Consumers today expect brands to deliver exceptional experiences throughout the customer journey, from pre-purchase through post-purchase. Marketers need to reverse engineer the process of delivering customer experiences.
As eCommerce and digital channels continue to evolve, so does the customer experience. To gain customer traction, today marketers must execute innovative experiences that they can relate to and remember. This is making the CX terrain even more challenging than it was earlier, for marketers to navigate effectively. The battle to gain consumer attention has become a permanent job with the ability to scroll infinitely on the internet. Consumers now expect access to information, in addition to customized, consistent, and essential customer experiences. Companies must compete to create a consolidated enriching customer experience strategy to ensure that the brand delivers the best experience at every touchpoint.
New marketing strategies must be equipped with the agility to anticipate consumer needs, predict issues before they arise, and actively react to their changing preferences. This is critical, in order to develop stronger brand loyalty with better business outcomes.
It is essential to step back to figure out why and how the current customer experience strategy was initially created, re-addressing the issues, and re-evaluating them. This “reverse engineering” strategy would allow businesses to produce successful customer experiences more quickly, even with limited resources.
For effective implementation of “reverse engineering” strategies, businesses should follow the below rules:
- Understand the consumers and their preferences – Businesses must research and discover what customers need the most. It is necessary for businesses to de-code what are the most important factors that push audiences to make a purchase. Once marketers go back and study the CX journeys, they can visualize what the ideal buying journey looks like. They can then implement it across the business – from lead conversion to loyalty programs and customer retention plans.
- Assess and evaluate the company’s stance – Assessing where the company is on the spectrum of centricity is of paramount importance, even before strategizing. Marketers need to question whether the firm is setting the pace, armed with the best resources to deliver a personalized, integrated, brand experience for different kind of consumers.
- Realign internal communication and teams- Many companies take a siloed approach to this CX strategy with every team sending out contrary messages to the same customers. To streamline the CX process, brands need to transform how their teams interact with consumers across the entire buying journey. This includes creating a unified branding strategy across streams of customer communications. The advertising team, sales team, e-marketing, and branding team need to deliver similar messaging across channels.
- Introduce innovation – Each department needs to effectively engage with CX leaders to create a CX task force. They can further lead the charge to streamline strategies to develop innovative campaigns, daunting content, and interactions.
- Implement an experience command center – Firms must master the balance of digital agility with the human touch. Legacy operations lack the agility to support a constant stream of quality content, which is both creative and intelligent. The transition to MRM and DAM systems is critical to successfully automate formerly complex processes like planning, ideation, budgeting, and creation.
- Measure and revise what is working – For optimized performance, it is critical to evaluate the performance of strategies to comprehend what is effective. Based on that, marketers should further develop insights to move forward. Analytics and Artificial Intelligence backed programs are the most effective way to identify what is working and what is not. This helps businesses to improve and be proactive. Ideally, to win the race, measuring the effectiveness of all CX strategy should be a continuous process that is integral to the business operation.
Marketers are intelligently reversing the approach to CX strategies and re-aligning the business away from products, making them customer-centric. With time, this will heighten the sense of trust that customers have on the brand and help them realize that the business understands their preferences, values their thoughts, and can anticipate their needs.
