3 Ways Companies Get Customer Experience Wrong

by Lisa Nirell

Most businesses profess to having a “customer first” philosophy. And many have created their own customer experience (CX) function to fuel higher customer retention, brand reputation, and recurring revenues. But, many companies’ CX strategies have fallen out of sync with post-pandemic customer realities.

As a strategic marketing adviser and executive coach for the past three decades, I’ve seen in my day-to-day work and private CMO cohorts that many leaders are deploying the same digital CX strategies that they used in 2019, thereby risking customer defection and dissatisfaction at a time when they can least afford it.

Here are common CX missteps I’m seeing — and strategies to address them before your competitors seize the opportunity.

1) Prioritizing Cost Management at the Expense of Strategic Investment

During uncertain times, it’s tempting for companies to obsess over boosting the balance sheet. In fact, most of my coaching clients are striving to replicate Google’s ambition to become 20% more efficient. But this leaves companies vulnerable to competitors who also focus on boosting customer-facing value to improve the bottom line.

For example, one of my clients, a profitable publicly traded firm, recently experienced a six-month stock price dip. The CFO immediately froze all new marketing initiatives, and they required every executive team leader to find at least $1 million in expenses to cut.

For the CMO, this represented a missed opportunity to invest in identifying new customer segments, fortify their retention strategies, and experiment with new CX programs. The CMO brings a rich set of experiences from her previous roles — such as strategic account planning, customer advisory board programs, and brand-fortifying thought leadership strategies. Investing in just one of those areas would have paid for itself by sparking long-term growth at a time when their sizable competitors were cutting back. But her company’s singular focus on expense reduction made it difficult to pursue such growth opportunities. It felt like a short-sighted strategy that made the company penny-wise and pound-foolish. 

2) Relying on Old Segmentation Strategies

CX leaders have been trained to define addressable customer segments (such as psychographics and demographics) and to create sophisticated customer journey maps (which are used to define customers’ common challenges and buying patterns). Yet they’re generally ignoring one of the biggest changes since the pandemic: customers’ desire to understand a company’s stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion, climate change, and other social issues.

Creating a Compelling Customer Experience

It’s about building a genuine relationship.

KPMG’s 2022 CEO survey found that 69% of executives surveyed noted higher levels of stakeholder pressure to improve ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting transparency — an 11% increase in only a year. It’s unlikely that this is a fad. These topics have climbed to the top of customers’ priority lists. They reflect a person’s values. But you seldom find them on modern-day customer journey maps.

After reviewing several journey maps, I found that most only include superficial data, such as demographics, job functions, hobbies, and common pain points. Very few describe the values behind why buyers choose a certain software tool, snack brand, or vacation getaway.

3) Treating Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) as Separate Silos

You’ll hear some leaders say that the “customer is always right”. Yet that strict policy can also lead to costly attrition of top people, too many priorities, and team burnout.

Salesforce recently teamed up with Stanford and Columbia Universities on research that showed that only one in three companies had designed a seamless integration between their customer experience and employee experience initiatives. And when they’re not aligned, the research team suggests that companies may be missing out on as much as a 50% revenue bump.

Addressing These CX Challenges

To address these modern-day CX challenges, here’s what I recommend:

1) Craft CFO discussions around value creation, not just expense reduction.

Many CX leaders downplay their value, focusing on activities versus outcomes. One executive recently boasted about juggling ten different buyer personas — a nearly impossible feat with their lean CX team.

 When confronted with cost-cutting conversations, consider these reframing strategies:

• Show how CX investments drive incremental revenue, grow share of voice, accelerate current revenue streams, or fuel higher lifetime customer value. Stop using terms such as “program delivery” and “support.” This positions your initiatives as transactional and nonessential.
• Ensure that your CX metrics align with your organization’s strategic goals — especially those that the CFO reports to the street, such as revenue growth and operating margins. CFOs seldom care about vanity metrics, such as the number of followers. Nor should you.
• Invite a Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) colleague to project planning and status meetings. They will feel more like collaborators versus adversaries — increasing the chances that your strategic CX investments will get serious consideration during the next planning cycle.

2) Integrate customer values research into traditional segmentation exercises.

According to ValueGraphics CEO David Allison, CX strategies built exclusively around demographics miss the mark. He and his team looked at 750,000 surveys in 152 languages about audience values, wants, needs, and expectations. They were astounded to find that “people in any demographic cohort are, on average, only 10% similar.” (Full interview here.)

