In this day and age of immense competition, when customers have the power and luxury of choosing from among competing brands, it is important to create a positive and memorable customer experience. Here are four things you need to consider.
Make it emotional.
People feel first before they think. In fact, the human brain processes emotional information five times faster than it does cognitive information. This is simply how we humans are wired and it has been an integral part of our coping and survival mechanisms throughout our evolution. This also happens to be extremely important to the marketing process and is at the core of emotional marketing.
Placing emotional markers along the road of your customer's journey makes the experience more memorable for them and is more likely to lead to sales. The emotion you want to focus on here is happiness. When people are delighted, they tend to act more positively on your messages and share the benefits as well. How do you create a customer journey that delights?
Ask yourself, "How easy is it to buy products from us?"
Analyze what make it difficult for customers to buy, then eliminate them.
Get feedback from your customers.
Act on the feedback.
Think about how you can make things better for the customer.
Reward people for delighting the customers. And create consequences for when they don't.
Put yourself in your customers' shoes and experience your customer experience.
Plug into your customer's lifestyle.
Weave your brand into your customer's lifestyle and allow them to "discover" you as they go about their day-to-day routine. These multiple touches go a long way to keep your brand top-of-mind and increase your chances of closing sales. Here are some things to consider to work your way into the customer's focus as he goes through his daily routines.
Integrate your customer's interests. For example, if you typically focus on capturing customer attention through technology-centric messages, you may want to try to spread the focus to include other interests, such as travel or sports.
Integrate online and offline modes of communication. This allows you to be "there" for your customers, wherever "there" may be. If your targets are on social media, then you need to be on social media. If they see a lot of billboards then you have to be on some billboards.
Feature relevant lifestyle content.
Find out what topics your customers are passionate about and include these in your content.
Focus on your customers, but do not let them lead you.
You cannot expect customers to tell you what they want for the simple reason that they do not always know what they want. It is actually your job to help them consider possibilities they never even imagined. Some years ago, Delta Airlines delighted their customers by bringing the lounge right to the gate. It had never been done before, and passengers had certainly never considered the gate as more than the place where you wait before boarding the plane.
Take in all available information, consider how to do things better, think out of the box and come up with crazy ideas that just might bring a smile to your customer's face.
Paint the big picture.
In their book "Made to Stick," Chip and Dan Heath write about how the agency Stone Yamashita helped HP pitch a proposal to Disney by creating a 6,000 square-foot exhibit about the life of a fictitious family and their visit to Disney World. HP expected the agency to highlight the features and benefits of their flagship products. Instead, Stone Yamashita created a concrete representation of how HP's technologies can drive Disney's entire business, end-to-end. What was originally thought to be a Powerpoint presentation turned out to be a living, breathing simulation of the immense possibilities.
You, too, can create opportunities for your business by going beyond the confines of individual products and opening your customers' eyes to possibilities they may not have imagined. Show them what these possibilities are and how your products and services fit into the big picture for them.
