The experiences of customers at the interfaces to companies are very different. Redirects, waiting times, or outdated content make them migrate to the competition. The best medicine, on the other hand, is clever customer experience management.
The customer experience (CX) increasingly determines the competitiveness and economic success of companies. It describes the way in which customers perceive the respective company in its communication, its products, and its services. Both conscious perceptions and unconscious reactions to the quality of the interaction play a role. Both together have a lasting influence – positively and negatively – on purchasing behavior and decide whether a customer is satisfied with the service quality and remains loyal to the company or turns away dissatisfied, disappointed, and frustrated. Both the level of demand and the market power of customers has increased drastically in recent years. We are dealing with a buyer’s market in which interested parties have a large selection from a wide variety of providers with transparent options and fast access times at the same time.
In order to survive here, it is no longer enough to offer good products and attractive conditions. This is a prerequisite for being able to compete at all, but not a unique selling proposition. Tailored customer experience management decides on success and failure. The first step towards a holistic CX strategy is a process- and system-oriented approach, which makes it possible to respond to individual needs and requirements. The better this succeeds, the closer you are to the (potential) customers. Such a strategy must take into account both the internal processes on the way from content generation to the touchpoint (depth), as well as the selection and synchronization of the touchpoints at the interfaces to the customer (width).
Customer Experience: The way to the customer
In the course of a professional digital experience, it is important to provide context-related personalized content at all relevant touchpoints and to convince with your own content on every channel in the right tonality and characteristics. The content management systems (CMS) that have been in use for a long time are no longer suitable for this complex task and are therefore increasingly being replaced by digital experience platforms (DXP).
They allow the synchronization of the different sources and their contents. Content, or data, is still the basis of all customer relationships. In addition to the quality and quantity of content, easy findability also plays an important role. The faster and easier the desired information can be found and addressed in a targeted manner, the higher customer satisfaction. Online marketing managers can use their expertise via DXP portals and in SEO – compliant messages at the interfaces to owned media (own websites or social media channels), earned media (press releases, content marketing ), and paid media (advertisements, implement native advertising ).
One of the greatest advantages of DXP systems is their interoperability. This simplifies the necessary interaction with other internal systems such as payment systems, subscription management, email marketing, digital asset management (DAM), ERP, CRM, PIM, translation and localization services, other content management systems and platforms, but also interaction with external platforms such as social networks. The customer should not and must not be aware of these complex processes in the background. For him, only the customer experience counts. And that should be positive and identical at all interfaces.
Customer Experience: The interfaces to the customer
DXP systems are an indispensable tool for the selection and synchronization of touchpoints and their ongoing orchestration. Ultimately, it is important to constantly harmonize and coordinate a large number of different interfaces to the customer in their entirety in such a way that they do not show any contradictions, breaks, or discrepancies to outsiders. At the same time, the content should also take into account channel-specific characteristics such as restrictions on the amount of text or the integration of multimedia elements. In view of the variety of e-mails, websites, social media channels, e-commerce portals, and search engine entries, this is a task that cannot be managed either manually or in a semi-automated manner.
As if the very different touchpoint characteristics weren’t aggravating enough, the feedback options of many channels have added a new dimension to the reputation ranking: trust.
Referral marketing is becoming more and more important and must be actively controlled using appropriate tools, i.e. DXP systems. For the selection of the touchpoints, their synchronization, adjustments, and changes through to influencer marketing, in addition to the purely operational customer data (operational data), data that is read from the customer behavior (experience data) are also required as a complementary supplement.
Marketing Automation
This is impossible to achieve without greater automation of marketing activities, which is why we are currently experiencing a veritable revolution in customer-centric processes in the sales and marketing departments of companies. In its 2020 trend barometer, the Federal Association of Industry Communication (bvik) therefore logically lists marketing automation as one of the three top trends in B2B marketing. It is driven by a technology that makes it increasingly possible to automatically set up, process, and control all the time-consuming and labor-intensive manual processes related to the use of customer data, data segmentation, and data visualization. Additional optimization potential lies in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The use of AI-supported methods such as true real-time decisioning or deep behavioral tracking makes it even easier to individually address the target groups. They enable the tailor-made segmentation of target groups and the individualized reaction to a specific customer behavior at the touchpoints – if desired and useful even in real-time.
It should not be overlooked that advanced customer experience management requires not only the right toolset but also a corresponding mindset. Marketing experts in companies still need to be able to intervene manually, for example, to make adjustments. The standard for this is, and this is where we come to the mindset, always the customer. To do this, it is necessary to switch from an inside-out behavior to an outside-in approach, i.e. no longer thinking and acting from the company, but from the wishes and demands of consumers, and offering them a unique experience across all touchpoints to offer experience. Customer Experience Management provides both the right data and the operational support for implementing marketing tactics based on it.
