Optimizing The Social Customer Experience For Better Customer Engagement

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Customers are moving outside the purchasing funnel—changing the way they research and buy products and services. If your service experience hasn’t adapted, you’re falling behind.

A customer-centric approach to service, integrating all available customer contact channels, needs to be based upon your customer journey. Every aspect of your service offering, sales and marketing efforts need to correlate and contribute to that desired experience.

From customer service in the call center to content marketing and the actual sales pitch, everything needs to tie in to the customer journey. This approach  to customer experience optimization and persuasion/conversion architectures is not new, but much can and should be done to enhance its influence in customer relationship development today.

We’ve learned the lessons of the past and many organizations today are seeing the potential that social media has in contributing to the overall customer experience and many have integrated social into their customer service contact channels rather than allowing it to become siloed into a sales and marketing tool only.

However, more can and needs to be done to really take advantage of the service opportunity that social presents. I think that SMS/text had a similar opportunity but never really took hold as a true two-way customer contact channel, but that’s for another discussion.

I recently came across a post by J-P De Clerck on Optimizing the Social Experience and just had to share some of his findings. The following is excerpted from De Clerck’s views on touchpoint optimization and its role in the social experience.

Optimizing the customer journey means putting the customer at the center and aligning your goals with the windows of opportunity when customers are ready to be approached, touched and persuaded. And nowadays it’s often the opposite: they approach, touch and even persuade us. In a sense that’s what inbound marketing and a large part of social media tactics are all about. The customer journey is a connected one and includes peers and trusted advisors. We are not the center of the marketing universe, nor are our businesses or brands. The customer is, as are all touchpoints where we meet them, including the social ones.

This is not a major discovery but it’s an imperative most organizations don’t fully grasp yet as it’s so all-encompassing. And for many it’s a true Copernican revolution, when compared to the one-way approach they heralded for so long. Social has not changed this but it certainly speeded up the must of other models than one-to-many in a reality where many-to-many has become one of the social models of interaction.

When putting the customer and his journey first, the customer experience becomes the focal point of everything we do as marketers. And it’s not just about marketing. It’s about all customer-facing processes and functions, including social CRM and customer service. And it’s also the case in business and management where the customer can, for instance, be the employee.

The customer experience, touchpoints and conversion

The (end-to-end) customer experience is traditionally defined as the sum of all customer experiences a customer has with a business/brand.

A touchpoint is something else. W.H. (Hank) Brigman defined a touchpoint as “any influencing action initiated through communication, human contact or physical or sensory interaction.” His definition covers every “touch occasion” a customer can have with the brand, product, or service. Brigman’s examples include less-obvious touchpoints such as walking into a movie theatre and smelling popcorn, hearing pleasant music when shopping in a store, or being able to understand and easily cash in a coupon. You can imagine that with social media the number of touchpoints has largely increased.

The main touchpoint challenges for marketers

  • Mapping potential touchpoints as they occur in the context of the customer journey.
  • Defining the triggers that open a window of opportunity for persuasion/conversion/engagement.
  • Improving the various elements constituting potential touchpoints.
  • Having an integrated and channel-agnostic touchpoint approach since the customer experience overlaps media, channels, business functions etc.
  • Bringing the social and connected dimension into the equation.
  • Moving from a siloed approach to a connected or omnichannel approach, including social, among others in customer service (touchpoints).

Mutually valuable touchpoints are the moments of truth where conversions can occur. A conversion (e.g. from click to buy) is any action resulting from touchpoints and leading to (desired) outcomes. Integrated and customer-centric touchpoint oriented marketing is not new but it seems that only now it’s being discovered in the ‘social media expert space’.

When you want to work with touchpoint mapping or customer experience mapping you can use a tool that’s built to do exactly that. There are several ones on the market. An easy-to-use one I mentioned some time ago is TouchPoint Dashboard. However, you can also use Excel files, mindmaps or the features you find in some marketing software platforms for the enterprise.

Expanding the definition of conversions in a social world

Traditionally we looked at conversions from a sales funnel perspective. However, the stark increase in channels, consumer-controlled interaction possibilities and potential touchpoints, along with the increasing role of all customer-facing processes in marketing (remember customer service) and the social dimension, all require a model that better fits the customer journey reality. The funnel never really existed, that’s why it’s a model (that can still be used, just as the new funnel and customer journey models you see appearing since many years now).

Social media experts, for instance, have defined the concept of engagement, the social customer journey, the dynamic customer journey, you name it. Engagement, they say, is measured by actual outcomes. If we look closely at this, social engagement is nothing more than social conversion. The difference is that we still too often look at conversion from a simple linear perspective: search -> click -> buy. A second difference is that we need to broaden the definition of a customer in an era where you don’t only have to earn the buy.

The customer journey is not linear and conversions are composed of many micro-conversions occurring through various touchpoints, including social ones and indirect ones ABOUT your brand. Having someone to retweet a message you sent via Twitter, for instance, is a micro-conversion.

As these messages travel through the social Web and get retweeted, more micro-conversions happen. However, the value of each conversion differs per touchpoint and scenario. The overall value is defined by the combinations of micro-conversions from a customer journey and lifecycle value (or other marketing) perspective.

