Rethinking Customer Engagement to Create Competitive Advantage

For today’s executives, customer experience leaders and CXOs, the landscape, strategies, and tools of the trade have changed dramatically. Customer-centric companies, according to Forbes[1], are 60% more profitable than companies who don’t focus explicitly on their customers. Customer experience can provide and sustain competitive advantage across a broad variety of industries, from luxury automobiles to hospitality to healthcare to financial services. The strategies employed today merge technologies that didn’t exist a decade ago with processes and insights which have advanced dramatically in that same timeframe. Over the past several years, improvements in technology, methodology, and strategy have merged to give us entirely new and more impactful tools and practices for engaging our customers and assessing the efficacy of our products. The coming revolution in customer engagement is here and the weapons of that war are strategic, and they are digital.  

Here are a dozen ideas to consider as you develop your company’s strategy for customer engagement in the 21st Century…

1.      Loyalty is Earned – No business begins with a brand that commands loyalty, drives referrals, or accelerates repurchase intent. We can measure loyalty with tools like Net Promoter Scores or Customer Satisfaction Indices, but at the end of the day your customers most important votes are via their wallets, driven by the experience we deliver as the sum of our ability to deliver against our brand promise across all previous interactions with that brand. Loyalty typically takes a long time to build and is easily destroyed, so actively defining and curating your brand’s image and reputation over time is paramount to your brand’s success.

2.      Culture is Brand – In our increasingly transparent digital world, consumers choose whether or not to do business with a brand based on that brand’s culture, values, and business practices. Companies who act unethically, fail to protect their customers’ personal information, exploit workers, or abuse our natural resources do so at their own peril. 

3.      The Customer Journey is Cumulative – A customer’s actions at a given point in time are predicated by the full sum of interactions that customer has had with our brand to that point in time, whether controlled by us or others… Marketing messages, social media messaging, news stories, sales practices and channels, prior uses of our products and those of our competitors,… The cumulative aggregation of these positive and negative memories merge to drive our image of a given brand. Adding complexity to this, human perception subconsciously assigns greater importance to those events which occur during times of heightened emotional impact or stress. All these factors need to be identified and mapped throughout the customer lifecycle to truly have an impactful model of how and why customer perceptions change over time.

4.      Customer Feedback is Omnichannel – Technologies have emerged which allow consumers to provide instant feedback almost effortlessly to a business or to other consumers. No longer is a long, preformatted survey required to capture feedback long after a customer uses our product or service – Companies capture feedback today throughout the process via apps on our phones, active tools placed within the point of service, passive inputs measured against quantitative historical baselines from our peer group, even biometric markers indicative of a consumer’s perceptions and reactions to given products.  With our customer’s permission, we can capture volumes and breadth of insight once unimaginable and harness it to both improve our current products and expand our operating results with incredible efficiency and accuracy.  (The secrets to these enhancements, in turn, come from a variety of technological advancements described in the following paragraphs.)

5.      Big Data / Machine Learning is Here – With the costs of storage and speed of analytics accelerating almost daily, there is no excuse for not knowing who a given customer is, what experiences they’ve had with your products, what they’ve told you about their perceptions of those experiences, and what other related products and services are part of their lives. Moreover, we can extrapolate, based on this information about large numbers of customers, what they are likely to want, do, demand, and expect at given points in the future.  In the past, marketers would group customers into like groups to build approaches that might appeal to statistically predictable portions of that given demographic and psychographic subset of the population. Now the terabytes of data, across various sources can be merged, appended, and manipulated in entirely new ways to give us incredibly accurate snapshots of one given customer or household that allow us to engage them in much more successful conversations that convert at a much higher rate and volume to sales.  Over time, machine learning algorithms should refine our strategies to optimize our results based on the ever-changing and constantly improving data set before us.

6.      Voice/Text Analytics have Evolved – Common tools like Siri and Alexa can understand our words, in verbal and written formats, to capture (again driven by machine learning algorithms) what we are saying, asking, thinking.  The outputs of those analytics can be taken in real time to deliver enhanced results across future engagements but also to direct the immediate responses in the ongoing current interface with that customer. 

7.      Artificial Intelligence (AI) gets Human – We are rapidly approaching a day when we will not know whether we are communicating with a human being or an autonomous intelligence. Whether in the form of a phone call, text conversation, or even a video chat, artificial intelligence is quickly evolving to the point that they can root cause and direct conversations more efficiently than a well-trained human. The applications are endless, but for sake of this conversation, we should focus on the new abilities this brings to our ability to engage our customers… at any given time, in the communications form of their choice, with integrated text mining and instant routing to one or many end points in our business that can benefit from such information. 

