Managing Customer Relationships in the New Age of Experiences

Transcription

1 Managing Customer Relationships in the New Age of Experiences Using technology to deliver remarkable experiences in a world of evolving customer expectations 1

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 02 Overview 05 Earning Trust with Self-Educated Buyers 08 Architecting the Journey 12 Gatekeeper to the Customer 15 Orchestrating Experiences 20 Conclusion: Creating Experience-Driven Relationships in a Digital World 01

3 Overview Our digital world has heightened customers expectations of the experiences they have with a brand, and they re justified in doing so. Google answers any question in an instant, setting expectations about response times. The allure of social media s real-time updates has us smack in the middle of an always on culture that expects 24/7 service. Top this off with ever-present smartphones that keep people connected with anyone at any time. 02

4 Research from Lithium Technologies points out how much people take these same expectations into the business world. Consumers who go online looking for help want a response fast 66% of consumers expect a same-day response, 43% expect a response within an hour and the uber demanding want a response in five minutes or less. Expectations about response times are only a part of the picture. Another issue is the consistency of experiences with a brand as people device-hop. They may have a delightful chat with a brand on social media one day and then become frustrated when a sales person doesn t know the conversation the next day. With 60% of consumers changing their contact channel during the buying cycle, creating a consistent digital experience means designing a path that naturally transitions people from marketing messages and into sales conversations that fulfill the brand promise. With 60% of consumers changing their contact channel during the buying cycle, creating a consistent digital experience means designing a path that naturally transitions people from marketing messages and into sales conversations that fulfill the brand promise. Ultimately, when customers step away from the screen, phone or social conversation, what matters most to them is the experience they had as a brand builds a relationship with them. The key to cultivating these relationships is focusing on customer value. How customers define value is based on what emotions drive them. Smart companies dig deep into customer behavior to understand emotions and the source of these emotions. Then they architect customer experiences that answer the questions and solve the problems that put these emotions at ease. That s the secret to fostering strong customer relationships in the new age of experiences. 03

5 Earning Trust with Self-Educated Buyers The days of prospects depending on sales teams for information when researching a product are long gone. Buyers are more powerful today not only because they can educate themselves but because they choose when, where and how they want to have their first conversations with a sales person. 04

6 Look at statistics from the pharmaceutical industry as an example. The ability for a salesperson to have access to a physician has dropped by nearly 20% in the last three years. Over 50% of physicians seriously or moderately limit the number of reps they allow to visit them. The next generation of medical professionals will be even harder to reach only 36% of graduates from the top 12 U.S. medical schools are considered accessible, compared with 48% from all other schools. Over 50% of physicians seriously or moderately limit the number of reps they allow to visit them. The next generation of medical professionals will be even harder to reach. Most sales organizations are running the transactional playbook created more than a century ago. They re just using modern technology to interrupt more and pitch harder and sooner, which makes it even more of a turn-off for prospects. This, in turn, is what makes prospects like medical professionals forcibly deny access. The hurdle isn t just getting educational content in front of consumers as they do homework. Instead, it s the ability to create a consistent digital experience that first builds trust. Delivering valuable experiences is foundational for companies that want to build relationships with customers before it s ever time to buy. 05

7 The ability of a brand to deliver on expectations is the foundation for customer experience. It s a strategic approach to proactively delivering value to an audience throughout the life of the relationship. This is where the difference between focusing on the experiences companies create for prospects sets them apart in the marketplace. Unfortunately, too many companies put the spotlight on customer service instead of customer experience. But these are very different mindsets. A person s expectations about the experience they ll have with a brand is what attracts them in the first place. It sets the stage for how often and how pleasing they think their interactions will play out. The ability of a brand to deliver on these expectations is the foundation for customer experience. It s a strategic approach to proactively delivering value to an audience throughout the life of the relationship. Customer service, on the other hand, is how quickly a brand can take care of a customer s issue after they ve had a poor experience. Companies that make customer experience a priority realize that the key to delivering the experience is intimately analyzing their customers journey from beginning to end. Engrained, legacy processes make some companies blind to what matters most to customers. By investing time to understand customer needs, wants and feelings - from the invisible activities of identifying and researching problems, solutions and partners through traditional approaches to vendor selection - brands have the power to design experiences that build trusted relationships. 06

