In marketing, brand management has often focused on the customer experience. Brands set expectations of a particular customer experience. The brand is an expression of a product or company’s reputation built up over time.
Today, brands increasingly are used as part of marketing engagement to create a high-level expectation or promise of a particular quality of customer experience.
What is changing is the focus on the detail. Brand management traditionally seeks out high-level brand promises rather than specific “service-level” agreements for individual interactions. However, the detailed interactions and customer touches are where the brand promise is to be realized. New forms of customer experience management seek to live up to smaller promises and expectations for specific interaction types that roll up to meet the brand’s overall promise.
Marketing is in a unique position for the customer experience. Understanding the customer relationship, the company’s value to customers, the customers’ value to the company, the importance of learning and reacting to customer interactions, meeting customer expectations for business goals like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, advocacy and ultimately revenue, are all under marketing’s purview.
This, of course, is an enormous responsibility. Creating an environment for a positive customer experience means that processes must be accessible, dependable, thorough, timely, adaptable, flexible and personalized. A tall order. A big issue is that marketing doesn’t completely own the customer experience. It is certainly shared and orchestrated with the customer themselves. Another big issue is marketing doesn’t have control of the end-to-end experience. Marketers must work across departments, outside of marketing, and outside the company itself (partners, suppliers, etc.). They must do this in both the digital and physical world. Marketers must overcome silos to help plan, design, and facilitate start to finish positive experiences and get to a place where they are living up to the high-level expectation brand promises that they are making.
This week, Gartner for Marketing Leaders discusses specific digital marketing techniques that allow marketers to match real-time interactions and how marketing organizations are reorienting themselves to deliver great customer experiences. Clients only.
