In an increasingly competitive business landscape, companies are leveraging customer-centric business solutions to increase their share of voice in social media, generate value for their brand, and drive long-term financial gains.
Designing amazing user experiences that keep your customers coming back can give you a better bang for your marketing buck. A customer experience-centric approach goes beyond individual transactions and focuses on building long-term relationships with customers. This often leads to higher customer lifetime value.
Below, we list down five tried and tested innovative marketing strategies that can drive positive experiences for your brand and give you a pipeline of satisfied customers for years to come.
1. Setting the Stage for Positive Experiences
Positive experiences can be achieved through User Experience (UX) Design.
UX Design begins with identifying your customers’ needs through a variety of tools such as surveys and interviews. Using these tools, UX designers craft intuitive, personalized customer solutions that serve as touch points in elevating the overall experience of buying your product or service.
These touch points are translated into a customer journey map. You’ll want them to be satisfied throughout the entire buying journey, and this map helps visualize each stage of your users’ experience with your brand.
Consider the customer journey map as the blueprint that you and your staff can utilize when engaging customers and stakeholders. It can help you identify internal and external gaps in your current business processes and can help you predict customer behavior to achieve your next business milestone!
2. Leveraging Technology for Enhanced Customer Experiences
When serving thousands and even millions of customers, using technology can keep you consistent throughout each of your customer’s experiences. Consistency can keep your customers loyal to you since they know they can rely on you to deliver quality customer service every time.
These are some techniques and technologies that can help your brand remain consistent across all channels:
● Chatbots and AI can make your organization accessible to your customers 24/7. This technology ensures that your customers are receiving the same quality service wherever they are in the world. Simply setting up automatic replies (available on most social media messaging platforms) can help cultivate better brand experiences for your customers. If you want to kick it up a notch, give software like Bard or ChatGPT a spin (if you haven’t). See how their capabilities fit your business!
● Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems store your customer data all in one place. Having this kind of back-end technology can help you visualize your customer data, to help sharpen your targeting strategy and deepen customer relationships through personalization. Some popular choices are HubSpot, Salesforce, and Monday.com.
● Omnichannel marketing ensures your presence and visibility across platforms from brick-and-mortar shops to social media, email and mobile. Make sure your business is visible on multiple relevant platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, Threads, TikTok, and more.
3. Designing Memorable Customer Touchpoints
While remaining consistent cultivates customer loyalty, ensuring that your user’s experience remains personalized can increase customer retention.
Satisfied customers who have a strong connection with your brand are more likely to be encouraged to share and refer your brand within their network. Having a strong community of followers can prop you up as a dominant voice within your industry and help you acquire customers along the way.
Nike leverages customer experiences to strengthen their community–breaking barriers between fashion and athletics. In contrast with other sports brands, Nike has hundreds of customers lined up in front of their stores on the eve of launching new apparel and is highly visible not just in sports but also in fashion circles. By curating moments that elevate the experience for their customer, such as launching branded partnerships with influencers and creating new products that continuously optimize performance, they have been able to become a strong and consistent voice in their industry.
Consistency and personalization may seem like polar opposite goals, but there are multiple ways to create special touch points in your customer journey without diluting your brand’s consistency.
● Use data analytics to segment your customer base. Learn their preferences.
● Tailor your products, services, and marketing to these individual customer preferences.
● Learn the different combination of products and channels which customers respond to best and are most likely to engage with. For instance, repeat customers may have different needs than first-time users. Specialized loyalty programs may be a more effective marketing tool for repeat customers while special offers may be more suited in building relationships with the first-time users.
For example, Starbucks utilizes different marketing strategies for first-time and repeat customers.
Starbucks mostly acquires new customers through strategic convenient locations and an immersive in-store service that focuses on personalizing your coffee experience, such as putting your name in your coffee cup; and offering a variety of ingredients so they can make your coffee just the way you like it.
Creating immersive in-store experiences, as in the case of Starbucks, is a way to make a memorable impression. Setting the stage to ’wow’ your customer can make you stand out from your competition.
On the other hand, Starbucks also has strong rewards programs that cater to loyal customers. They incentivize customers to keep buying coffee through discounts and freebies that customers can get once they buy a certain amount of coffee from them.
In addition, Starbucks has integrated its brand into its customers' lifestyle more than any other coffee shop. Its app lets you track your points, find nearby branches, and place advance orders online – services that the customers themselves love to use. Whether you are online or in-store, they guarantee that no matter which branch you are in, you will be getting the same experience.
Optimizing your website and mobile app can showcase your intentionality in creating customer-centric design. Ensure your customers’ tools have a seamless interface that makes your products easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to access (remember UX in #1!)
4. Collecting and Utilizing Customer Feedback
Customer feedback matters. It is typically the first and the last step in the user experience design process. This end-to-end mechanism is typically called a feedback loop, where customer information is acquired at the start of the design process as well as after-sales.
Closing this loop can determine the impact of the product in your customer’s life and determine their satisfaction level with your product. It can also gauge their engagement in each of the touch points in your customer journey map.
This loop enables you to continuously improve your services by informing you of processes you will need to iterate in your user experience.
On top of this, after-sales feedback analysis can also keep you up to date in assessing emerging trends in your customer segments. After-sales customer feedback can be collected using product reviews, online data analytics and surveys. Google Forms or JotForm, for instance, are reliable platforms for feedback.
5. Creating a Customer-Centric Workplace Culture
Customer-centric approaches are propelled by a team who embraces customer success. Without teams to champion this culture in their work, customer-centric strategies will not be able to drive the lasting customer relationships it was designed for to produce resilient and sustainable businesses.
Organizations must therefore encourage and train employees to go above and beyond to achieve customer satisfaction in order to build a customer-centric workplace culture.
Employees who have the authority to make decisions to benefit the customer and are empowered to offer feedback that can improve customer touch points, and contribute to positive customer experiences.
Moving Forward for Growth
In a world where businesses come and go, those that prioritize customer-centricity have staying power. Businesses whose foundations are forged through a customer-first approach are likely to endure the test of time and competition.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses that had access to their customers and understood their evolving needs in the crisis were able to endure and even grow.
It showed that true customer-centricity requires a solid commitment to continuous listening, learning, and adapting to customers in a hyper-changing world.
Because of this, partnering with top PR agencies in the Philippines to help build out customer-centric marketing strategies for your business can certainly help you achieve success and jumpstart your organization’s journey toward exponential and sustainable growth.
After all, customers are the lifeblood of your business. Their satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy are the ultimate measures of your success.
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