A critical part of making business, the customer experience is mostly limited to sales support and customer complain management activities. The truth is super-connected consumers of today want to go beyond that. Every moment they get in touch with a brand, they start evaluating the phases they go through be it an answer to Twitter mention, a response to a rich push notification reflecting your latest product, or an order placement after getting a personalized e-mail with a special offer.
Keeping today’s consumers’ impatience and tech savviness in mind, brands need to deliver seamless and timely experiences as their audiences expected: Delivering the right message and providing the right service or product at the right time and place via the right channel.
Some barriers to the desired customer experiences are ignored or unforeseen but still may have effects that cause retention and financial loss for the brands. Let’s now focus these hidden enemies weakening the relations between businesses and their customers.
1) The Inconsistency of Profiling Across the Channels
Today brands reach their customers via many touch points and channels – SMS, e-mail, chatbot, push notification, call center, etc.
The list goes on. The customers of today look for consistency when they get in touch via different channels brands use.
Imagine a situation where you have an issue with a product and each time you try to communicate the brand via a different channel – you start telling your story over and over again. Instead, a successful brand holds your unified profile in the system so that whole journey can easily be tracked and updated delivering the most accurate information regardless the channel you use for communication. Many brands still miss that.
The way to creating consistency of profiles relies on data quality. Today companies suffer from ununified, unsorted and poorly processed customer data that creates confusion. It is almost impossible to satisfy your audience with a confused mind.
2) Not Caring About Customers’ Preferences
Today consumers want to get only timely, relevant information via channels they prefer. Since they are under the bombardment of messages every day, their time is limited to only most relevant and personalized ones. Truth is we live in an omnichannel world now, and this situation provides an advantage for brands (possibility of expanding the reach from different channels). Still, consumers want to claim their choices and get the related messages, products and services as they prefer. Once they get the opposite reactions, they prefer to walk away. Simple as that.
3) Automation for the Sake of Automation
Marketing automation is a great tool optimizing processes and saving time for marketers. Still, they need to plan and execute it precisely so that it won’t create side-effects that will lead to customer dissatisfaction. Just remember the mismatch situations we face when shopping online – like offering the customer with a vegetarian purchase history a beef roll or showing a ski clothing ad to a surfer in the Caribbean.
Considering automation as an e-mail marketing only activity also leads to cx underperformances. Since modern consumers interact with brands via many different channels, automation should be across the channels. Otherwise, the consumer journey will be fragmented.
Even though there is a common tendency to perceive customer experience as an after-sales activity, consumers of today start to evaluate brands in the first second they interact. Companies should be aware of unforeseen silos and barriers that can affect CX in a negative way. Since experience is an ongoing process, the data should be kept fresh and precisely analyzed to take the right actions at the right moments.
Let’s us help you create experiences as your customers expect via efficient and productive omnichannel marketing.
