Customer Journey - Understanding expectations & listening for customers bad experiences
Have you had a bad experience with a brand? Did it leave a bad taste and you moved away from that brand? I think all of us can relate to such in our lives.
As a marketer in digital era, customer journey has to be part of your strategy. In the journey it can then be planned to respond to cases when customer does not have desired experience. By doing so you as a brand are proactively looking to change customers impressions of your brand.
75 percent say they would be willing to stop doing business with your brand after just a single bad customer experience. from customer-service-goes-beyond-sales-think-marketing
I remember when I had a bad experienced with Overstock.com. I had purchased a mattress and it had turned out not so good. I called and customer service was not willing to listen. I posted a 1 star review and to my surprise my review never was approved. I never went back to the site.
On positive side, I have had positive experiences with some brands like Logitech. Years ago before digital era, a phone call where customer service listened and responded was acceptable and Logitech was always willing to listen to feedback about its products.
Today brands like T-mobile and Samsung are using channels like Twitter and Facebook to provide customer service. T-Mobile Help monitors for customer who are having problems and respond to them and via private message find ways to resolve your problem. T-Mobile has developed a custom application to ask for your authorization so they can look into your account and help.
I saw an ad today for Sony's OLED TV on Twitter. While reading comments I saw customers talking about bad experience with Samsung and how 4k content was not available on Comcast. As you see both brands jumped on interacting with the customer.
Brands like T-Mobile & Samsung are monitoring that you have a bad experience and finding way to turn it into a positive and keep you as a loyal customer.
If one bad experience is enough to stop a customer from doing business with a brand, what does that say about the mounting expectations that marketers are facing? Consumers are not just comparing their experiences with your brand against those they’ve had with your direct competitors; today, they’re comparing their experiences with your brand against the best experiences they’ve ever had — with any brand. from The Business Case for Optimizing Customer Journeys.
I had a bad experience not once but three times with BMW. I used to be a loyal customer but now because in each of the cases I was not heard and since then I have moved away. In recent car purchase I was delighted by how Porche has provided me with an experience as a new customer.
Customers today expect that you know who they are and the brands market to them accordingly. They expect that if you have provided them with an marketing offer and then when they visit your website or call customer service that they can easily apply the offer.
A new study conducted by Accenture found that the majority of consumers in both the U.S. and UK are willing to have trusted retailers use some of their personal data in order to present personalized and targeted products, services, recommendations and offers. from Why consumers are increasingly willing to trade data for personalization
Experience Marketing is whats needed in todays digital era. This can all be done with today's marketing technology. But technology alone is not enough, you need strategy, data, analytics and execution to provide your customers with an experience they desire and be a brand that outshines your competition.