In today’s blog post, we explore what it takes to deliver brilliant customer experience (CX) and long-term engagement.

Brands that understand this importance, invest in meaningful and measured ways that focus on the short term and long term. These brands go beyond short term gain and seek to build long term relationships with the right customers.

Customer Engagement Is A Team Sport

When a customer recommends a brand to their friends and family, it’s because the great CX of a brand has been delivered by a team. Great CX comes from a clear strategy that all teams and team members buy into and support. The right data is captured, analysed and reported on. Technology is an enabler that supports the customer to go from A to B. And this is powered by people across the organisation, following clearly defined processes.

Key recommendation: Ensure that Finance, Marketing, Customer Services, Operations, Sales etc. work as one on a vision and mission. How can you align everyone to put the customer vision first? Taking action on these elements will improve customer experience and long term engagement.

Through the funnel, be guided by data and insight

Converting prospects into customers, engaging them to return for their second, third or nth transaction, retaining customers at a point at which it’s suspected they’ll churn, or reactivating lapsed customers are all part of delivering great CX and long-term engagement. Throughout the funnel, make sure you have a picture of how customers experience your brand, and keep in mind that the path isn’t linear.

Business priorities may shift across these pillars, but for the most part, acquisition is the biggest challenge when it comes to growing market share. Acquire more customers than you lose and your customer base will grow. And on this growth path, your opportunity is to increase frequency and monetary contributions that deliver long term value.

Key recommendation: Investing in brilliant customer experience and engagement can deliver even better outcomes when you target the right customers. Identify your high value, long-term customers and seek to acquire them into your funnel, rather than adopting a spray and pray approach to acquisition. You might pay a higher cost per acquisition of this segment, but the payback in the medium term will be far higher.

Customer Journey Mapping & Personalisation

Mapping out the customer journey on the path to purchase is a rewarding exercise. You’ll discover new experiences from the customers’ perspective and when met with personalisation, you stand a chance to create meaningful experiences that increase the value exchange.

Key recommendation: utilise a matrix team that represents multiple functions when mapping the customer journey. This has the effect of broadening visibility, ensuring cross functional commitment and interest in the outcomes and most of all, everyone will be on the look out to personalise more interactions. A broader reach inside the organisation will lead to better customer experiences and long term customer engagement.

Combining best practice methodologies to increase customer experience and engagement

As mentioned earlier, delivering better CX and long-term engagement is a team sport. Data teams play their part along with digital and marketing to ensure that testing is implemented at every opportunity. Markting teams ensure that multiple channels are connected, measured and continually optimised, whether that’s search, display, social, website, email, sms, push notifications or more.

And importantly, capturing customer feedback at every opportunity ensures the business can adapt and fine tune experiences based on meaningful feedback. Whether it’s focus groups, closed loop customer feedback, IVR recordings or in-person events, ensuring that NPS and drivers of experience are measured and connected to value, will underline the importance of creating a business case for all these CX and experience initiatives and ensure they’re balanced as a revenue generator amongst other initiatives.

If you would like to discuss any of the themes we covered here, contact us for a confidential chat.

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