Want to know what your ideal audience cares about? You can either conduct values research, schedule one-on-one conversations, or do both. If you’re facing a time or budget crunch, these questions will help you get started:

• Why do you [go to work, attend concerts, buy new clothes, etc.]? Tailor the question to where your audience would experience your brand.
• You just won the lottery. Why would you give away half of your winnings?
• You’re writing a letter to your younger self from 10 years ago. What would you say, and why?

3) Align EX and CX goals and incentives.

In a 2019 HBR article, Andrew Chamberlain and Daniel Zhao cited myriad correlations between high employee engagement and higher American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores. Apple, Trader Joe’s, Costco, and Johnson & Johnson still top the list of great places to work. Here’s something else they share: impressive ACSI scores.

Taking cues from these brand juggernauts, where can you improve EX and CX team collaborations? How can you align incentives across those teams?  Where can you streamline technology platforms for both groups? How can EX and CX metrics earn their rightful place alongside board-level operational and financial reporting?

In addition, ensure that your employees have a say in how you design customer-focused programs. In the Experience Advantage study, Salesforce reported that “employees who feel trusted and who feel they can take risks in their roles are 1.5 times more likely to consider themselves top CX supporters.” One of my global clients hosts a monthly employee recognition program for team members who best model the company’s values. In 2022, they celebrated 32% revenue growth and a twenty-point employee engagement score improvement.

The pandemic changed the world and customer expectations, and the most successful companies recognize that their customer experience needs to change in turn. By engaging cross-functional teams in CX discussions and understanding customer values, leaders can ensure that their brand remains relevant for years to come.

How Technology Can Improve the Customer Experience

Customers and markets have seen an immense degree of change during the past few years. Organizations have struggled to keep up with the changing demands and expectations of their consumers due to issues with the supply chain and changes in customer channel preferences.

Through the use of self-service and online auto purchasing, digital technology has been integrated into the customer experience, forcing all sorts of enterprises to engage their target customers in new ways (CX).

Technology, however, is only one aspect of the narrative.

The most effective digital experiences, in our view, begin with a compelling grasp of the client – who they are, what they want, what work they must perform, and even how they feel about themselves.

Regrettably, a lot of businesses approach technology first before returning to understanding customers. Automation is being prioritized over consumer empathy in their never-ending search for operational efficiency, which is a concern. There are no engaging digital experiences without compelling consumer comprehension.

Technology, however, is only one aspect of the narrative.

The most effective digital experiences, in our view, begin with a compelling grasp of the client – who they are, what they want, what work they must perform, and even how they feel about themselves.

Regrettably, a lot of businesses approach technology first before returning to understanding customers. Automation is being prioritized over consumer empathy in their never-ending search for operational efficiency, which is a concern. There are no engaging digital experiences without compelling consumer comprehension.

Companies work to exceed consumers’ expectations by streamlining their customer journeys, but these initiatives will fail if they are focused on short-term click-through and conversion rates rather than long-term happiness, loyalty, and retention.

How they can get there is as follows.

Start By Offering What Consumers Want

Most businesses struggle to understand what their consumers genuinely value in a great digital experience. This isn’t to say that most experiences are bad; rather, the commoditization of digital encounters has rendered most of them uninteresting.

According to a Gartner survey, just 14% of consumers experienced a digital connection with a brand that motivated them to make a different choice.

What is different is when businesses alter their strategy to concentrate on how they can help their consumers feel better about themselves rather than just improving how customers perceive their goods and services. Consumers want to know more about themselves. By doing this, they will have a better chance of achieving their aims or objectives.

Most businesses place more emphasis on “what customers think of us” than “what customers think of themselves,” which is a missed chance to improve. Organizations can utilize the following three strategies to encourage a positive change in their customers’ perceptions of themselves:

Understand that not every digital encounter is intended to be seamless. Depending on the purpose of the consumer, a better experience may cause some friction, allowing the customer to consider their decisions by offering a learning route. A series of brand encounters that help consumers better grasp how to achieve their goals is referred to as a learning path. A Gartner survey indicated that B2B and B2C consumers agreed that if they “realized anything new about their wants or their own aspirations” they were 1.73 times more inclined to buy more.

Consider value over quantity. Catalytic brand experiences are distinctive, and emotive, and have a direct effect on the lives of customers. Customers are thereby altered in some way and are then more likely to continue acting in the manner in which they wish to. As compared to traditional strategies like promoting brand uniqueness, familiarity, or authenticity, these encounters have a roughly twofold impact on brand commitment.

