The Customer Experience Gap and How to Bridge It

Our  friend and customer service advocate, Becky Carroll penned an interesting post over on her blog, Customers Rock. The jest of the post is the significant disconnect with what companies think they are delivering relative to Customer Experience, and what their customers purport.

Understanding the principles of customer experience and actually delivering them do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2008 Bain & Company found that while 80 percent of companies believe they deliver a superior experience to their customers, only 8 percent of those companies’ customers report having such an experience. Similarly, a CMO Council study found that fifty-six percent of technology vendors perceive themselves as being extremely customer-centric, compared with only 12% of their customers.

There is a clear disconnect between the experience companies think they deliver and what customers experience, perceive and – more importantly – desire. It’s not about what you think… it’s about what your customers think.

In order to determine whether you are disappointing, meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations, you need to continuously listen. And it’s not as easy as it sounds. It goes far beyond monitoring the chatter on Twitter and other social media platforms or performing your annual customer satisfaction survey. It requires soliciting customer feedback on a regular, ongoing basis at multiple touch points, and closing the loop to address issues and understand root cause.

How to Bridge the Gap

I think part of the issue stems from confusing Customer Service with Customer Experience. It is much easier to Enhance the Customers Experience than to deliver stealer Customer Service. We confuse great customer service as being Ritz Carlton or Nordstrom, it isn’t, as customer service varies based on the product type, brand and product price point.

Folks can argue that if they want, but you simply do not expect the same level of customer service at McDonalds, a fast food chain as you do at Mortons, a high-end steakhouse. The problem with focusing on increased Customer Service is, irrespective of your product price point, folks always expect a little more “service” than your product offering is designed to deliver. Trying to out service your competitors is a race to eroding profits. I am not suggesting that a company only deliver minimal customer service, but am pointing out there are differences.

However, companies that shift their thinking toward Enhancing the Customers Experience should have a much easier time, and really speaks to shifts in your behavior to align with your brand. This was an epiphany moment for us at Urbane, as once we started behaving, consistent with our Brand, things became much easier and more clear, all of which centered around Enhancing the Residents Experience at each of the touch points throughout the resident life cycle.

What are your thoughts about this? Is there a difference between Customer Service and customer Experience?

Social Influencers Help You Sell More Stuff

Social Influence Marketing, as described in Social Media Marketing for Dummies, is a technique that employs Social Media (content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, microblogs, bookmarks, social networks, communities, wiki’s and vlogs) and Social Influencers, (everyday people who have an outsized influence on their peers by virtue of how much content they share on line) to achieve an organization’s marketing and business needs.

Social Media, which was likely one of the most hyped buzzwords in 2008, refers to content created and consumed by regular people for each other.

Social Media and its making now allows everyone in the world to be a content publisher and arbitrator.

Social Influencers are the everyday people who influence the consumer as he/she makes a purchasing decision. Simply, the people who influence a brand affinity and purchasing decisions are Social Influencers. Engagement is a Lost Art, are you targeting Social Influencers as part of your overall marketing objectives?

Social influence is the change in behavior that one person causes in another, intentionally or unintentionally, as a result of the way the changed person perceives themselves in relationship to the influencer, other people and society in general.

Christine Thompson describes Social Influencers in her post titled Social Influence Marketing;

Key influencers – people who have almost celebrity status in the social media world – in some cases can exercise considerable influence on purchase decisions throughout the consumer’s buying process. Rarely does the consumer actually know these key influencers in real life.

Social influencers are people whom the consumer follows on Twitter or FaceBook, or whose blogs and product reviews appeal to the consumer. Their influence is greatest during the earlier phase of the buying cycle: awareness and consideration, but wanes during the action phase. Although the social influencers are likely to be within the consumer’s social graph, they may not actually know each other.

The greatest impact occurs through known peer influencers: colleagues, friends and family. How much impact these “known peers” exercise varies by product category and how much the consumer respects the person’s insight and expertise in that category. For example, a husband can influence the brand and model decisions when it comes to auto purchases or leases; however, he has no impact on purchase decisions for yoga classes, mats and accessories, or other yoga-related items. This is because I don’t believe he has an informed opinion in this arena.

1. Are you connecting with Social Influencers to drive your marketing needs and business needs?
2. Does your Digital Footprint have the required reach and inclusion of Social Influencers relevant to your brand?