Customers Don’t Care How We Work

We still too often think in terms of channels, our organization, divisions and silos. Customers notice that and they don’t want to. They want to be treated in the same consistent way no matter where they interact with us.

They are channel-agnostic and expect brands to deliver upon their promises online, in-store, on social, on the website, when calling support, etc. Inconsistent and disconnected experiences negatively impact the overall experience and perception. Customers don’t want to know how we work. They want great experiences and will tell others about them.

Service is a Facilitator

The main result of the so-called customer empowerment is the simple fact that people are more informed when they get in touch with us, have more control over how and when they do so and over their time. Each touchpoint should be designed with the customer experience and how customers behave in mind.

We don’t say how things should happen, we make sure they can happen as the customers want them to. We facilitate the information gathering and buying journey, rather than sell. And it all starts with the very first impression we make in any touchpoint.

Consistency is Critical to Experience

It’s almost too obvious to write it: improving the customer experience in a consistent and continuous way simply is the path to more revenue, more positive word-of-mouth, a better brand reputation, more loyal customers and higher profit margins, etc. Unfortunately this simple fact and most powerful argument to focus on the customer experience remains undervalued as reports show year after year and regardless of tactics. Note there are two important words here: consistency and continues.

  • Consistency is about listening to your customers and making things easy for them, about removing obstacles and any possible doubt about what they are doing at any given point. It’s about integrated flows of improving across different steps in the journey. It’s about not saying ‘Click here to download our folder’ in your call-to-action and next sending people to your homepage. And, finally, it’s about your brand promise and story and how you stick to it.
  • Continuity is the must-have step-by-step approach in optimization, regarding conversions and beyond. As conversion marketing expert Bryan Eisenberg says optimization and improvement is not a one-off activity nor is it restricted to any kind of marketing tactics or business processes. Bryan’s concept of ‘continuous improvement’ is one of incremental changes of the customer experience that never ends.

There are thousands of tests and studies, indicating how a more personal approach, a more consistent and human customer experience and continuous optimization improve virtually all marketing parameters, regardless of the medium or tactic.

However, the basic premise is that 1) customers see our business as a whole that is constituted by all touchpoints and 2) that making the interactions and experiences worthwhile is paid back in hard cash. Because frankly, customers really don’t care that much – if at all – about you and your concerns, politics, turf wars, silos or channels. They want to get what they look and pay for and the service they deserve.

How customer-centric are you?

Now, how do you get started? How can you make your digital content, website and other online properties and tactics better and more aligned with your customer’s journey and preferences? Or in other words; how do you become more customer-centric and people-centric which is the real essence of social media marketing and often even social business?

Let’s start with a simple test to gauge how customer-centric and driven by customer experiences you are today. Ask yourself these questions and…answer them.

  • Do you spend a budget on optimizing conversion and customer experience that is comparable to the budget you spend on acquisition? (for every $95 businesses spend on generating traffic, they only spend $1 on conversion optimization).
  • Do you spend one fifth of your marketing budget on better serving your existing customers? (existing and satisfied customers are the largest untapped potential of brand advocates).
  • What percentage of your existing customers accounts for 80% of your revenue? How many of these people have you ever asked their opinion in person? Do you monitor the social profiles of your top 10% customers?
  • Do your employees get a bonus based on customer satisfaction?
  • Are you able to identify specific communities of customers or other people in the ecosystem of your business (e.g. bloggers or employees) and what they need from you so you can engage them and they can help you achieve specific business goals?
  • Can you describe in a somewhat detailed way what people you had in mind when developing your latest website or blog and do you know what touchpoints they use before buying?
  • Can your customer service agent access data about possible complaints customers made on a social network?
  • Have you ever developed a marketing strategy or program whereby you actually invited (potential) customers to know what they thought about it, whether it’s by including them in the taskforce or asking them by email or phone?
  • Can you name two keywords your – potential – customers use when looking for a product or solution similar to yours in Google?
  • Do you think I am able to find what I’m looking for when I visit your homepage in less than 4 clicks?
  • Have you ever researched what words your different types of customers use when you writing the content for your website?
  • Can you show me the names, profiles, potential social media accounts, transaction history and information preferences of your 3 largest customers in 10 minutes?
  • Are you able to adapt the content of your emails depending on non-demographic parameters such as previous interactions, expressed preferences, measured preferences, behavior on other channels, etc. of your subscribers?
  • Name at least two channels or tactics you use to listen to your customers or survey them at least once per year.
  • Can you tell me one particular action you took based on customer input in the last year?
  • Do you use buyer personas and/or customer experience mapping?

In practice, most businesses are unable to answer most of these questions. Start asking them, depending on the social and informational needs of your customers in the broadest sense today. It is all about customer-centricity and the power of community, service and customer experiences.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Flavio Martins
Flavio Martins is the VP of Operations and Customer Support at DigiCert, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise authentication services and high-assurance SSL certificates trusted by thousands of government, education, and Fortune 500 organizations. Flavio is an award-winning customer service blogger, customer service fanatic, and on a mission to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage win customer loyalty. Blog: Win the Customer!

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