If you asked brands to describe the difference between customer service and customer experience (CX), many might have trouble providing a solid answer. But those who understand the difference, and are able to prove it, will claim a powerful competitive advantage in the pursuit of customer engagement.
In fact, Gartner, a global business technology and research firm, has called customer experience the new competitive “battlefield.” By 2016, 89% of surveyed brands are planning to compete largely on the basis of customer experience.
This topic formed the foundation of yesterday’s Loyalty360 webinar hosted by InMoment, a leading customer experience optimization platform and VoC provider for numerous industries. During the webinar titled, “Unknown Unknowns: What Marketers Still Need to Learn About CX,” Kristi Knight, CMO of InMoment, discussed how brands can close the gaps in their customer experience strategy.
“Customer service tends to be very transaction oriented, and it is something that happens in a particular moment,” Knight said. “Customer service is a single opportunity to work with a customer when they need help or when there is a tactical interaction. Customer experience is much more relationship based. I think of customer experience as the culmination of all of the different touch points.”
So rather than occurring in a single instance at, for example, a checkout counter, customer experience comes into play overtime. And Knight equates the growing importance of CX to the problem of scarcity. Today, most products and services are no longer scarce. But even though choice has exponentially increased, great customer experiences have not.
This is why customer experience presents such an enormous opportunity for marketers, which comes married to a number of advantages.
The Many Benefits of CX:
According to the presentation, some of the benefits of customer experience include:
- Acquisition: It costs 7x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer.
- Spend: Happy customers spend 140% more than unsatisfied customers.
- Advocacy: 20% - 50% of purchases are the result of word-of-mouth promotion.
- Emotion: 70% of buying decisions are based on how customers feel they are being treated.
- Loyalty: Loyal customers spend 10x more than disengaged customers.
Therefore, a solid customer experience strategy offers a wide range of significant advantages. However, many brands either lack the expertise to optimize customer experience or they are unsure of how to close the gaps in their strategy.
According to Knight, this arises for three main reasons.
“The first is building relationships,” said Knight. “Brand experience and customer experience strategy is often created by marketing, but the execution of that strategy, and the interactions with the customer, is not. The second thing is how to value customer stories and how to communicate the value of customer stories within your organization. The third gap is how to support the brand execution.”
These gaps must be closed. Before brands can reap the benefits of CX, strategies have to be closely linked to the their actual execution, which must be understood and carried out across the entire organization.
But getting such a strategy to an operational level is one of the biggest challenges for CX professionals today.
How to Close the Gaps:
“It starts with organizational awareness, and understanding the all the touch points an organization has with customers,” said Knight. “Because if you don’t understand those touch points, you can’t actually help influence how those customer interactions take place. Marketers have to start with an awareness of how customer experience is executed at every aspect of the business.”
The second factor in closing the CX gap is education, which relates to knowing who and where your audience is. This is all the information that data can provide including customer wants, needs, demographics, and so on. And Knight makes it clear that most marketers are generally already savvy with these first two elements.
“Awareness and education have historically been owned by marketing,” said Knight. “We’ve got those down.”
However, the remaining elements become more difficult to master.
“The third element is transaction, and this is where it starts to get a little bit muddy for marketers,” Knight continued. “The transaction often takes place from an operational or sales perspective. In a B2B setting, the transaction element is closed by sales. Marketing is not involved. In a B2C setting, this would be customer service.”
The fourth and fifth elements include service and retention, which are also areas that usually occur in the absence of a strong marketing presence.
“Once you get past that transaction point, marketers have not been involved, nor do they really truly understand what is taking place,” Knight explained. “A lot of people on the frontlines think that marketing is disconnected from what actually happens, and we need to make sure that that is not the case. We need to make sure that we know what really happens, so we can make [the CX strategy] real for those on the frontline.”
The answer then is collaboration. InMoment encourages marketers to work closely with various departments, to educate them on all aspects of the customer experience strategy. This also helps build a two-way dialogue that will, in turn, give marketers the essential feedback needed to gain a deeper understanding of how customers are thinking and feeling.
So collaboration is key, and Knight wants marketers to understand that this is good news. The weight of the customer experience, then, does not have to rest entirely on the shoulders of marketers, which also means that everyone gets to enjoy the benefits of a great customer experience strategy once it is successfully carried out across the entire organization.