8 Architecting the Journey With prospects turning to a plethora of resources for information, brands don t have much time to change opinions if they wait for the traditional point of interaction with a sales person to make their case. 07

9 Enterprises need to see invisible activities as an opportunity to architect each stage of the buyer journey in a way that helps them understand the needs of the customer, and then work across the organization to deliver value at each stage. Without doing this, sales representatives will be woefully underprepared when prospects are ready to engage. A lack of understanding the entire customer journey keeps companies in a transaction mindset how many people crossed the line and became a customer? Customer-centric thinking, on the other hand, is quite different. It starts with identifying the major stepping stones in the buying process and then looking at each one in detail to understand what triggers decision makers to move to the next step. The exercise of mapping the buyer s journey from beginning-to-end forces collaboration across the enterprise and uncovers issues that create frustrations for prospects. Prospects continually return to companies that foresee their needs with a chain of valuable interactions and dodge those that treat touchpoints as isolated experiences. The exercise of mapping the buyer s journey from beginning-to-end forces collaboration across the enterprise and uncovers issues that create frustrations for prospects. For example, many companies create customer service teams to respond to technical support issues and track metrics around number of calls, hold times and issues resolved. However, if these same companies invested the time to take care of the root cause of calls, rather than how well they react to customer issues, they would be solving problems before they become customer complaints. That builds relationships based on 08

10 valuable experiences, not time-consuming and often frustrating reactions. Consistent customer experience across the entire journey increases customer satisfaction, builds trust and boosts loyalty. All too often, enterprise companies try to window-dress the front end of digital interactions without thinking in context of the end-to-end experience. United Airlines understood this when it spent two years re-engineering its digital platforms to create a single source for real-time travel information for passengers and staff. While it s challenging for an enterprise to consistently deliver across the customer journey, it s certainly possible. A foundational part of the experience is creating consistency to connect every touchpoint. In fact, consistency is the biggest predictor of the overall customer journey experience and potential for loyalty to the brand and ultimately revenue. This kind of customer-centric view looks at the entire process as one continuous experience. That means having the ability to look back on previous conversations with the prospect and being able to thoughtfully and intentionally guide them to the next step. According to SAP Chief Digital Officer, Jonathan Becher, The customer journey must be orchestrated, not owned. To implement an end-to-end experience requires companies to cross traditional organizational boundaries and ignore hierarchies. This is quite difficult to repeatedly do at scale. 09

11 Gatekeeper to the Customer The burden of bringing revenue in the door for any company ultimately sits with the sales team. With that, there s an enormous opportunity for sales people to step up and lead the customer experience. Not only are some sales teams already taking on this added responsibility of driving the customer experience, they see it as an opportunity to empower themselves to hit sales targets with a new level of control and ease. 10

12 More and more sales managers are ready to transform their role into one that aligns the business with customers so they can woo prospects, retain their business and expand the volume of sales for these customers. The biggest challenge is marketing s ability to create an experience that can be supported and extended through sales. In the digital world, it s a gray area as to where marketing ends and sales enters the picture. In the digital world, there isn t a sharp delineation between sales and marketing, said Becher. Organizations need to move from the mental model of helping sellers sell to helping buyers buy. Many companies talk about being customer centric, but it s amazing what changes when customer interests are the focus of the business, not increasing transactions. In every company, marketing messages launch expectations of what a customer will experience when they interact with the brand. Trouble brews, then, when there s no alignment between what marketing sets as expectations and what happens when a prospect begins talking with sales. If there s no consistency in what a company says and how it positions itself, it s perfectly understandable for a prospect to misinterpret what to expect and feel dissatisfied with the brand experience before they ever become a customer. In the digital world, there isn t a sharp delineation between sales and marketing, ~Jonathan Becher, SAP Chief Digital Officer 11

