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WHITE PAPER
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BUILDING A BETTER CROSS-CHANNEL
CUSTOMER JOURNEY.A Strategic Approach
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CONTENTSIntegrating and optimising touchpoints along
the customer decision journey 4
The Aim: Consistently Strong Interactions
Across the Customer Journey 5
Driving brand recognition and awareness 6
What strategic processes can I implement? 7
Mastering the moment of decision 8
What strategic processes can I implement? 9
Building a better post-purchase experience. 10
What strategic processes can I implement? 11
A Challenge With a Major Upside 12
Endnotes 13
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MODERN MARKETERS FACE A NEW SET OF CHALLENGES.
Building awareness and driving purchases are as important as
ever. At the same time, optimising the post-purchase phase
and creating an outstanding overall customer experience are
becoming key differentiators, separating successful brands
from middle-of-the-pack players. The task of integrating and
improving experiences along the entire customer journey—a
company-wide process—will fall to marketing departments.
This paper looks at the key issues marketing leaders will need to
address as they guide their teams through this transition.
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INTEGRATING AND OPTIMISING TOUCHPOINTS ALONG THE CUSTOMER DECISION JOURNEY.
Customer experience has become the primary battlefield for attracting, winning and retaining customers. Its role in growing lifetime customer value and, ultimately, the overall value of a brand is difficult to understate.
Companies at the top of their industry, in terms of overall customer experience across channels, have seen 78% growth in terms of market capitalization over the last seven years, according to research from Forrester and Watermark Consulting.1
The rise of customer experience as a key strategic focus for businesses is the result of several converging factors—greater consumer choice being the most prominent.
Customer experience can sound like a fuzzy concept. To put it clearly, it’s the sum total of a potential or existing customer’s interactions with your brand.
From a CMO’s perspective, customer experience needs to be understood in relation to the customer journey.
The McKinsey model of the customer journey is more accurate than the classic funnel in today’s marketing landscape. From aware, to active evaluation to purchase, then potentially back again to repurchase, experiences are what customers base decisions on.
Better experiences will help you attract more customers and make them more likely to purchase again, improving your customer lifetime value, and the strength, revenue and value of your brand.
According to McKinsey’s research, “maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent but also to lift revenue by up to 15 percent while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20 percent.”2
EVALUATION
LOYALTY
POSTPURCHASE
MOMENT OF PURCHASE
INITIAL CONSIDERATION
SET
TRIGGER
Model source: McKinsey Quarterly, The Customer Decision Journey
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THE AIM: CONSISTENTLY STRONG INTERACTIONS ACROSS THE CUSTOMER JOURNEYWhile customer experience has grown more important in terms of improving revenues, it has also grown more complex to manage. Why? There are more possible touchpoints between consumers and your brand than ever before.
And the brands that gain the most from successful customer interactions are the ones that do them all well, not just, say, the moment of purchase.
McKinsey’s research backs up the importance of consistency: ”measuring satisfaction (across) customer journeys is 30 percent more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction.”
For many brands, the customer journey is too fragmented and brands fail to meet customer needs at many points along the way. An integrated, consistent journey consisting of strong experiences will drive growth in revenue, customer retention and overall brand value.
And the CEO is expecting the CMO to lead here:
A Gartner survey of CMOs found that “25% of CMOs say leading customer experience is the most-increased
expectation CEOs have of them over the last year. It beat out the next category, developing and retaining staff, by
11 percentage points. “
The survey also asked CMOs about “the areas where they’ve made the most progress.” There, “customer experience came in last.”3
Integrating and improving experiences across the customer journey will be an ongoing process for most companies. Here is an analysis of the challenges facing marketing leaders across the three main phases of the customer journey and how they can begin to respond to them on a strategic level.
Their findings indicate that:
“Consistency on the most common customer journeys is an important predictor of
overall customer experience and loyalty. Banks, for example, saw an exceptionally
strong correlation between consistency on key customer journeys and overall
performance in customer experience…..customers trusted banks that were in the top
quartile of delivering consistent customer journeys 30 percent more than banks
in the bottom quartile.”2
McKinsey Insights, Alfonso Pulido, Dorian Stone, and John Strevel
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DRIVING BRAND RECOGNITION AND AWARENESS.
The beginning of the journey, the awareness phase, has the greatest number of possible touchpoints. Your website, social media, television, billboards, digital ads, native ads, and print, for a start.
Brands need to create and distribute messages and content that increase the pool of aware prospects and convey the relevant high-level brand messages to those people.
Getting the right message to the right person at the right time has more variables than ever.
To create early-stage touches that excel cross-channel, you need to break down the awareness part of the customer journey: On what possible channels could someone interact with your brand? What messages will they see there? How will the messages make them feel, and how will it affect them in terms of recall and likelihood of purchase?
You need to determine what elements of your brand should be conveyed during the discovery and awareness phase: What’s the brand personality,
what few, specific, high-level product messages need to be conveyed, what are the key components of who you are and what you want to convey?
