Insights Blog

In recent weeks, we’ve been writing a lot about customer experience. We’ve addressed ownership of the customer experience within the organization. We’ve discussed how your customer’s digital experience influences their view of your brand. We’ve also touched on the role of metrics in your customer design experience.

Our primary message throughout has been that if you integrate each of your customer’s touch points to reflect your brand, you win. So, let’s talk about a few brands that are doing this brilliantly:

Finally, finally, finally, we come full circle. A new Gallup report highlights what we have been saying all along. Social media is a tool to connect and communicate, but brands will not be rewarded just for showing up.

Conventional wisdom dictates that for an organization to become customer-centric, all functions must make meeting customer needs their priority. This is often too simplistic and simply not practical. Each function has its own priorities and goals that are often in conflict with other functions. Manufacturing is charged with production and cost goals, sales has to meet its numbers, product management is trying to meet P&L goals, and marketing is trying to meet customer needs. These goals don’t often line up. And then when financial pressure builds up, customer experience related priorities are often thrown out the window, and everyone puts their heads down to deliver the Quarter or make the number for the year.

It is nearly impossible to navigate the web these days without being inundated by a barrage of clever headlines tempting you to distraction. (Although, let's be honest, sometimes we are looking for a little distraction.) Still, how many times have you gotten burned by clicking though a snappy link only to discover that the content is completely devoid of any substance or only loosely related to the headline?

Most initiatives related to building a better customer experience emanate from the customer experience function. Others come from well-intentioned marketing and strategy groups. For businesses with a retail operation, sometimes it’s the store management function that starts the ball rolling.

Great brands make every effort to control and provide amazing experiences for their customers. (Need some help here? Check out our recent post on How to Make Your Next Customer’s Experience the Best Yet.) Yet as careful and strategically savvy as they can be, many companies drop the ball when it comes to the digital customer experience.

Can you describe the experience your next customer will receive by engaging with your brand? By taking a look at how customers are involved with, use, and perceive your products in the market, you can begin to understand how your brand accrues value. However, doing this research alone is not enough to make your brand stand apart. What you do with this information and how you act upon it become critical in shaping the interaction for the best possible customer experience .

Apple is a popular example of customer driven innovation that wins the market. Nobody can argue with the company's exceptionally high market share, high profit margins, and deep customer loyalty. Nor do we think many would debate that Apple's focus on the customer is embedded throughout the company. It is a true marketing culture top to bottom.

Are you struggling to keep up with the frenzied pace of the changing digital landscape? Have you run a series of digital "pilots" on Facebook, Twitter, Mobile, and others but don't know how they all relate to each other? Are your digital campaigns smart, snazzy, and even productive from a demand gen perspective but one-off events rather than a scalable digital presence?

Times have changed. The power in a B2B transaction has shifted dramatically to the buyer. Gone are the good old days where if you had good sales people, you typically won the deal. Back then the salesperson drove the sale because she had the customer relationship, the information on how to solve the customer’s problem, pricing authority, and the ability to manage the sales cycle from lead to deal.