how the relationship they have with your brand will evolve. The more you understand this journey, the better you can manage the resulting relationship.

And this brings us to the second concept—that customer experience design needs a process. The customer journey discussed above is the first step. Then you need to do deeper discovery, build out some concepts, test and validate and finally implement. This is not something you design and push out to market as a finished product. You need to be agile. The end result is all about your customers, so they need to be part of the process.

Digital technologies are disrupting many industries, but for each there are also new revenue opportunities to be had. A customer experience strategy is a fast way of uncovering the untapped revenue in your business.

Mark Cameron is CEO and lead strategist of social media conversion and commercialization agency Working Three. While his agency is based in Melbourne, Australia, he works for some of the world’s most innovative and forward-thinking brands. As a regular speaker and writer on social media and digital strategy, Mark stays focused on customers and outcomes, not the technology, leading to simple strategic conclusions.