Customers 1st: February 2015

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

How to Create a Customer Experience that Sells

Today, businesses of all types and sizes must provide high quality products, but customers tend to remember the details of their experience with the product or the company better than the product itself.

So now it is more important than ever for businesses to focus on developing customer experiences that enables them to grow and retain their customer base. Here are a few ways businesses can create a customer experience that truly sells the product.

Recognize Your Customer. A key step you can take to enhance your customer experiences is to personally recognize your customer when they return to make a purchase. It’s the personalized treatment that adds value to a purchase, makes the customer feel special, and injects loyalty into your customer base. Evaluate your business operations to for areas where you can ensure that your customers know you are paying attention to their purchases.

Provide a Personalized Experience. It is also important to focus on providing your customers with personalized shopping experiences. Integrating interactive experiences along with in-store shopping is an excellent way to do this. Customers expect VIP treatment from brands in both online and in-person experiences. Providing customers with the same personalized experience when shopping online as they receive when they are in the store can go a long way toward encouraging repeat business.

Tapping into the Customer’s Emotions. For many consumers, shopping is an emotionally driven experience. No matter what they are shopping for, consumers are seeking opportunities to connect those events with their experiences with products. So, provide consumers with the option to build shopping lists and share with friends. Along with seeing what people close them are shopping for, these lists also make it possible for consumers to save the products they like for future reference, increasing the chance of making a sale.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Create Your CX Story at The Total CX Leaders Conference

Immerse yourself fully in a world of best in class, seamless customer experience programs at the Total CX Leaders Conference. Elevate your understanding from insight to implementation through interactive keynote discussions, collaborative sessions and insightful case studies.

Total CX Leaders Conference

June 3-4, 2015

Trump National Doral

Miami, Florida

Acquire the tools you need to accelerate your Customer Experience practice and get hands-on instruction in creating journey maps and service blueprints in TCXL's groundbreaking interactive workshop series.

· Journey Mapping & Service Blueprinting
Kerry Bodine, CX Expert and Co-author, Outside In

A dynamic, interactive session to help you accelerate your practice. We will share customer experience as a framework and best practices. Focused on actionable takeaways - driven by your questions and needs - this workshop is a combination of presentation, facilitated ideation and small group work sessions. The challenges of CEM - big data, change management, organizational alignment - will be included as topics for discovery and sharing

· Customer Experience Hat Trick
Diane Magers, Office of the Customer Mobility and Business Solutions, AT&T
Every person in an organization impacts the customer experience in some way, and all employees must be aligned in order to produce customer interactions that are useful, easy, and enjoyable. This requires tools that help both frontline and behind-the-scenes staff understand the end-to-end customer experience from the customer perspective - and the role they personally play in delivering it. In this workshop, participants will get hands-on experience creating journey maps and service blueprints. We'll discuss what these tools are, how they can be used to drive experience improvements and organizational change, and how participants can leverage them within their own companies.

Download the brochure for full conference details: http://bit.ly/1EogAMC

Unite with other change-makers responsible for creating a strategic customer experience program this June 3-4 in Miami, FL.

Mention code TCXCL15BL & Save$100 off the current rate. Register today: http://bit.ly/1EogAMC

Visit the Customers 1^st Blog for customer experience feature stories, industry news, interviews, and event updates: http://bit.ly/1z7oWIB

Best,
The Total CX Leaders Team

@TotalCustomer

#TCXL15

Customers1stblog.iirusa.com

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Mobile Marketing is Vital for Customer Experience Success

The emergence of cross-channel and omni-channel strategies have been a vital tool for many retailers to engage with consumers across different platforms. Some companies have embraced these strategies and created a retail experience that gives their customers the same experience whether it be on a smartphone, laptop or in person. However a recent study carried out by Altimeter Group has found that a lot of companies are still not utilizing mobile strategies as a customer experience in itself but merely as part of the retail journey.

The research found that the companies with poor mobile marketing strategies have low budget and poor staff allocation for their mobile initiatives. Mobile is treated as a ‘bolt on’ to their already existing digital initiatives. Consumers are learning quickly to function in an increasingly mobile world, with one-third of shoppers using mobile exclusively, and over half seeing mobile the most important tool in the purchase decision process. 90 percent of consumers still move between different purchase platforms in order to accomplish a goal, with an average of three screen combinations each day. Having to move from mobile to laptop to make a purchase may lose customers to other retailers who allow purchases and a great customer experience via mobile.

A survey by Tecmark in October of 2014 found that in the UK (where 53.7 percent of the population use a smartphone) the average user carries out 221 functions every day on their smartphone, compared to 140 on desktop or laptop computers. Statista estimates that by 2018 there will be 220 million smartphone users in the USA alone. Figures like that are a huge indicator of the necessary shift towards better marketing approaches for mobile.

One example of a company with an excellent mobile strategy that is easy to use and seamless across devices is Amazon. The mobile app has the range of items available on its mobile platform as it does on tablet or laptop computers. It is incredibly easy to use and if a customer wishes to start a shop on their phone and then want to access their basket on another device the basket contents can still be accessed. The seamless transition across all devices makes the customers experience incredibly easy.

Altimeter Group reached out to 20 leading mobile strategists and executives from companies such as Zappos and Mastercard in order to find out what they believed were the best plans for implementing a strong mobile initiative. They found that the secret to mobile success lies in developing the digital and mobile strategies individually whilst also bringing them together in order to deliver an integrated customer experience.

Companies need to truly understand the needs of the customer’s digital experience and the role that mobile can play then they can proceed in designing their mobile platform. Mobile strategies should not just be a bolt on to the rest of the digital strategy but a customer experience in itself. By first understanding the customer they can then create better experiences for them and better turnover for themselves.

About the Author: Harry Kempe, a marketing intern at IIR USA, who works on various aspects of the industry including social media, marketing analysis and media. He is a recent graduate of Newcastle University who previously worked for EMAP Ltd. and WGSN as a marketing assistant on events such as the World Architecture Festival, World Retail Congress and Global Fashion Awards. He can be reached at hkempe@IIRUSA.com.