A new article on
Martech.org reports that the most successful brands keep the customer at the center when expanding their digital presence.
Matthew Crocker is Director of Marketing for CX software company Table:
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"We've all heard that adage, there's danger in not moving your business at the speed at which it should be moving, Right now, customers are becoming digital first, and let's be honest, they're becoming digital everywhere. Digital is that huge push, that huge focus that the customer has that they want to be served up their content in that way, in that manner. Even though we've talked about it for a long time, there needs to be a seamless, easy and very unified way that businesses can move from the square footage (in a store) to the screen...and maybe back and forth a little bit."
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Seamless doesn't mean reducing experience to a single channel so there isn't anything to stitch together. Yet Crocker finds this to be a common method used by marketers, at least at the early stages of digital transformation.
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"A lot of companies are struggling now with the plug-and-play solutions to keep their businesses relevant. The easy solution is to follow these methods that bend customers to predictable funnels...but it sacrifices experience for efficiency. It's a common problem that a lot of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers fall into."
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Digital Presence
When companies grow their digital presence, they are immediately met with the challenge to avoid being repetitive. They can't simply build a homepage and then use those same messages and graphics on all other digital channels. Cristian Petschen is CEO of Table:
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"The business, on the one hand, has this issue that they need to reach as many people as they can, and they have thousands, if not tens of millions, of customers they need to take care of. But at the same time they need to provide an experience for them that feels natural. We do have this automated experience, but it needs to be semi-customized, and it needs to be customer-driven. [Customers] shouldn't have things forced on them, [they] should have the ability to talk to a live agent. That dynamic is so key to dynamic [experience] versus repetition."
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Crocker adds that customers who are served the same content for different use cases will be turned off by repetition. Conversely, good seamless CX should also be persistent in leading customers through the right experience.
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"Whatever you are interfacing with, it needs to have some persistence to it. It needs to remember who you are. It needs to remember what your problem is, and that's really important when you're talking about these interactions -- is it persistent, does it remember? When somebody has a relationship with someone and they have a conversation it needs to be personal, it needs to be dynamic, it needs to flow, it needs to have a thread to the conversation. If you don't know who they are or you don't understand the previous conversations that you had, you're not going to have that relationship."
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Seamless journeys
Crocker thinks customer journeys are more complex than they're often portrayed:
"When retailers talk about a customer journey, it's usually shown as a line on a screen. I hate that methodology because the customer journey is actually more like a circle. [Customers] should keep coming back around and being exposed to your brand over and over, and to what the brand can offer the individual. Different brands have different personas and personalities, and there's certain goals they're trying to achieve. But the customer actually moves across different channels.
They're not really seeing themselves as being part of a stage where, for instance, they're being tracked and they're in the retention stage, or in the 'make the customer an advocate' stage -- they're just going about their life. Tap what their needs are, then tie it together so that you know where they are along this journey."
