A 2008 Forrester study concluded that 91 percent of [surveyed] executives said that customer experience is either critical or very important to their companies. However, companies struggle with developing a digital strategy that promotes an effective and seamless customer experience. Time and again, I have seen information architects and user experience leads struggle with creating a disciplined approach to maximizing the customer’s online experience. The issues:
- The challenge of managing business stakeholder requirements with what online consumers really need and want
- Getting overly seduced by sexy Ajaxian interaction at the expense of simplicity and convenience.
- Poor understanding of creating bilateral brand experiences. All too often, companies just jump on the “Web 2.0″ bandwagon without forming a social media strategy.
These factors, amongst others, taint the customer experience and require media teams to create a customer-centric digital strategy. Follow these three steps to mitigate these challenges and capture a bigger marketspace by welcoming “headroom” customers (i.e. individuals who are not yet committed to you or your competitors):
1. Listen to your customers- several years ago, listening could only be completed through expensive usability studies. Not every project necessitates full-blown usability studies; you can harness powerful insight through more affordable means, specifically:
- Direct observation of family/friends- give them a $10 gift card, pull out your camera, fit them into a persona, and give them a go, while you aptly watch to find improvement opportunities.
- Plug into all the social media channels through listeners- although enterprise social media adoption has increased manifold over the past 3 years, companies are still struggling with harnessing value out of the myriad of data out there. Leverage tools such as Cision or Vocus to fish through all the core channels and segregate the data to gauge tone and messaging.
2. Power Analytics- today, data is not power as it once used to be. Information is king, and extracting info from piles of data takes robust analytics capabilities. There are dozens of web analytics engines out there that will help you get the data, but ensure that you’re tracking the right experience KPIs and making that data accessible to your user experience team & information architects so that they can marry customer insight from usability studies and social media listeners with precise data on how users are interacting with your site and where there are usability gaps/blips.
3. Build bilateral customer experiences- Gone are the days where companies push their messages onto consumers. Today, consumers have greater clout than ever before, and if your company fails to tap into two-media (e.g. WOMs, social networks, blogs, chat programs, etc), you will miss out on a crucial opportunity to engage in a dialogue with customers. The cost- pretty minimal. Start with tweeting away on Twitter, conversing through Facebook (ask questions, share stories and information that is relevant to the audience), and figuring out how to integrate WOMs & blogs into your overall social media strategy. Remember to capitalize on the synergies between all your channels, instead of a run & gun one-off approach, to create powerful new connections with your consumer.
The underlying premise for all three steps is open communication. Don’t let corporate politics stymie progress by pocketing information. Marketing, creative teams (info arch/user experience), public relations, information management, and business units need to collaborate and share info to ensure your customer experience is crafted based on all available information.
I’d be glad to provide free advice and insight to your company to help you get started. Reach me at brijeshp@gmail.com