Offering a great product or service isn’t all it takes to win customer loyalty. The experience behind the purchase can create dedicated, repeat customers who can bring others with them, ultimately strengthening brand recognition. In marketing, focusing on the customer’s experience can create meaningful reactions from the target audience, which can often result in stronger sales, more revenue, and better opportunities to expand. Applying the Customer Experience Management process to the digital marketing plan will enable companies to build a kinship with their clients by fostering an unforgettable brand experience.

Companies focusing on customer experiences

A recent study showed that customer experience is becoming more of a focus for companies and marketers are devoting more resources for branding in the customer service process. According to a survey from Gartner, 89 per cent of companies expect to compete on the basis of customer experience, compared with just 36 per cent four years ago. This rise in focus on how customers interact with the brand stems from the growth in the number of interactions the target audience has with the brand.

What is Customer Experience Management?

Customer Experience Management is the process a company uses to track and oversee its interactions with its customers, helping to gain valuable insight on how to reach and maintain these relationships. Improvements in technology make it easier for marketers to automate data collection and analysis, resulting in better campaigns and frameworks that create a positive connection with the target audience.

Customer touch-points

To create a more meaningful customer experience, companies must improve the “touch-points” where it interacts directly with their buyers. Customer touch-points are where businesses engage with their customers, exchanging good or services, collecting ideas, and advancing conceptions. While there have always been touch-points in marketing, new developments in software and data collection offer new brand promotional opportunities at different parts of the customer journey.

Recognising touch-points

Touch-points are part of the customer journey map, where companies lay out the path a potential customer will take in the process of purchasing the product or service. This customer map must focus on both the good and bad experiences, which could include customer service calls, product returns, and unfulfilled delivery of service. There are limitless ways a customer can be touched by your brand, beyond simply the sale. They can include:

• A positive encounter with a company representative.

• An informational newsletter email.

• An entertaining company tweet.

• A striking Instagram photo.

• An engaging infographic.

• An interactive Facebook post.

• A compelling blog post.

The key to using these touch-points for gaining new customers is to create positive experiences through these interactions with the brand. That takes good content, management, timing, and experience.

Personalising encounters

Technology enables more opportunities to personalise the brand experience for customers, where digital marketing and content strategies can have new ways to make an impact on the target audience. Mobile marketing, location-based services, and social media offers the easiest ways to make personal connections with customers that improve their experience. Marketing content can play a significant role in personalisation, as elements like thought leadership and employee advocacy can give the customer new insights on the company while helping strengthen the brand narrative.

Analysing interactions

Managing the customer experience requires informed analysis of the information collected from touch-point interactions. This information can be used to create new advertising campaigns, improve customer service, and reimagine company marketing strategies. Engagement metrics like clicks, page views, downloads, service calls, and social media mentions can produce data and highlight trends that marketers use to evaluate their approach to the customer experience and customise processes, content schedules, and work flows accordingly.

Creating customer KINSHIP

Creating the type of customer experience that is memorable and enjoyable can help grow brand recognition and loyalty. But the planning and strategy behind an advanced customer experience management takes the work of skilled marketing professionals that can integrate the brand narrative throughout the customer journey. KINSHIP offers its clients the capability and knowledge to build an unforgettable customer experience that will boost both the brand and revenues along with it.