With an ever-growing quantity of content coming at consumers, and a higher number of possible channels to reach them, strategies for driving brand awareness need to adapt. Do your teams know your audience well enough to create content that will make them stop and pay attention? If prospects and customers are going to give you their time, they need something that grabs them—something brand-focused messages don’t always deliver.
Brands need a range of awareness-generating content if they want to connect with audiences across channels without becoming repetitive (a negative experience). The companies that are strongest here have the ability to hit the area where audience resonance, brand relevance and channel optimization overlap.
Improving performance on individual channels is key, but it can’t come at the expense of seeing the big picture.
AUDIENCE PLEASING
CHANNEL APPROPRIATE
BRAND MESSAGE
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Research agency Nielsen looked at how the world’s largest beer company, Anheuser Busch InBev (ABI), optimised its cross-channel media spending:
“To market effectively to Millennials, ABI has created a measurement framework that allows (the company) to
optimize its digital creative content, as well as its digital media execution ensuring Millennials are viewing the
content created for them.”4
Here are some of the steps that AB Inbev took to measure and optimise its cross-channel media spend:
Pre-testing online video to gauge performance ahead of wider release
Tracking unique audience to make sure ads are reaching the right customers
Tracking the impact of ads on brand perception via digital ad resonance services
Leveraging marketing insights to determine media allocation within channels, and across multiple platforms and brands
As Nielsen noted, thanks to these actions, “ABI has achieved ROIs that are the envy of the industry, over twice
the CPG average!”
WHAT STRATEGIC PROCESSES CAN I IMPLEMENT?
What can you do to kickstart stronger, more consistent touchpoints across the awareness journey?
• Put in place robust procedures to determine what awareness-level content will resonate with your audience: Create thorough profiles of your target audience. Leverage listening tools to pick up on the topics that are most interesting to them, as well as the types of content others in your industry are producing.
• Focus on continuous message testing: evaluate performance of messages and creative across target segments and markets
on social before releasing them—and do it on an ongoing basis, not just at the start of major campaigns.
• Make efforts to standardize measurement of awareness-focused content performance across channels so you can better audit and optimize your omnichannel media spend.
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MASTERING THE MOMENT OF DECISION.
If the ‘old’ funnel model no longer accurately represents the entire customer journey, there is still a bottleneck at the moment before purchase where customer experience becomes even more crucial.
This represents the time between the “zero moment of truth” and final purchase. Zero moment of truth is a concept introduced by Google for the point at which your customer actively decides or realizes that she has a need that your product could fill. The period between ZMOT and final purchase is arguably the most important in the customer journey, and your brand must execute on experience there to succeed.
The moments leading up to purchase and the purchase itself have the potential to create anxiety for your customers. If they have questions about the product, if they are unsure of company policies, if they can’t figure out if they’ll be signed up for a million mailing lists when they create an account
on your site, or if they won’t get emails they want to get, it can create a negative experience.
In the worst case, it means that they’ll abandon a purchase and you won’t see them again.
Forrester data shows that 55% of US online adults
are likely to abandon their online purchase if they
cannot find a quick answer to their question.5
Even if they go ahead with the purchase, a subpar experience will make a customer feel less positively about your brand, and you will have to do (and spend) that much more later in order to retain their business.
Many customers, whether you like it or not, are going to choose sources outside your control in order to inform themselves to make a final purchase decision. However, for those who look to you, the experience needs to be as seamless as possible.
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This means helping customers understand what you’re offering. If, for example, your brand is an online retailer, the channels where you sell items should allow customers to get as much information as they need in order to feel comfortable purchasing your product. Also critical: They shouldn’t get more information than they need; an uncomplicated purchase can be marred by superfluous information, leading to information overload.
You should be able to anticipate key questions that come up and allow customers to find answers themselves. For other issues, customers should have the ability to reach someone who will resolve their issue in a matter of minutes, or, ideally, seconds, if you want them to continue on the customer journey.
Across different markets and channels, you should strive to make customers walk, or click, away from purchasing your products happier than they were when they entered.
WHAT STRATEGIC PROCESSES CAN I IMPLEMENT?
• Research and consolidate all intelligence you have across teams about what can prevent a customer from continuing in the customer journey—from issues like pricing, to complaints about long lines or a poorly designed website.
• Track not only outright complaints, but any issues customers remarked on that wasn’t positive.
• Research and listen to what customers are saying on social media and elsewhere not just
about your company but about competition to see where purchase experience can be improved.
• Create an action plan to address problem points where potential customers are dropping out before the moment of purchase—and ensure any fixes will work across all potential channels.
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BUILDING A BETTER POST-PURCHASE EXPERIENCE.
Marketing for growth demands as much focus on experience after purchase as before. The strongest brands in the long-term are the ones that retain customers and drive repeat purchases, for a higher value and over the longest possible time period.
In terms of the arc of a customer journey, the post purchase period can reinforce initial positive impressions in order to drive loyalty and even advocacy. On the other side, it can also lead to a cooling of the customer relationship.
