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Perfect These Three Things To Curate A Great Customer Experience

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Found in:    joyX | Consumer Products or Services | Financial Services | Healthcare | Restaurants | Retail/Ecommerce

Creating a great Customer Experience can serve as a huge differentiator between your brand and the rest of the competition, but it can be very challenging to establish this level of service. Ultimately, your organization needs to train employees to optimize each individual interaction, in order to churn out as many brand ambassadors as possible. Understanding the impact of optimizing the following three organizational aspects can serve as a great way to reach this level of performance. Check out the following list written by Carlos Dominguez for AdWeek. You can access the article by clicking here, or by reading below:

This piece was originally published by AdWeek on March 30, 2018:

“In 1997, I was flying out to San Jose, Calif., to attend a meeting that could transform my career. Upon arriving at the airport, I realized I had left my suitcase on the Amtrak train I’d taken earlier.

I can still recall the panic I felt in that moment. That suitcase had all of my business attire in it, and it was too late to go back and get it. My wife—whom I called from 35,000 feet in the air—suggested that I reach out to a personal shopper from Nordstrom. I did so immediately. The kind woman on the other end listened to my predicament and asked a variety of questions about my size, styles and color preferences.

When I arrived at my hotel room, I was speechless. I had a closet full of clothing that was personally selected and set up for me. I wouldn’t have to miss my landmark meeting or embarrass myself on this important trip.

I’ve never been able to thank the individual who helped me, but this kind of customer experience is unforgettable. I am a fan of Nordstrom for life.

Every brand can learn from this story. In a world where buyers are overloaded with content, ads and purchase options, delivering amazing customer experiences is paramount to survival. In fact, 86 percent of business leaders say customer experience is foundational to their success.

Still, knowing that is one thing, while actually executing those experiences is another.

Here are three fundamental tools for building a superior customer-service strategy.

Think beyond marketing

I recently had a meeting with a marketing executive from an airline. I asked him how his marketing campaigns were going. He proudly showed me one of the company’s latest ads—a clever video that had accrued tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments.

I urged him to take a closer look at the comments. It turns out that most of them were from customers frustrated about delays, overbooked flights and other service-related issues—a growing list of customers telling others not to do business with the airline.

This brand probably spent a lot of money making that video. But it’s their customers—their very pissed-off customers—who are doing the marketing for them.

In a world where 3 billion people are connected to social and openly sharing their experiences with brands, marketing no longer happens in isolation. The things that happen in marketing and the things that happen across the street in care are inextricably linked now. Care is the new marketing.

Channel the voice of your customers

Your customers are talking, they’re tweeting, they’re posting and they’re livestreaming. They’re sending information about themselves and their interests into the world.

The onus is on us, as brands, to listen up and to turn these various conversations into meaningful decisions that improve the customer’s experience. To accomplish this, companies must be properly equipped to not only capture insights from billions of online interactions, but also to analyze and distribute these insights at scale.

At Microsoft’s Social Command, for example, active listening is the first step in crafting memorable customer experiences. The team’s social listening software pulls in about 150 million conversations each year. After artificial-intelligence filters scan and deactivate all the irrelevant conversations—someone cleaning the “windows in their office—5 million are handled personally. The social team directly reaches out to customers with personalized messages and custom-made content.

Ideas, suggestions and needs from customers are processed and forwarded to development teams, to be turned into product improvements. And once a product has been updated, the company circles back with those customers, letting them know. These customers, in turn, organically advocate on behalf of the brand and market Microsoft products to their networks.

Microsoft is creating a truly holistic experience for its customers, and it all starts with the simple act of listening to the voice of the customer.

Say no to point solutions

According to Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, there are now more than 5,300 marketing technology solutions—a 40 percent increase from 2016. And this number will only keep growing as consumer behaviors evolve, driving brands to look to new technologies to solve those gaps. It’s not that marketers are suffering from a lack of technology; it’s quite the opposite.

The problem with adding another point solution to your arsenal is that most of these siloed solutions are unable to communicate with one another. They require different interfaces, credentials and workflows. They often use different metrics and methods of reporting, too. With one or two point solutions, the inconvenience is negligible, but an entire ecosystem of point solutions ultimately creates more barriers in between the brand and the customers it’s meant to serve.

The strategy I see most of our customers at Sprinklr take is to whittle down their tech stack to a lean set of primary solutions that integrate with one another. They first unify their digital data and activities within Sprinklr, then extend our customer-experience-management platform to their core legacy systems such as customer relationship management and email.

In doing so, they’re layering unstructured social data on top of existing customer data (like purchase history) and creating a more complete view of the customer. Just as important, they’re also unifying previously disparate teams across marketing, advertising, research, commerce and customer care so that the whole organization has the same view of the customer.

Final thoughts

The rules of marketing have changed. The rise of social and digital media has reinvented how people learn about brands, form opinions, buy products, seek support and give feedback. Now that customers are more connected and empowered than ever before, their expectations have evolved and increased.

To survive and thrive in our digitally disrupted, customer-driven world, brands must undergo a marketing transformation. It will require an entire rethinking of people, processes and technology. But the result will be an organization that truly prioritizes the most important people to your brand: your customers.”


Second To None empowers customer-centric brands to deliver consistent, intentional and authentic consumer experiences.

We adeptly design and manage mystery shopping, compliance, engagement and voice of customer solutions grounded in strategic relevance, program integrity and actionable insights. Our solutions are developed on the basis of solid research and statistical science. We achieve success through a relentless focus on quality and innovation, consultative relationships and a talented team of professional associates.