8.      Apps and Wearable Technologies Apply – Whether you’re a doctor wanting to monitor medication adherence and efficacy for your patients or a consumer wanting to track the leaps and dips in your 401k, the smartphone in your pocket and the watch on your wrist are now far smarter than the sum of technologies that landed a human on the moon. Regardless of your industry and function, it is increasingly important to understand the rapidly evolving capabilities and expectations inherent in these consumer technologies and their implications on your business. Nearly half of all ecommerce, over 50% in some sectors, is happening via smartphones, with the numbers continuing to increase year over year. (In 2018, Statista reports over $200Bn in commerce was done via smartphones and smartphone apps.) For nearly every industry, device recognition and user experience on smartphones and tablets must be carefully considered as part of your online strategy if you want to be considered a viable business.

9.      Digital Marketing is Transformed – Decades of experience in sales and marketing have long been considered important precursors of a marketing leader’s future success, but that value has pivoted as the pace of change in the digital marketing world has exponentially accelerated. At this point, a 50-year-old executive without a good grasp on Google Analytics, PPC, Salesforce, and the Cloud are about as useful to their CMO as an 8-track tape and a pile of floppy discs is to a CIO. That doesn’t mean that experience has no value, but the pace of change has accelerated over the past decade at an unprecedented rate, making historical context alone useless. CMOs must carefully decide whether to add these talents to their team internally our blend internal capabilities with external partnerships and vendor relationships. For the small to mid-size company, this increasingly requires the outsourcing of certain aspects of operations to stay in front of the curve and at the same time maintain an optimized cost base.

10.  CRM Tools are Gamechangers – CRM tools including Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot and others have become intuitive and overarching powerhouses guiding our efforts to cultivate customer relationships across their lifecycle. For smaller businesses, several of these offer free options and trials, many with strong feature sets even in these ostensibly scaled back versions. Full-featured versions include incredible integrations with digital marketing tools, cloud data repositories, and other popular operating and financial systems. If you’re trying to track and manage customers across your sales funnel with old school files and spreadsheets, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice and costing the company a lot of money in the long run.

11.  Work is Done in the Cloud – Companies led by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others host a broad array of services and applications in the cloud, providing businesses big and small with immense power characterized by efficiency and security that most businesses can’t match on their own. By leveraging these services and the data tools they offer, you can integrate substantial information to understand each of your customers.

12.  Security & Compliance are Stakes of the Game – One security expert recently told me that every company is either taking steps to overcome a recent hack or is oblivious to the fact that they’re still being hacked. Customers will not do business with a company that they feel is cavalier with their personal information, ignorant of their social obligations, or failing in their adherence to the breadth of governmental regulations and compliance standards. Consumers don’t feel they should need to understand PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and a host of other acronyms representing standards and regulations governing the collection, maintenance, and use of customer information – All they know is that they EXPECT companies to protect and care for them in highly ethical and careful ways, without exception, in every regard.

Customer expectations today are entirely elevated, but thankfully so are the strategies, technologies and process expertise available to enable those elevated experiences today. Take Mobius, for example – Their CustomerCount? system has long been a standard for post-stay quality benchmarking surveys in the hospitality industry, but by rethinking their processes, applying recent breakthroughs in AI, SMS, cloud computing, and text analytics, and by delivering integrations with most leading operations and CRM systems, Mobius can now engage 1:1 with clients and their customers across a breadth of industries during key moments in their experience to assess and transform that guest experience in real-time, performing service recovery, quality benchmarking, and future sales prospecting effortlessly across millions of customer touchpoints annually and disseminating actionable insights securely, efficiently, and instantly. Similarly, global professional services companies like Accenture, Skookum, and DGMS Labs are helping both existing leaders and emerging market disruptors in healthcare and other industries transform the customer experience journey through strategic reinvention of key processes, integration of groundbreaking technologies, and application of digital tools across the customer lifecycle. By carefully cascading our strategic vision into better processes, technologies, and partnerships, then enhancing execution through effective real-time feedback loops and tools, each of us can find and maintain success in leveraging customer experience as an ongoing competitive advantage in our own company’s unique and lucrative market space.

The Author is a corporate leader, director, innovator, and growth strategist who has created new 100Mn+ businesses and product lines in each of several industries and he’s also successfully served executive strategic growth roles for global market leaders in other segments. He is currently helping guide a variety of startups and industry-leading corporations, including several of those mentioned in this article, through strategic transformation of product, process, and technology.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/09/24/50-stats-that-prove-the-value-of-customer-experience/#151c3de34ef2