Consider options other than a digital purchase. The following is a summary of the services that you may expect from the company value their. According to Gartner research, consumers who experience this kind of value-enhancing response are far more likely to remain around and make more purchases.

The Brooks Shoe Finder is an example. In addition to asking customers to think carefully about important issues regarding their fitness objectives, the evaluation assists customers in actively reflecting on their running mechanics (e.g., location of their feet, the relative strain on knee joints). This quiz differs from others in that it focuses on the customer’s confidence in their capacity to reach their running objectives rather than just the product itself. As a result, it may assist them to make decisions that are different and/or better informed than they otherwise would have.

These are the words they used to describe how significant it was to them. Do not misunderstand us; we adore technology. But we love customer understanding even more, which is why it’s one of the essential ingredients of a compelling CX.

The Secret To Providing A Great Customer Experience

Organizations must focus on two key themes, or vital elements, for engaging customer experiences: 1) complete experience and customer knowledge and empathy.

Brands may prevent “manufactured insincerity” by making sure each ingredient is included in the broader recipe, which we discuss below.

Improve Understanding of the Client

Few, if any, businesses offer purely digital experiences; they still transport tangible goods, have in-person conversations, and offer physical experiences. This implies that rather than treating the digital journey as the be-all and end-all, you must comprehend where and how clients seek digital experiences throughout the customer journey.

Voice of the Customer (VoC), creating personas, creating customer journey maps, and encouraging more customer-centric choices are just a few examples of successful customer listening practices that may help you better understand and respond to your customers’ present and changing requirements.

Organizations may then concentrate on how they will provide that experience after this point. It’s a skill that must be developed over time in order to be effective, not just once.

The businesses that take the lead with their consumers in mind succeed: According to Gartner’s data, CX programs that surpass management expectations are twice as likely to have end-to-end customer journey mapping in place for more than three years and are 1.9 times more likely to have persona creation activities in place for over three years.

Given the macroeconomic climate at the moment, companies have the chance to reinvest in and develop their CX skills in a way that gives their consumers confidence they are making the correct decision to keep doing business with them.

Customer empathy is a crucial result of great customer understanding.

A key component of a customer engagement strategy, customer empathy strikes a balance between an organization’s objectives and a thorough comprehension of a customer’s position, interests, and intent. This is difficult, especially without the thorough grasp of the consumer we’ve been discussing.

L’Oreal provides a straightforward yet effective illustration of excellent consumer knowledge and empathy.

Oreal is aware of how crucially important skincare is to one’s health. Their Skin Genius mobile application uses an AI-powered evaluation of the customer’s specific skin care needs utilizing a privacy-protected image of your face to combine individualized help with a game-changing digital experience. By acting as an in-person beauty counsellor, it also forces clients to reevaluate their plans and consider their skin-improvement objectives.

Customers are likely to feel better overall if they have a better knowledge of their skincare regimen. Once again, this relates to improving the consumers’ feeling of self.

It’s not necessary for compelling consumer experiences to include extravagant digital capabilities. Little things that are based in human knowledge can have equal power.

Use a holistic strategy and all of your experience

Customers frequently ask us what technology they should purchase or how they should organize their activities to provide better customer experiences. However the question is not fully answered there.

The epidemic has shown us how important it is for staff to provide excellent customer service. Their experiences are important, and this is reflected in employee experience, or EX. Yet, in the majority of firms, the departments in charge of CX, EX, user experience (UX), and the related technological platforms operate independently.

The better issue to ask is how to arrange such that consumers and staff have a more comprehensive and appealing digital experience.

Enter the concept of whole experience, or the purposeful fusion of CX, EX, and UX to provide better shared experiences for all stakeholders.

A B2C company that has embraced complete experience is the Lego Group. It came to the realization that because of fragmented design methods, digital solutions frequently fall short of meeting the demands of consumers and workers.

The LEGO Group originally developed a self-service online catalogue for store customers when the Covid-19 outbreak caused the business to introduce new goods remotely. Unfortunately, because the solution’s design did not take into consideration all end users’ specific and intersecting demands, it did not effectively deliver the high-quality purchasing experience that consumers and sales representatives previously enjoyed in-person. The LEGO Group developed a virtual showroom system that offers a better product viewing experience in order to address this difficulty.

Lego’s employees were able to provide better customer service and enhance the overall purchasing experience by designing and implementing technology solutions that prioritize the needs of customers and employees before those of technology. This resulted in more seamless interactions between customers and employees as well as an improved overall product viewing experience.

Lego succeeded in avoiding the pitfall of engineering insincerity by relying on the essential elements of customer comprehension and TX.

Track Your Marketing Campaigns and Increase Conversions with CallRail

Every digital marketing campaign uses various marketing channels and analytics to track its business. Callrail monitors lead generated by submissions of contact or lead generation forms. Although, some of these leads come from websites and social media ads, it is essential to know who reached out, when, why, and if they intend to come back.

CallRail is that one tool every company is trying to get on their side for all their digital marketing and advertising efforts. Milia Marketing is a premiere Agency Partner with CallRail as our Call Tracking tool of choice. Let’s take a deeper look into what it is and how it can help make your business and customer understanding more efficient.

What is CallRail used for?

CallRail is a powerful solution for data-driven marketers from the marketing agency perspective. Callrail provides you with several key features to track key metrics across the site and achieve better outcomes. It is one of the most effective tools for monitoring the effectiveness and efficiency of your company’s sales department. Its plethora of helpful information will help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The following are some of the essential uses of call rail:

Call recording

Duration of calls

You can get complete information on the number of calls you make. It’ll determine which of your user calls often. Its digital marketing efforts result in more comprehensive, detailed insights into calls with a better conversion rate. Users can also use this software to evaluate which times of day and which location generates the most phone calls and phone leads.

Call tracking

In the past, you could track your website’s callers by hard-coding the tracking number into it, but that’s not advisable for SEO. Without a doubt, CallRail is one of the most user-friendly call tracking software for tracking every phone number that contacts your business. Tracking static enables users to create new call tracking numbers using the system’s call flow builder.

The analytical aspect of this call tracking solution is easy and great data gained from its digital marketing campaigns. Its system also aids in keywords spotting and dynamic number insertion. We are able to add a tracking phone number to each marketing campaign to track the marketing return on investment and measure results. The ability for tracking multi channel campaigns allows us to make smarter decisions with our clients advertising dollars.

CallRail integrations

Callrail integrates directly to Google analytics, GDS reporting software, and various online analytics, such as Marin Software, Wix, and sales software. When you integrate with Google data studio or Google AdWords, you’ll be able to annotate phone calls as conversion tracking on those platforms. It also supports voicemail transcription, lead capture, and SMS. Without these integrations and without a tool like CallRail, tracking phone call conversions would be a complete and total nightmare.

Evaluation of P.P.C. landing pages

Callrail users can analyze the effectiveness of each of your P.P.C. landing pages. Lead Center help businesses determine their highest-quality leads and the increased conversion rate. The phone call and form submission data are critical to showing clients’ quality.

Who uses CallRail?

CallRail is suitable for any company that uses phone numbers for marketing purposes. A majority of CallRail users are enterprises with higher volume campaigns.

Other users of CallRail are:

• Small or medium businesses that advertise with phone numbers.
• Marketing agencies
• Data-driven marketers.

What are the benefits of using CallRail?

CallRail is a lead management platform whose benefits include characteristics that help customers with free call tracking. A slew of other features is conversation intelligence, call routing, excellent reporting functionality, a call analytics dashboard, form tracking, lead center. Below is some additional information.

Effective and simplified conversion performance

It’s great to have traffic on your website. But your investment might have no value for money if the customers don’t complete a desired action. For this reason, one of the most crucial benefits of callrail is its simplified conversion performance.

Callrail aids in determining which websites, search terms, and marketing are most effective at converting visitors into customers. It has a visitor timeline function that allows users to see the full visitor journey. After that, the conversion-related data will upload into Google Analytics. Asides that, it also optimizes AdWords call tracking and marketing campaigns.

Functionalities in Marketing campaigns

Callrail software helps a company determine the marketing channels that generate more calls. The system also has call tracking software that measures the quality of inbound leads generated by emails, radio, television, newspapers, and other forms of digital marketing campaigns. Users can also gather important caller information using the platform to understand their callers and provide better service.

Reporting and wise budget investment

CallRail features real-time reporting, allowing users to know when inbound calls are received. Marketing agencies may allocate adequate budgets to tracking campaigns, and the sales team can improve the one-on-one interaction of callers with the firm. It will also help you assess which offline marketing campaigns provide a decent rate of return.

Mapping Out Your Customer Journey

Integrating CallRail with your website and marketing campaigns allows you to see every touch point within your existing or planned customer journey.

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