These days we hear a lot about the customer journey. But too often companies only think about addressing this journey from a marketing perspective. The true customer journey cuts across every stage of the customer life-cycle; from pre-sales and purchase, through to loyalty and advocacy.
What defines the customer experience?
The customer experience is the overall experience a customer has with your organization. Obviously, the better an experience you can deliver, the better your engagement with the customer and the more you each get out of the relationship. And that means everyone across the company, in every department, has to contribute to that customer expectation.
As a result, when organizations are looking for solutions that help them deliver a fantastic customer experience, they need to consider ones that support much more than customer acquisition. They need solutions that take into account customer support, finance, and more. And they need solutions that support the language of their customers as they expand into new global markets or further penetrate existing markets.
How can companies deliver on this vision?
Relevancy and contextualization are still pertinent factors beyond the marketing piece. These days, the customer experiences most interactions across marketing, sales and service in a digital manner. To enable this - and drive a seamless, transformational experience across marketing, sales and support - the ideal solution unites multiple marketing solutions such as those for Web Content Management, Multi-Channel Campaigns, Experience Optimization and Media Management to name a few.
Here's how this plays out across marketing, sales and support:
Delivering contextual campaigns
Delivering a transformational experience when it comes to marketing hinges on the ability to seamlessly execute campaigns that are delivered at the right time, to the right place, and in the right context. The ideal solution makes it possible to develop and call upon a common profile that provides intelligence about that prospect or customer depending on where they are in journey. The fuel for delivering a contextual campaign is the ability to share data across all the points of interaction an organization has with these prospects and customers.
Ensuring an Optimized eCommerce Experience
When it comes to a transformational sales experience, companies can make sure that they unite commerce and content to ensure a more interactive, engaging and visual experience. Today's online shoppers expect an experience that is just as visually engaging and inspiring as when they go shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. The key is to focus on the entire customer experience and integrate your strategies around content and rich media with merchandising and personalization practices. Make sure shoppers online can quickly find what they're looking for, and provide personalized recommendations for other items.
Supporting Self-Service
To deliver a transformational support experience, companies need to satisfy the expectations of customers accessing support documentation via the Internet and smartphones. They want on-demand, personalized and highly interactive technical documentation. Businesses that deliver this type of electronic documentation can help their customers easily find the help they're looking for, tailored to the products they purchased and their interests. By providing relevant, accurate and personalized content, companies will be viewed more favorably by their customers.
What solution enables these transformational experiences?
To enable a truly seamless, contextual experience, organizations need a solution with all these features tightly integrated rather than loosely coupled.
Why is this so important? If you buy loosely coupled solutions, someone in your organization needs to spend time integrating them to enable the seamless, transformational experience. That's the first hurdle. Once any of these third-party solutions are enhanced by the original developer, your organization needs to decide whether or not to upgrade to take advantage of the new functionality. If the answer is 'yes,' the next concern is whether or not all the integrations still work. At the very least, whoever handles application implementation and maintenance for your organization will likely need to conduct a round of testing every time you choose to upgrade. And these days, marketing moves so quickly, with a seemingly endless stream of new devices and channels and ways to reach and engage buyers.
The best solution is one that can support that ever-changing marketing landscape without putting any burden on your organization to make it all work.
If those solutions are pre-integrated out of the box, you're more easily able to drive or guide prospects on their journey from anonymous to known to customer to advocate. For instance, in an eCommerce scenario, you'd be able to seamlessly execute a campaign that starts when the prospective customer conducts a web search. Should she visit your site and then abandon the shopping cart, you could follow up to present an offer that entices her to make a purchase - without missing a beat. And after the purchase, you could stay in touch with her to present fitting offers and content that keeps her a satisfied - and repeat - customer.
Look for a vendor that provides all the solutions that make it possible to deliver transformational experiences across the entire customer journey and a technology provider that is continually evolving to keep pace with the changing requirements of you and your target customers.
Image: Magec
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