Social Media Strategy

The customer experience is your next competitive battleground. Are you prepared to win it with social media?

You can claim victory by way of this competitive differentiation war by offering the lowest prices or providing a superior, surprising and spectacular customer experience! You may win the price battle, but that is only a short-term solution. However, you will always win the customer experience war. Providing a spectacular experience is more sustainable!

What Is Customer Experience And Why Is It So Important?

Customer experience is your customer’s perception of his or her relationship with your brand. These perceptions result from the collection of their interactions with your brand’s touchpoints during the customer lifecycle.

The rules change daily. Customer expectations of experience are set and improved by the best in class in an industry – Google, IKEA, Subway, and many others. So, with every new improvement or introduction of a new way of doing things, your customer raises the bar and increases your pressure to deliver. Think Amazon’s user experience setting expectations for a B2B software company, or that Apple sets expectations for a retailer, and you start to connect the dots.

5 Key Customer Experience Facts

1. 80% of U.S. consumers would pay more for a product or service to ensure a superior customer experience. Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs
2. 68% of businesses plan to increase their spending on customer experience. (Source: Call Center Executive Priorities)
3. 44% of consumers consider customer loyalty to be a relic of the past (Source: Avaya and BT Research)
4. Shoppers use an average of 10.4 sources of information to make a purchase decision (Source: Google)
5. Referred customers deliver 16% higher lifetime value (Source: Wharton School of Business)

Connect The Dots In The Customer Journey Touch Points

Each customer journey includes touchpoints – dots you need to connect to draw a holistic experience. It would help if you increased your relationship currency value at every section of the sales funnel – using social media, content marketing, and traditional interactions to connect these dots. The question is, do you have the resources and know-how to connect the dots to draw a winning solution or a scary picture?

The Customer’s Customer Requires 10 Key Experiences

Customer experience manifests in social selling, content marketing, social media, and every touchpoint on the customer journey. Your customers don’t want it. They require it. Here are ten experiences your customers demand in today’s economy.

1. Keep the customer experience simple and easy

Forest Gump couldn’t have said it any better – “Simple is as simple does.” Brands providing an integrated experience across channels make it simpler and easier for customers to engage. Whether it’s the one-off Google search experience or ordering a sandwich at Subway – two of the most highly ranked ’simple’ brands – a simple and easy experience differentiates your business from the competition. Making it easy to find your brand and consume your content is the key to winning their heart!

Google delivers a simple and successful customer experience for users searching for results!

2. Educate and communicate with your customers with social media

Your customers do not want to be sold your stuff. They want to be educated on how your staff can help them – then they will buy! The Home Depot builds a great customer experience by giving away their expertise during their Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-Herself, and Kids Workshops! Stitch-Fix, the woman’s subscription clothes service, presents possibilities by providing custom combinations printed on in-box instructions. Customers are self-educating, so integrate education and relevant content into their experience. 82% of U.S. digital buyers prefer to research products from multichannel retailers on the internet (Source: March 2014 study by UPS, ComScore, and the E-tailing Group). If you don’t educate your customers, then your competition will! Take the teaching approach with your customers instead of selling to them, and they will make you a trusted advisor – with sales becoming an exponential by-product!

3. Quickly resolve the bumps in the road using your social channels

You can’t make all of your customers happy all of the time. However, you can resolve most of their bumps in the road – the wrong-sized Boden pants, the missing button on your Stitch-Fix jacket, or even the Amazon Prime order that missed your deadline. Your customers expect resolution – from an under 60-minute response on Twitter to reading a blog post to help self-resolve an issue! Respond to social media outreach and make it easy for customers to easily find the content at 2 AM to resolve their issue, and you will quickly become a part of their ‘family.’

4. Personalize the customer experience

Smart, connected customers expect personalized experiences. From REI’s persona-based content marketing strategy targeting (tongue-in-cheek) narcissists who love biking to Nike ID’s custom footwear, customers require an experience that is all about them! A data and analytics strategy gives brands a single-view into individual customers – enabling a positive customized experience.

5. Make it easy to #humblebrag

Customers love to #humblebrag since it validates their purchase. It’s part of their brand experience – both with you and their community. Brands who strategically integrate a video, pictures and hashtag strategy into the customer experience score the most points – and social referrals!

6. Deliver a safe and secure experience

Customers’ heads are spinning with cyber-security breaches. People will share their details to enable a great experience. Just make sure you explain how you are going to securely handle their identity

7. Surprise and delight your customers

Marketing automation has created this ‘bland-compliant’ messaging. The customer wants a little personality and delight with their relationship with you. You have to work hard to differentiate yourself from the competition. Surprising and delighting can be as simple as Netflix’s season two House Of Cards Tweet chat with the actors to Mastercard’s #PricelessSurprises campaign featuring Justine Timberlake! Brands can combine a little bit of big data and creativity to create a priceless connection with customers

8. Be ‘always-on’ to be in the heart and minds of the customer

FOMO (fear of missing out) is the Millennial’s number one fear. So, you want to be always-on with cross-channel access to your brand – on Instagram and Snapchat –  so they never miss out on not missing out. Gartner predicts that by 2017, 50 percent of consumer product investments will target customer experience innovation, so investing in an always-on and brand-to-demand strategy makes sense. Translated to Gen X – it’s staying on top of the newest ‘thing’ to ‘keep up with the Jones’. BirchBox does this well

9. Mobilize your experience

With smartphone adoption reaching 70% in the U.S, reported by Asymco, providing a mobile customer experience is not an option, but a requirement! From mobile banking experiences like TD Bank offers or content updates from the Wall Street Journals app, customers want mobile access to your brand. As the man in the old Verizon commercial says “Can you hear me now?”

10. Create a circle of trust for your customers

88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, reports Bright Local. The fact of the matter is many customers begin their customer journey amongst their circle of trust. This activity means you need to build a trusting relationship with a great brand experience – using social, mobile, analytics, and cloud technology – making it easy for others to communicate their trust. Consumers will continue to build up their trust by using Yelp, Trip Advisor and Amazon Reviews, and their social media networks. How do brands build trust? Listen, respond, and do what you say you will do – just like any good relationship.

Do you have another customer experience you think customers require? If so, then please share below. Or, contact me directly at gerry@marketingthink.com.

As Jimi Hendrix kind of said, “Are you (customer) experienced?” If you aren’t, then you aren’t adding value to your customers, and you will lose the battle and the war with your competition.

NOTE: This blog post was originally published on May 3, 2015, and was lightly updated on January 27, 2021.

Social selling has clearly taken hold in the B2B world. Everyone is talking about it — especially your competition. Perhaps you still struggle with evolving into modern selling?

Read more

Are you a destination on the buyer’s journey map? Or, if you were a hitchhiker on the B2B highway, would customers pick you up?

Or, would they stick their disapproving and down-turned thumb out?

Read more

This article first appeared on Citeworld.com and was authored by Ron Miller.

Businesses are flocking to social media today because they understand at some level that customers are there and they need to be there with them. But there’s always been a sticky question about return on investment in social media and whether it drives sales.

Read more