B2B Social Media; Senior Marketing Executives Want Control

A Guest Post from HiveFire Marketing; Taariq Lewis

B2B Social Media; Senior Marketing Executives Want Control

While participating at the Online Marketing Conference, I heard a few comments from a few very hard-working working eMarketing managers.  These managers commented on their company’s leadership view of the growing importance of Social Media for their businesses.   In their view, most senior executives still don’t understand the need for all this focus on Social Media.  Sure, some bosses are willing to devote a little time and budget, but senior marketing executives see lots of fads in their lengthy careers.

Thus, the brave eMarketing Managers, whom they employ, are usually pioneers, risking their careers, to launch and integrate Social Media plans into their corporate marketing efforts.  Not only do they have the smallest budgets, but they usually have the highest ROI proof requirements.  I am guilty of chuckling at the true story of one eMarketing Manager sneaking their company’s credit card to make a Social Media tool purchase.  They were only able to keep their job after showing the ROI on the tool!

It’s my view that senior marketing executives in large companies clearly understand and see progress in Social Media.  This is old news.  Many of the leading social media marketing technology companies have covered it here and elsewhere.  However, the problem, from my perspective, is one of control.  Who controls Social Media in the organization?  Does it fall under Corporate Marketing or Marketing Communications?  If Social Media ROI doesn’t deliver, as promised, who’s responsible, the eMarketing Manager or her boss?  Finally, if an eMarketing or Social Media Manager positively impacts revenue growth, how does the firm properly reward that individual and encourage the rest of the organization to support that success?

Social Media Marketing is not easy.  It’s not non-technical and it requires increasing understanding of analytics, software, and rapidly evolving Internet technology.  Although there’s sufficient education for eMarketers through organizations such as Online Marketing Institute, where’s the educational opportunity for Senior Marketing executives?  How will they learn about Social Media so that they can feel empowered to move their marketing organization, with confidence, in this rapidly emerging and highly effective direction?
In the absence of more education, tools must suffice and these tools need to get easier and give Senior Marketing executives more control and easier participation in Social Media marketing activities.  Information automation tools and social media dashboards are a start.  However, there’s more that can be done and I’d like to see more conversations around other possible solutions.  Unless our senior executives are encouraged to participate in B2B social media, we’ll miss out on their insights and support for this new customer engagement channel.

Your Blog Is Not a Brochure; Create Inbound Links for Increased Business Leads

If you operate a business, you have a much higher interest in Results than those who do not. Absent Results, the business doesn’t make money and will soon fail. As a business owner, you get to make as many mistakes as you have available capital to fund those miscues. There are a thousand and one clamoring social media marketers with lots of theory, and some of those ideas are good, some not so much. Here at Digital Sherpa, we like to test things, and see what works and what doesn’t. We think that gives our clients an edge when expanding their Digital Footprint. We also like to focus on driving business leads, which is the reason to advertise.

One thing we have learned from our own businesses we manage is that when our Digital Footprint expands, our web traffic increases. There is a direct correlation to increased web traffic verses actual, physical traffic, meaning customers in the door. At the end of the day, that IS the result we are all looking for, more traffic in the door, which increases our opportunity to sell more stuff to more people.

Your Business Blog Is Not a Company Brochure

When first starting a blog it is easy to get hung up on all of the details. Notwithstanding, details are important, but we often see clients getting stuck on certain details of the blog that have little to no overall value to what the goal of your business blog should be, which is to sell more stuff. Your business blog does provide an excellent opportunity for Inbound Marketing, which is really no more than providing content that your prospective customer, and customer base find interesting and useful. While it can be about your product, it typically is not.

The good folks over at Hub Spot continue to provide us with excellent case studies on the effects and results to your business when you apply inbound marketing.

Are you sitting on data that might be interesting to others?

Inbound marketing rests on the assumption that people seek out and want to consume remarkable content.  PR, historically, has been about getting a message, remarkable or not, in front of an audience.

Inbound marketing and its opposite outbound marketing have various meanings depending on the context.

Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively).

Hub Spot said it well;

If you think your company doesn’t lend itself to creating interesting content, you may be mistaken.  Companies across various industries are blogging, reporting and creating remarkable content that matters to their target market.  Why?  Because it drives traffic and generates qualified leads.

What are some stories that your customers may find helpful or useful, we would love to hear about what is working, and what hasn’t worked so well.