The final frontier: adding value to the customer experience
Jarther Taylor
Director & Principal at Jarther+ | Senior Advisor & CMO at 24 Hour Business Plan | Adjunct Professor at AGSM@UNSW
The customer experience might never be perfect – it just has to feel right
How often have you heard someone say they like something a business offers …and then they quickly add ‘but the customer experience is terrible’?
That (hypothetical) business could be brilliant at developing, distributing and selling products but if its interactions with its customers feel off, it isn’t giving them what they really want.
The experience of doing business with an organisation is so much more than a financial transaction for products and services. Customers value some kind of relationship – short or long – that feels good on all kinds of conscious and unconscious levels.
(There are plenty of interesting models for defining the customer experience, though I particularly like the ARC model linked here as it’s a nice blend of the rational and emotional. It also acknowledges that customers get value from multiple touch points and experiences.)
If those positive feelings can be experienced repeatedly at every part of the customer journey, (as Tim Wade at Smith+Co points out) then (as John Turnbull at Macquarie University notes) it’s more likely they’ll value the relationship longer.
How can marketers add more value to the customer experience?
Marketers love boosting that perception of value because it helps increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Marketers also get that even the most rational people don’t really make unemotional, calculated decisions about business relationships, possibly because humans aren’t drones yearning for absolute precision in a relationship.
So they’re doing more to personalize communication, while acknowledging that most people won’t perfectly assimilate an organisation’s way of thinking or its way of doing things.
But consistency in how people experience a brand is also massively important.
As a marketer at Telstra I’m part of the overall effort to improve customer experience across the organisation. So, while I’m not personally involved in defining that experience at every touch point, our team is doing a lot more to bring Telstra’s values into each customer interaction. Good cross-team collaboration certainly helps the customer enjoy a positive relationship with the business overall – though we recognise it’s an ongoing journey, with plenty of hard work ahead of us
CPO | Procurement Transformation Leader | Digital Procurement Cloud Systems Expert | Sustainability
9yHey Jarther, good post. Even better if you understand which of those customer interactions mean the most to the customer, esp. if for a key customer persona
#LinkedIn Top Sales Voice, #Salesforce Top Sales Influencer | Upgrade Your Sales to Buyer-Focused Selling for real Revenue Growth 📈 Australia, USA, Online | Let's lift your Sales, too: pstrohkorb@peterstrohkorb.com
9yHello Jarther, Thank you for posting, it is a great article and one that resonates with our findings, too. We have been advocating collaboration and mutual support between Sales and Marketing teams for a long time and our OneTEAM Method has proven very effective in terms of customer experience, staff morale and - last not least - financial outcomes. However, the approach is the deciding factor here. This is a People matter, so it requires an approach that addresses the People dimension first, then the Processes (and their ensuing metrics) and then the Technology aspects. We find that this is the only way to achieve lasting success. I'll be happy to elaborate if you like, just respond to me privately. Thanks again for posting, we look forward to hearing more from you.