Why Marketing Should Lead the Customer Experience Dance
Who leads who? The marketing versus customer experience debate is ongoing. If you read some of the latest whitepapers on the topic, you will often see phrases like, “customer experience is the new marketing”, “marketing will be overtaken by customer experience”, and “the marketing leader will soon report into customer experience leader“. As a customer experience professional who came up through the marketing ranks, I am here to make a case that customer experience should take the lead from marketing.
1. Customer Experience Is The Least Independent of All Functions
Customer experience is a discovery and orchestration function. Those who are effective in the customer experience role are the ones who can successfully engage with customer service, IT, R&D, sales, marketing, and other functions to solve customer issues. Even if it was a standalone function from a reporting perspective, customer experience can never generate meaningful results by itself without the assistance of one or more traditional functions.
While all corporate functions rely on each another to some extent for success, sales can still generate sales by itself, marketing can still do marketing by itself, and IT can build lots of infrastructure by themselves. If you are a customer experience leader, you need a dancing partner. But who should the you pick?
2. Customer Experience Will Become Muddled By Itself
One of the greatest challenges when building a customer experience practice is to define and gain consensus on what exactly does a great customer experience look and feel like. Have you done this as part of your customer experience role yet?
Take this test. Pick 10 employees including executives in your organization and ask them to define and write out what is a great customer experience. You will be amazed at what you discover. When I first conducted this exercise early in my customer experience career, I received comments such as:
· Answer customer calls within 10 seconds
· Give them a surprise gift
· Give them free product
· Make sure our products work great
· Give them a discount
How can your company deliver a great customer experience if no one knows exactly what that this? Turn to your marketing dancing partner for inspiration.
3. Customer Experience Needs Inspiration & Structure from Marketing
While marketing is many things to many people, one of the key functions of a marketing team is brand management. A brand defines how a company wants to be perceived in the hearts and minds of its customers. There is an entire science and methodology to the brand management function.
Traditionally, brand evolves around the customer’s perception of the product and / or the company. More recently, brand managers realize what registers in the hearts and minds of customer is more than just product or company. It is in fact the sum of all interactions that a customer has with the organization (brand experience). Aha! Isn’t that the definition of customer experience - the sum of all interactions with the organization? Amazingly, this is the often-overlooked common thread that binds marketing and customer experience teams together.
But who leads who? Marketing should define the desired outcome - hearts and minds of customers during the interactions with the customers. Customer experience should take marketing’s lead and define what specific actions are required to fulfill the hearts and minds of customers.
4. Both Brand and Customer Experience Rely on Emotional Connection
Customer experience research tells us that the single most important driver to customer loyalty is when the customer has an emotional connection with the company through one or more touchpoint. Interestingly, marketing’s brand personality has always been crafted full of emotion qualities that customers associate with the brand. The power of comes when you unite these two emotional forces to drive customer loyalty. How do you do that?
5. Customer Experience Will Bring the Marketer’s Brand to Life
To help bring the brand experience to life, the customer experience leader will need to work with a cross functional team to define specific actions which will build and reinforce the brand experience and the brand personality. This brings us to the art of experience design for each functional area with the brand as the guide.
6. A Real-Life Example – Marketing Taking the Lead
In one of my customer experience roles, I began the journey of learning experience design. I reached out to our global marketing team to learn the specifics of our brand and see how I can help to bring the brand to life. I discovered that one of our brand attributes was “Be There” meaning to “be there” whenever and wherever the customer would need us. There were some obvious “Be There” moments for a B2B technology customer: post-sales support during activation and installation and customer calling for help during usage.
Armed with brand as a guide, I began conducting employee round-tables with our customer service teams to brainstorm how we can leverage customer experience to bring our brand to life. Around that time in 2008, it was one of the most devastating hurricane seasons on record in the US including hurricane Ike that struck the state of Texas causing billions of dollars in damages. One of our customer service team members made a profound statement which forever changed my customer experience and brand perspective. The person said, “if one of our brand attributes is to be there for our customers, should we not be there for them during this devastating hurricane season?”.
As we continue to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes, it became blatantly obvious that our B2B customers were facing enormous pain and suffering. Not only did they have to worry about their homes and personal belongings being destroyed, they also had to be concerned about their businesses being damaged. Some of these customers were small business owners who put their life savings and hearts and souls into these businesses. To see those businesses being devastated in a flash by a hurricane must be heart breaking. We all felt and empathized with the customer’s anguish.
What can we do? A task force sprang into action. A list of our customers was generated within the hurricane impacted areas. Then one by one, we called them to see if they are OK and if there is something that we could do to help. That single phone call made such an emotional impact on our customers that they became loyal lifetime friends and customers.
This experience has also led to the formation of a more formalized hurricane customer response program. Whenever an area has a hurricane in its forecast during the hurricane season, there is a formal process where a list of potentially impacted customers is generated. This is followed by a proactive outreach to those customers where we express our concern for them and offer potential ways to assist before the storm hits. Back before the days of cloud computing when everything resided on someone’s desktop, it was a disaster waiting to happen. One simple way that we helped was to offer to backup the customer’s data to our cloud servers for free. This simple gesture did not cost the organization a lot of resources, but it gave the customer a peace of mind and one less thing to worry about during a crisis. Therefore, we were able to reinforce our brand attribute of being there for our customers whenever and wherever they needed us.
It is a great example of how we used customer experience actions to build and reinforce the brand as defined by marketing. In this case, we took marketing’s lead. That is how we got there. So, all you customer experience leaders out there, go talk to your marketing leaders and learn about your brand. Lead a cross functional team and see how you can leverage this in your customer experience design.
For more on customer experience learnings and how to advance your customer experience to the next level, visit advancingcx.com.
Photo by Scott Broome on Unsplash