On March 11, 2020, the WHO officially declared Covid-19 a pandemic. All businesses are now facing many challenges, including how to minimize their profit loss during this outbreak. It is also a difficult moment for marketers, as they now have to be careful of how to deliver their brand’s messages to their sensitive target consumers. Now is the time when marketers have to put themselves into consumers’ shoes, show what their brand can do to solve consumers’ problems, and build a meaningful relationship with their consumers. This is now marketers should focus on “customer experience.”
What is Customer Experience (CX) ?
Customer experience is the “cumulative experiences across multiple touchpoints and in multiple channels over time.” [1] In order words, CX is the customer’s perception of the brand based on all interactions that they had with the brand over all touchpoints, from finding information from the brand to after purchasing or experiencing the brand’s product or service. There are three components of customer experience. (1) Emotional – how does it make people feel? (2) Functional – does it do what people want it to do? (3) Accessible – how easy is it for people to do what they want to do? The brand that provides amazing customer experience can make their customer feel positive and happy by providing instant solution that satisfies the customer’s wants. In order to provide such amazing customer experience, a company should understand customer journey.
CX in Digital Age
In this digital environment, the customer journey has become more complex. The customer’s route to a purchasing decision can experience “stops and starts, wrong turns, and progress that often appears to be anything but linear.” [1] The image below is a good example.
According to a recent study, there are four key touchpoints in this digital age.
- Search engine visits – consumer searches online for information about retailers, products, and brands
- Retailer visits – consumers still visit retail stores to actually see and experience the product and get more information
- Brand visits – although decreasing, some consumers visits to brand and manufacturer sites directly. Amazon is the best alternative for this, which many shoppers use as a price and review check either before or after visiting a retail store.
- Review site or app visits – some shoppers make additional checks through third-party reference sites, often using their mobile apps. [1]
The customer may repeat any of the touchpoints above before making the purchase. Active evaluation is going on during all this time, when the customer is gathering information.
Fortunately, the technology now makes marketers easy to track customers through their journeys. For example, a Facebook pixel allows a marketer to track sales from a Facebook ad, to show the ads to people like their existing customers, and to remarket to people who have looked but not purchased. [1]
How to provide excellent Customer Experience?
Today, CX is the competitive battlefield as it has become at or near the top of marketing trends lists. It is not easy to provide excellent CX, but the followings are the good summary of how to provide excellent CS according to IBM’s SilverPop.
- Understanding customers’ wants, before they even figure it out themselves.
- Identifying the perfect moment using helps from technology.
- Adding sentiment and emotion to the promotion mix.
- Utilizing data, analytics, and predictive models to create personalized massages that impact the purchasing decision.
- Bringing all marketing capabilities to carry across any touchpoint in real time. [1]
Conclusion
To conclude this post, I want to share one of the good examples of customer experience marketing during this outbreak.
Great Jones is an eCommerce cookware brand. Two weeks ago, they posted this Instagram post that they would extend their free text service for “real-time recipe inspiration and cooking advice.” In this post, they are not pushing their product nor their brand. Instead, they are providing a solution to their customers who now have to stay home and cook for themselves or their family. They understand their customer’s wants, which is cooking recipe inspiration and cooking advice. They identified the right moment, when people were worried about how to feed themselves. Lastly, they added emotion to the post, motivating customers to cook and feeling positive during this moment. This is the perfect example of how a brand can provide good customer experience.
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Footnote:
[1] Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies, 4th Edition by Mary Roberts & Zahay; ISBN: 978133750187