Fiona’s Fascinations is a regular column by Fiona Blades, Founder of MESH Experience. In this column, Fiona will explore new thinking on how market research can help marketing and brand growth.
Every other article, webinar and job ad seems to be about “customer experience”!
Why are so many marketers changing roles to become the Chief Customer Experience Officer? Who is in the newly created Customer Experience Team and what skills do they have? And most pertinently for me, what does this mean in terms of what our industry should be providing? How should we be pivoting to align with these new client needs?
Going beyond customer satisfaction to customer experience
A few years ago, when I heard about Customer Experience it was the new name for the Customer Satisfaction Survey! Thankfully we have moved on leaps and bounds since then. Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Procter & Gamble, exemplifies two things – that packaged goods clients embrace the customer experience (as Customer Sat tended to be the preserve of service brands) and that this notion of customer experience goes way beyond the call center feedback. “What we think about is every aspect of the consumer experience and trying to make it better: the product, the package, the communication, the in-store, the online, the in use, the after use, and how it all comes together.”
Customer experience requires new roles and skill sets
There is no doubt that Customer Experience is BIG and so are new roles associated with this! It leaps beyond marketing, insight and research. It is at the heart of the business. There is no business without customers. These new roles in client companies have wide remits. If clients want to put customers at the heart of the business, surely this is where the market research industry can help? We understand what real people want in their everyday lives.
But are Marketing Directors/Customer Experience Officers coming to us or to others?
Probably both.
New insight tools provide more understanding of customer experience
In May the Wall Street Journal published an article showing how the number of mentions in earnings calls of Net Promoter Score, as a measure of customer satisfaction, is ballooning. If NPS is the measure keeping the CEOs awake at night, we should listen. We’ve been involved in a project, with an airline client, this year to Monetize NPS, helping stakeholders put customer at the heart of investment decisions. This will be presented at Adweek in New York later this month.
It’s not just the metrics and the analytics around these where the energy is, but the technical tools to measure experience. At the Forrester CX NYC event in June, Pointillist particularly attracted my attention as a tool to combine survey and CRM data for quick and illuminating analysis. Another tool called Clickscape came to my attention last week. This is a button that people press “in the moment” to register positive and negative experiences.
So much for analytics and tech, but what about human beings?
I read an article in Marketing Week, “Today’s Marketers are missing true customer insight.” by Cheryl Calverley.
She reminds us that we rely on attribution modelling and social media listening but we can miss the human interaction we once had.
I am all for attribution modelling and social listening. These are two great new tools that I never had as a marketer but I do think we are missing something.
Stories give customer experiences more meaning
In the last month I have had a number of clients saying the same thing. “How can I help our leaders really understand our customers – the ones today and the ones for tomorrow?” Sometimes numbers don’t always engage the hearts and minds. Sometimes it is the stories we remember, the person we met, the customer we spoke to. When marketers need to take decisions, they need to have internalized the customer and feel and think as they do, not simply refer to a spreadsheet.
Whether you are a client, an agency, a fieldwork partner, a technical partner or a data scientist, we all have the opportunity to re-orient our work towards a customer experience focus. We have always captured people’s experiences in real-time, and we are finding that some simple adjustments are helping us to address emerging client needs.
Key take-aways
Whilst I certainly don’t have all the answers, here are some things I do know.
- If we have a way of understanding the customer experience, this is valuable. Don’t worry whether this is a statistical way, or through ethnography. Clients are being tasked with driving business growth through a deep understanding of the customer experience. If this is big, let’s embrace it.
- Work out how you can help, with your unique expertise. How can you help marketers internalize the customer and their experience, so that when it comes to making decisions, the marketer can truly act in the customer’s interest?
- Analyze the suite of services you provide and how to talk about these. Do your research! Speak to your clients and stakeholders to understand how to help.
2 comments
Hello Alexander, thank you for your comment. You are right the viewpoint has changed, although the fundamentals are the same. It is interesting to think how much the customer experience is changing due to the current crisis. Safety for airlines, used to relate to crashes not COVID, comfort for hotels related to relaxing furniture rather than social distancing. We are having to re-engineer customer experiences for the new world we are living in.
Customer Experience is not really new. It’s a changed viewpoint. The old days, we market researchers looked into product satisfaction, service satisfaction, overall satisfaction etc., often with an isolated view. With CX, we follow now a process logic and want to better understand where and how we can create an experience for the customer, he or she will appreciate and is ready to pay for. It’s a holistic understanding, taking into consideration the different customer touchpoints, how true experiences for the customers can be created. The topics are still the same, the viewpoint has changed.