13 This is where sales intimate understanding of customers delivers the opportunity for more relevant, personalized experiences. A company s brand is driven by the combination of promises made and expectations around those promises being kept. It s also critical to make sure that customers can readily recognize when these promises are being delivered on. This means brands have to proactively shape communications and key messages that highlight how they deliver on promises. Companies need to look at the relationship between sales and marketing as one that taps the expertise of sales and lets marketers use that knowledge to better educate customers early in the decision journey. Research from McKinsey & Company reinforces this, pointing out that providing a consistent experience across all customer interactions is more important to satisfaction and loyalty than how a company responds in any individual interaction. 12

14 Orchestrating Experiences Truth be told, getting the proverbial ball rolling in creating unified experiences across the customer journey isn t easy, but it s certainly doable. Marriott Hotels has done an excellent job of this with their #TravelBrilliantly campaign. By tapping customers and influencers, they re able to move away from the transaction mindset of selling hotel rooms and into the experience approach of helping people travel brilliantly. 13

15 COMPANIES WHO MAKE THIS SHIFT START WITH THE FOLLOWING PROCESS: 01 IDENTIFY WHO OWNS THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. 02 CREATE CROSS- FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION. Let s face it, what gets assigned gets done. While there s not a standard approach to who owns or leads the customer experience, if no one takes ownership nothing will happen. Driving the customer experience requires time, budget, focus and collaboration. The ability to create remarkable customer experiences requires the authority to make things happen. Creating meaningful experiences across the customer decision journey requires the commitment of many people. Customerfacing departments are obvious sales and marketing but it also demands insights from back-office teams such as IT, product development and customer service to plan a well-thought out and meticulously delivered experience. 03 FOCUS ON EXPERIENCES FIRST AND CONTENT SECOND. Companies traditionally look at creating content that facilitates the buying process. This approach, however, creates a series of isolated interactions that don t have a purpose behind them, which frustrates prospects. By focusing on the experience first, companies will clearly understand the purpose of each piece of content they create. This makes the link between individual pieces of content evident when moving prospects through awareness into pre-sales, sales, conversion and ultimately into emotionally engaged, long-term 14

16 04 05 DEVELOP AGILITY IN RESPONDING TO SITUATIONS. CREATE A FEEDBACK LOOP. Customer needs can change on a dime. Savvy companies understand that and organize in ways that create fluid processes that respond accordingly. Instead of rigid, committeecontrolled environments, brands that create stellar experiences understand that developing meaningful experiences is a process that evolves, not a destination. Improving customer experiences can only happen when we understand the cause and effect of the experiences we create. By understanding how people behave because of experiences, companies will have the insights to continually push toward creating better experiences. That, in turn, continues to create emotional engagement and trust in our brands. 06 MEASURE OUTCOMES. Management guru Peter Drucker said, What gets measured gets improved. That couldn t be truer than with experiences. By looking at the outcome across the span of the customer experience, companies will be able to discover patterns and understand the cause-and-effect of individual touchpoints. This means instead of looking at web analytics and social shares, brands measure across the entire experience. This helps teams understand what has meaning to customers, and what experience performs well, rather than what piece of content performs well. 15

17 Conclusion: Creating Experience-Driven Relationships in a Digital World Companies have long emphasized touchpoints the meaningful moments when prospects reach out to an organization on their way to purchase and after they become a customer. But the narrow focus on making the most of individual micro-moments can create a distorted view, suggesting that people are more content with a company than they actually are. It also takes attention away from the bigger and more important picture: the customer s overall experience with a brand. Organizations that elegantly master the entire experience benefit from tremendous returns: greater customer satisfaction, less churn, increased revenue and better employee satisfaction. customers expect at every turn. With digital channels playing a front-and-center role in the decisions of today s buyer, it s clear that enterprise sellers must continue investing in digital strategies. Leading companies aren t just looking at how they can support the new buyer s journey with digital tactics, but rather looking at the entire experience of building a relationship and converting prospects into customers once they digitally engage. Customers certainly expect more from brands than they ever have before, which can feel overwhelming to companies. But with the right technology, there s no reason why any business can t go beyond what 16

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