Using Digital Information to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience

Many companies may miss or mishandle customer engagement opportunities. By delivering a fully integrated customer experience your company will improve customer retention, increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, receive referrals, and lower operational costs.

How to Deliver the Ultimate Customer Experience

Companies seeking to create the ultimate customer experience should strive to keep everything they do in context.

• When targeted customer segments respond to your campaigning, get them the right information the moment they click on your webpage.

• When a customer expresses interest with intent to buy be sure to update their customer profile with any new insights they provide, then offer the right help in the right context.
• When the customer makes the commitment to purchase, establish a foundation for success using your product and make certain they get the help they need to get started.
• During the lifecycle of regular use of the product, make sure the customer is connected to the right resources to answer questions, solve any problems, and repair anything that may go wrong.  
• At all stages, do everything possible to expand the relationship to increase the lifetime value of the customer through repeat sales at product end-of-life.

Data Drives Personalized Engagement

At each stage, providing and collecting data is key to your success.

• When the customer expresses interest, provide means to get their questions answered including telephone, online chat, email an expert, social media experiences and access to knowledge bases and product brochures. Be sure to collect those questions to have a record of their product concerns. 
• When the customer is ready to commit to the purchase, increase the bandwidth by adding escalated chat with an expert, video chat, co-browsing websites, shipping costs and other information to make the buying experience simple.  
• At the point where the buying decision is made, accelerate the process while increasing their satisfaction by offering a premium and making sure they know all their payment, shipping, and other options.
• Preclude any discomfort while the customer awaits delivery by keeping them informed of shipping progress at every step. Make sure they know everything they’ll need to know to get the product working as soon as it arrives.  
• Throughout the useful life of the product continue suggesting ways to get more value from the product. Make sure the customer knows how to easily obtain support. Capture all support questions or service requests to construct an ongoing history of the customer.

Making the Most of All Data Collected

Data collected from every interaction during the customer experience is vital to your ability to continue to keep the perceived value high.

Companies that deliver the best customer experiences are highly informed, they understand the customer, and the customer’s history with their company. They fully appreciate each customer’s preferences, and know all the channels the customer may have engaged with them, driving an extremely personalized engagement that values customer’s needs and interests.

That data isn’t static either. You must continue to gather new information with each engagement, information that evolves from each interaction with the customer. Successful customer engagement accumulates this information in real-time and incorporates that newfound learning into the evolving conversation. A big challenge for marketing and sales is that much of this knowledge and information exists across a multitude of systems and data sources that don’t communicate.

Bring the Data Together to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience

All the customer data you collect lives in multiple business systems and marketing applications. Most marketing applications were not designed to share information with each other, making it challenging to get the most out of marketing spend and driving a cohesive customer experience.

One significant challenge is the data design of the CRM system is dramatically different than that of a marketing system. A CRM system is designed to support complex data relationships and human workflow, while a marketing system is designed for speed of execution. The marketing system may incorporate all of the information about a prospect or customer inside 1 or 2 data objects, while the CRM may use up to a dozen related data objects. As a result, it’s not practical to try to share all of the data between the 2 systems.

This drives the need to identify critical information that needs to be shared to drive the most important business results and be precise when integrating data.  

There are three types of customer data you’ll want to collect that drive the three big areas of integration value to think about. They are: 

1. How do you synchronize attribute data about a customer/prospect into the marketing or CRM system to drive highly targeted and personalized experiences?  
2. How do I take information gathered in the marketing or sales interaction data and share it with the other systems for effective follow up and nurturing?  
3. How do we close the loop and attach data regarding the outcomes or results you are looking to drive? 

Summary:

Your ability to consistently drive the ultimate customer experience that will return tremendous benefits to you is rooted in your ability to manage this data and make it available at any touch point in the ongoing customer relationship.