Support is a primary differentiator in terms of post-purchase experience, and it impacts the overall value of customer relationships significantly. A Bain & Company study of online retailers showed that a one point increase in customer service satisfaction (on a scale of one to five) yielded a five percent increase in retention rate.6
This is as true on social media as elsewhere: according to McKinsey, brands that are able to get care right on social media have a major advantage in terms of per-customer value than those that don’t.
“We found that companies that have developed
social care capabilities to do this well—in a
personal, non-invasive, and relevant way—
improved year-over-year revenue per contact by
6.7% (those that didn’t saw a corresponding 12.1%
decline).”7
Brands that hope to drive positive value through support should not be executing different support
strategies across different channels. Creating good experiences means allowing customers to contact you where it’s convenient for them, and providing consistently great service. Cost is always a concern in a support context, but if you hope to offer consistent support that encourages loyalty, your phone support team should not be housed 5,000 miles away from your web support.
Customer service should aim to address customer issues effectively on the channels where they want to reach you. Single minded focus on reducing costs on specific channels often comes at the expense of customer satisfaction. An integrated approach to support across possible touchpoints—social media, website, email, telephone—that strives to improve satisfaction, can ultimately decrease costs and grow value. Ernst & Young looked at these efforts:
“Execution of these types of initiatives is challenging
because they need effective collaboration across
organisational silos, but the rewards are great.
When addressed systematically, we see banks,
insurers, telecommunication companies and
online businesses deliver year on year reductions in
contact volumes of over 20% per year.”8
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“An Australian telecommunications provider eliminated all productivity metrics from its frontline
reps’ performance scorecards. Although handle time increased slightly, repeat calls fell by
58%. Today the company evaluates its reps solely on the basis of short, direct interviews with
customers, essentially asking them if the service they received met their needs.”
Cutting Costs Not Customers: Maintaining Customer Loyalty in a Challenging Market. Ernst & Young
What is the payoff for understanding and meeting the needs of your customers after they’ve purchased?Brands that get this phase right in terms of support, messaging and other touchpoints can build your
customers into advocates, driving significant value.
“23% of customers who had a positive experience told 10+ people about it.”9
The companies that provide strong enough experiences to create customer advocates should also be able to leverage those voices in order to spread awareness of their brand and guide new prospects into the customer journey.
And, similar to customer advocates, employees that speak and create content about your brand can be some of the most powerful voices in terms of spreading your messages. The powerful response people have to hearing directly from a customer is replicated when employee advocates talk about your company in their own words.
WHAT STRATEGIC PROCESSES CAN I IMPLEMENT?
• Don’t just measure the cost of service interactions across channels, instead aim to measure their impact on overall customer satisfaction, repeat purchasing and CLV.
• Create consistent standards for support interactions across all channels, with a focus on availability, respecting customer time, and empowering agents to solve issues.
• Put in place procedures to identify possible brand advocates among customers and engage them on a 1-to-1 basis and share their positive messages with prospects (with customer cooperation)
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A CHALLENGE WITH A MAJOR UPSIDE.
On an operational level, creating consistently strong, integrated consumer experiences is one of the biggest challenges facing brands today. It’s a cross-departmental issue that requires the dismantling established processes and an acute focus on customer needs.
Marketing, sales and customer service all aim to meet the needs of a prospect or customer. As those customers demand better, more consistent experiences, companies need to find a way to closely link all three functions.
Creating common procedures, sharing insights and tracking company performance across the customer journey will create efficiency for the companies that are able to do so successfully.
It’s clear that CMOs and marketing departments will need to lead this transition. It won’t happen overnight. But the rewards for companies that can manage this shift—more customers, who are more loyal to your brand, and thus more valuable—make it critical to the overall success of your brand.
Falcon Social offers a unified SaaS platform for listening, engaging, publishing, measuring and management. Falcon Social’s global client roster includes:
Learn more about Falcon Social at www.falconsocial.com or www.twitter.com/falconsocial or get in touch with Falcon at [email protected].
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ENDNOTES1 The A, B, C, D and E’s of Marketing Engagement Laura Ramos, Forrester Research Inc, Blog post, August 2015.
2 The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency Alfonso Pulido, Dorian Stone, and John Strevel, McKinsey Insights, 2014.
3 CMOs Pressed to Lead Customer Experience Efforts, but Their Progress is Lacking Alex Kantrowitz, Ad Age, 2015.
4 Getting the Most From Your Digital Media Spend Nielsen Insights, 2015.
5 Channel Management: Core to Your Customer Service Strategy Kate Leggett and Fraser Tibbetts, Forrester Research Inc, January 2015.
6 The Value of Customer Loyalty and How You Can Capture It Sarabjit Singh Baveja, Sharad Rastogi, and Chris Zook; Randall S. Hancock and Julian Chu, eStrategy Brief, Bain & Company.
7 Your Company Should Be Helping Customers on Social Maher Masri, Dianne Esber, Hugo Sarrazin, Marc Singer, Harvard Business Review, 2015.
8 Cutting Costs Not Customers: Maintaining Customer Loyalty in a Challenging Market Ernst & Young, 2009.
9 Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, Nicholas Toman, Harvard Business Review, 2010.
