Dan MoyleHow you feel when interacting with a company… that’s customer experience (CX).
It’s their service, the experience you go through and how they treat you. Customer experience is more officially known as the sentiment associated with a company's ability to provide positive experiences to their customers. Services range from one-on-one interactions where a support agent resolves a customer issue, to exchanges with the brand on a more public scale.
You can think of it as the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. And it’s a critical component of today’s marketing mix.
How Does Customer Experience Connect to Marketing?
If your experience with a business is less than stellar, no amount of marketing can get you to come back.
With the world at their fingertips, consumers have more power than ever when it comes to choosing businesses to work with today. Plus the world of social media and review sites has brought word of mouth to a whole new level.
We know that it’s more expensive to get new customers than to keep the ones you have. Some research shows that acquiring a new customer will cost you five to 25 times more money and resources than keeping an existing one. This seems logical. You’re not spending time and resources going out and finding new leads and customers if you can keep your churn low and offer a positive customer experience.
Churn sucks the life out of an organization.
This is why marketing and your customer service team should work hand in hand.
3 Ways Marketing and Customer Service Work Together in Customer Experience
Want to ensure your clients have a great customer experience?
1) Set Clear Expectations in Your Marketing
If communicating and managing expectations is one major key to a happy long-term marriage, why wouldn’t it be the same in other relationships? Even business interactions?
Imagine your marketing team promoting a service your business can’t deliver on. Your customers would be disappointed and leave. This thread should run through all of your marketing.
A business that speaks in one voice in its marketing, another voice with sales and a third tone once the customer is “in” will only lower the customer experience and increase churn.
One way to ensure great customer experience is to connect marketing with service to get on the same page for tone of voice, the right services or products, setting expectations and connecting all the dots in communication.
Bonus: Learn what a customer experience platform is and how to build it in HubSpot.
2) Promote Social Proof Like Reviews
When your business has great customer experience stories, share them!
You can create case study stories and social media posts highlighting happy customers. You can ask for reviews on third-party review sites. You can ask for public recommendations.
Any number of social proof content pieces can help show off a great customer experience, creating a positive sentiment with potential clients.
3) Work Together to Delight Customers
Customer delight is surprising a customer by exceeding their expectations, creating a positive emotional reaction. This emotional reaction leads to word of mouth marketing by your most powerful marketers—happy customers!
You might think of delighting customers as the responsibility of the service team. And while that’s right, it’s really the job of everyone in a business to delight the client.
From initial interactions like website views, social media and email marketing all the way through to signing the contract and asking for help when needed should all point to delighting your customers.
Hear from Customer Experience Expert Joey Coleman on Wayfinding Growth
For over a decade, Joey Coleman has helped organizations retain their best customers and turn them into raving fans via his entertaining and actionable keynotes, workshops, and consulting projects.
He has a long history of energizing and motivating audiences to enhance their customers’ experiences. He is an award-winning speaker (yes – they do have speaking contests) at both national and international conferences – competing against NY Times Bestselling authors, business leaders, and internet sensations/celebrities.
Put Customer Experience at the Forefront of Your 2020 Marketing Strategy
The fact is in today's ultra-competitive and connected business landscape, delighting your customers, not simply satisfying them, will make the difference between a banner year and cutting budget to survive. Not only are customer expectations higher than ever, but their recommendations to their personal and professional networks are powerful.
It's easier than ever for your customers to change their products or services if you don't meet (and exceed) their expectations. You know this from your own experience. It’s the same for your business.
Customers today can easily and publicly share their experiences, including average or negative feedback about your business on platforms such as social media, Yelp, and Google Reviews.
Adding CX to your marketing team’s objectives and making the experience of a customer front and center in your organization will help make 2020 the best year yet.
Get started setting up your 2020 marketing strategy with our roadmap.
Then look to your customer experience through the eyes of your actual clients to set yourself up for success in the coming year.
Customer photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash