Good customer experiences retain customers and improve loyalty ... Here's how to get ahead of the CX revolution and create outstanding customer experiences that yield positive ROI.
2. 2
‘95 UR EE graduate
Cofounded Auragen
Communications in 1995,
sold to Catalyst in 2007
’09 Simon MBA
Director, Digital Marketing
@Catalyst
Leadership principles:
Excite
Energize
Guide
3. About Catalyst
3
#1 direct and digital marketing agency in
Greater Rochester
Catalyst combines Science + Soul to develop
more profitable customer relationships
Our approach yields deeper insights that
anticipate customers’ needs better
6. Wikipedia
6
Customer experience (CX) is the sum
of all experiences at various
touchpoints a customer has with a
supplier of goods and/or services,
over the duration of their relationship
with that supplier. This can include
awareness, discovery, attraction,
interaction, purchase, use, cultivation
and advocacy.
7. Why It Matters
7
According to the Gartner Group, Inc.:
By 2016, companies will compete primarily on the customer
experiences they deliver
Leading customer experience is the #1 expectation CEOs
have of CMOs
It’s the area where CMOs have made the least amount of
progress
12. It’s All About the Customer
12
“There are only three ways a
company can grow. First, earn more
business from your current customers.
Second, attract customers from your
competitors. Or third, buy another
company. If you can’t do the first,
what makes you think you can earn
more business from your competitors’
customers or from customers you buy
through acquisition?”
John Stumpf, chairman and CEO, Wells Fargo
14. Implications for Marketing
14
Consumers are in the driver’s seat:
More ways to engage and share content
More ways to opt out of traditional “push” channels
Marketing must evolve to meet customers’
expectations:
Must shift from brand push to consumer pull
Must develop better data-driven customer intelligence
Must optimize customer experiences across every touch
point and in real time
15. Implications for Marketing
15
Most organizations still struggling:
Structured around channels, touch points, technologies or
features, not customer’s relationship with brand
18. The Customer Journey
18
Also known as a Customer Experience Map
Research methodology that tells you what customers are
thinking, feeling and doing at each stage of the customer
life cycle
First step to better customer understanding
Results in opportunities for more relevant communications,
better customer relations, higher retention, and increased
customer value
19. Four Key Components
19
The journey – shows you what customers have
actually done
Qualitative online and offline research –
conversations with customers to gain insight
about what they are thinking and feeling
20. Four Key Components
20
Opportunities – gaps in the customer
experience that can be closed with improved
marketing and customer service
Guiding principles – these emerge as you
begin to understand your customer’s journey
26. Process
26
Triggers,
touch points
and
channels
inventory
Customer
research
(online
bulletin
boards)
Special deals are sometimes put out
there to attract new customers. I want
my bank to make special offers to
me...to show they value my continued
relationship with the bank.
Linda C.
Talk to me to find out which accounts work
best for me now...everyone wants to feel
important no matter how much money
they have. But also, they want to be
understood and valued as a customer.
Jessica F.
I want them to feel like they already
know me. Not by a number.
Bill M.
31. 31
Who do my friends and
family bank with?
How do I choose the best
account for my needs?
Does the bank offer the
services and technology I
need?
How close are the nearest
branches and ATMs?
How do fees and rates
compare to other
banks?
How big is the bank’s
presence (local,
national,
international)?
Does the bank take an
interest in my
community?
How helpful and
knowledgeable are the
bank employees?
Will the bank help me
grow and progress
financially?
33. Gaps Lead to Opportunities
33
Pinpoint opportunities for improvement:
For each stage in the customer life cycle
Which customer segments?
What channel or touch point?
39. Systematic Customer Cross-Sell
39
What is best next product for customer?
Self-reported interests
Behavioral inference
Modeled fit
What offers has customer recently
received?
What are business priorities for
quarter?
What channels are cost effective?
Q1: HELOC
Customer told bank representative that he
wanted to consolidate debt and reduce
monthly payments
Q2: Money Market Account
Customer has significant checking
balances and can earn more interest
Q3: World MasterCard
Great rewards card without a fee because
of PinnaclePlus checking account
Q4: Interest Survey
Show customer we care about their
needs, and use info for subsequent
targeting
41. Key Takeaways
41
1. Good customer experiences
matter
2. Bad customer experiences
impact the bottom line
42. Key Takeaways
42
3. Develop a customer experience map to
learn what customers are thinking, feeling
and doing at each stage of the life cycle
4. Use relevant, personalized communications
43. Key Takeaways
43
5. Put the customer’s needs first, not your
organization’s needs; CEO expects CMO to
lead this
6. Organizations who do all this will be
positioned for success. Organizations who
don’t are doomed to fail
The relationship a customer has with a business
The total of all experiences the customer has with the business, based on all interactions and thoughts about the business.
Integral part of customer relationship management
Important to brands because customers who have a positive experience are more likely to become repeat, loyal customers
Customer-obsessed companies deliver a seamless, coordinated, consistent experience from call center to website to field sales:
Some of you may be familiar with the site FindaBetterBank.com.
They did a survey of people shopping for a new checking account and asked “Which financial institutions would you not consider banking with and why?”
FindABetterBank is a property of Novarica, a division of Novantas, Inc. The site enables consumers to compare institutions and checking accounts based on location, feature preferences and banking behavior. FindABetterBank attracts people who are using search tools (e.g., Google) to shop for a new bank or credit union. Rather than generate revenue through advertising, we sell data-driven insights to banks and credit unions about what consumers want and which accounts they’re interested in.
Word of mouth can come through many different channels and one of those channels is social media.
Because it is easy to search for things that people say on Twitter, let’s look at a few tweets that have to do with poor experiences with banks….
READ----
Now, you can see here that these comments have to do with all sorts of different touchpoints: customer service reps, ATMs, direct mail, mobile banking.
To create a customer experience map, you really need to look at each stage of the customer relationship or customer life cycle.
When it comes to banks, we start out with the consideration phase: people are thinking about getting a new bank (moving, unhappy with current bank, bank is being acquired)
After that, we get into the Account Opening phase, whether it is in the branch, over the phone or online
Then there is an onboarding phase, where you want your customers to be setting up direct deposit, online bill payees, transferring automatic withdrawals to their new account
Then you move into the Day-to-Day Account Management which is where most customers spend the majority of their time in the banking relationship
But, hopefully, you get to a point where your customers start expanding their relationship with the bank – maybe they need a savings account that offers more interest or they are looking for an auto loan or they want to make home improvements and they need a HELOC
Finally, every relationship eventually ends in one way or another, but we want to keep people from getting to that ending relationship stage as much as possible
Let’s talk about the process of creating a customer experience map.
You want to start by doing what we call a triggers, touchpoints and channels inventory. I know that this is small on your screen, but across the top are all of the stages that we just talked about. Down the side we start looking at channels (READ AND BUILD).
Just by creating this inventory, you may find some gaps in the customer experience. You might even be able to say at this point: “Are those opportunities?”
Once you’ve completed your inventory, your ready to start doing some qualitative research.
Of course you can pull comments that are coming through social media, or if you have any sort of VOC ongoing research to pull from that is great, but we think that it is very important to setup direct qualitative research to create your customer experience map.
To do that…
1: READ… In the case of the research we are going to share with you, we talked to people that had opened an account within the last 6-12 months, because the account opening process and onboarding is fresh in their memory. We also talked to people that had been with their bank for more than 10 years – they’ve definitely gone through the day-to-day management and hopefully they have expanded their relationship.
2: READ…It is very important to script your questions properly. We’ve found online bulletin boards to be a valuable way to gather qualitative research: can be done in a fairly short amount of time.
3: READ…Paying them to participate gives an incentive to provide rich and useful information and really spend the time thinking about their responses.
Once you have your qualitative research in hand, you might these types of comments. {READ and BUILD}
The next step is to hold customer experience workshops. And these workshops are conducted with stakeholders, so you are not talking to your customers here, you are really talking to your internal stakeholders.
These are the people that can impact the final customer experience. You include them because they are going to gain customer empathy when they take part in these workshops. The team will read through customer comments and if a particular customer (or multiple customers) are really experiencing a problem with the bank you want these people to read about it themselves because they are going to be more likely to act upon it then.
BUILD: During the workshops, we take those online bulletin boards and we read through them and we start to create sticky notes of what people have said. As we go through that process, we start to cluster those comments into themes. Different color sticky notes represent different segments so we can see if there is a theme that emerges amongst a particular segment.
The next step is to develop an initial model of what your customers are feeling throughout the lifecycle. We focus on feelings to try to identify highs and lows in the customer experience.
[BUILD] As you can see here we have three lines, one represents what the optimal experience might be, the average experience and a poor experience. Our research shows that the optimal experience that you see here is typically coming from those customers that are going into the branch. They are actually getting feedback about their accounts from the bank and in some cases we were hearing that tellers or bankers were giving them suggestions about accounts or services that would benefit them financially. Those interactions really delighted customers and show up here when they expand the relationship. Too often we found that customers who are not going into the branch don’t really feel like they have a relationship with the bank. They don’t feel like offers are tailored towards them and they don’t really hear much from the bank. They honestly would welcome emails, text messages or direct mail that was personalized towards them, which would make them feel like the bank cares about their finances. The customers who have poor experiences, typically had some sort of problem with their account: either a mistake was made on their statement or they are getting locked out of their online or mobile account. Those types of frustrating experiences, especially when they aren’t resolved well, tend to make people more and more unhappy with their bank.
The final step is to organize all of your sticky notes and do a complete analysis to make sure that you’ve captured all of the main themes.
Once this is done, you are ready to assemble your customer experience map. To give you an example of how this all comes together, let’s examine the Consideration phase of the customer life cycle.
The first component of your customer experience map documents what customers are doing – it represents the customer’s journey.
There are a couple of steps, but let’s take a look at what customers are doing during this stage {READ}.
Not every customer may do all of these things, but we want to represent all of the possibilities here. And consideration is not really a linear process, it sort of ebbs and flows as people are going through that consideration phase.
The second component of the map is – what are customer’s thinking. {Read}
The third component of the map illustrates what people are feeling.
Remember that the feelings you see here represent what is happening during just the consideration phase of the customer life cycle.
I find that it is useful to separate out the positive, indifferent and dissatisfied feelings for each stage. When you put the whole map together, you’ll see which emotion is most heavily represented.
Not surprisingly during the consideration phase, most people are feeling pretty positive. They are excited about changing banks. They have hope for their financial future.
Once you’ve identified what people are doing, thinking and feeling, opportunities will naturally unfold.
It is beneficial to add these opportunities to your customer experience map and use them to put together a strategy and set of initiatives that will improve your customer experience.
In the end, your full customer experience map will look something like this.
All of the stages of the customer lifecycle are represented across the top.
There is a row for the customer journey – what customers are doing, a row for what people are thinking and what they are feeling.
When we deliver the final product to our clients, we find that it is useful to print it on a large, sturdy poster that can be passed around the organization, brought to meetings and used as inspiration.