Excellent customer interactions involve a delicate balance between the macro and the micro. As CMOs, we must pay attention to granular issues such as the language and vocal tone used by our employees as well as the larger trends facing the industry today and in the future. It’s no easy task to keep an eye on both levels of the factors affecting customer experience.
These five articles offer some great insights to help you meet this challenge. Let us know what you think.
Required For Success In The New Economy: An Authentic Customer Service Style [forbes.com]
Are phrases such as “My pleasure” and “Certainly, Sir” still part of your customer service language? If so, your organization might have a touch of what my friend and colleague Micah Solomon calls “excessive formality”. While technically, such language is polite it could signal to millennials and other customers that you’re out of touch or even, possibly condescending. Make sure that your customer service style is authentic. A good way to accomplish this is by encouraging your employees to adopt natural conversational language in dealing with customers, rather than using phrases prescribed by management.
Voice of the Employee Can Cure Broken Customer Experiences [1to1media.com]
Many companies have programs in place to mine the voice of the customer but VOC alone is insufficient to get to the root causes of bad CX. This is because it only paints half the picture. This is why companies need to also listen to the voice of the employee.
In order to keep employees engaged, CX teams must include employees in their analysis of CX issues and share how their feedback is being used. This feedback loop can contribute to significant CX improvements.
The CMO and COO: Partners on a Customer Journey [mckinseyonmarketingandsales.com]
Perfecting the customer journey is an imperative for today’s modern businesses. However, despite the real growth opportunities for companies with excellent CX, very often organizations have been slow to recognize how important managing the customer journey is to business success. In too many cases, companies focus on discrete touchpoints rather than optimizing the entire customer journey. One way to take a more macro approach to CX is to make sure that the CMO and the COO are working closely together to align the level of customer service to larger business objectives.
Your Loyalty Program Isn't Creating Loyal Customers [adage.com]
With so many options available to customers, traditional approaches to customer loyalty aren’t always effective anymore. Marketers should use data at their disposal to gain insight into customer behavior. In this vein, CMOs should consider reuniting acquisition and retention efforts. Empathy should be given importance. Loyalty metrics also seems to correlate with customer experience. Take these key takeaways into consideration when designing your CX management program.
Gartner Predicts Three Big Data Trends for Business Intelligence [forbes.com]
It’s always good to take a look at what’s in store for our industry. In that vein, Gartner has identified 3 BI Big Data Trends for the next 2-5 years:
- By 2020, information will be used to reinvent, digitalize or eliminate 80% of business processes and products from a decade earlier.
- By 2017, more than 30% of enterprise access to broadly based big data will be via intermediary data broker services, serving context to business decisions.
- By 2017, more than 20% of customer-facing analytic deployments will provide product tracking information leveraging the Internet of Things.
We hope you enjoyed our picks and bookmarked a few articles for future reference. Please don’t forget to share with other CMOs.
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