Customers interact with organizations multiple times before, during and after the purchase. Also known as touchpoints, marketers have studied these critical moments since the beginning. Touchpoints create a customer journey map for marketers to ensure satisfaction every step along the way. It’s the perfect way to promote an amazing customer experience.
A New Outlook
Since the advent of social media, organizations are better equipped than ever before to manage the customer’s end-to-end experience. Organizations able to skillfully manage the entire customer journey reap enormous benefits. Consider only a few of the advantages for marketers with a firm grasp on the customer experience:
- enhanced customer satisfaction
- reduced churn
- increased revenue
- greater employee satisfaction
How could your organization benefit from promoting an amazing customer experience?
A Four-Step Process
An amazing customer experience brings all the benefits a business or brand needs. How can your organization capitalize on the customer experience to realize these benefits? Linx has indentified a four-step process to embed the customer journey into your operating model. We’ll use a couple on their honeymoon as an example.
1. The journey begins with research.
How you communicate before, during and after the purchase can make all the difference to your bottom line. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Determine their needs and concerns. Consider how to make your communications go beyond the basics. An organization that sends pre-trip questions after honeymooners return home has the customer experience all wrong. Learn to get it right.
2. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
Customer experiences vary from one customer to the next. Honeymooners looking to book a hotel have a different agenda than a family of five. You can’t be everything to everyone, but you can learn to make an extra effort to respond to customer’s special needs. A bottle of champagne waiting in the honeymoon suite means you’re doing the customer experience right.
3. Delight and surprise them.
The key to delighting and surprising your customers is doing something special that’s different from the expected. A complimentary glass of wine for the honeymooners at a hotel is enough to do the trick. There’s no need to offer anything major. Just make it something positive. A little goes a long way in promoting an amazing customer experience.
4. Solve their problems, even before they realize they have one.
A couple books a honeymoon suite without knowing the local stores are closed for the holiday weekend. How can you promote an amazing customer experience? Offer a way to solve the problem. Give the couple a ride to the nearest available market or provide free Internet access for them to research markets open in the area. Chances are your customers have one problem or another. Learn to not only solve them, but predict them, too.
Are You Ready?
The secret to a journey-based transformation is creating a culture that engages organizations across all functions from top to bottom. It’s a hard culture to build but yields real-world competitive advantages to organizations that get it right. Is it time to start paying more attention to the customer experience?
Linx is More Than a Marketing Consultant
More than “marketing advice” – Linx can test, pull back and adjust, perform risk/reward calculations and implement a plethora of our own market-driven business strategies. Contact us today for help promoting an amazing customer experience.
