Tag: customer experience

Posted on

Eight things your brand should be doing now

(instead of waiting for things to go back to normal)

It’s been a wild ride this year, and it’s not even over yet.  As a brand leader, you know that customer engagement is critical.

How can you guarantee customer engagement?

Great customer experience. 74% of customers cite good CX as key to their loyalty. Even more important: brands with superior customer experience deliver 5.7 more revenue than those that don’t.1

And what does great CX look like in 2020? Hint: it’s more than just a pivot to at-home deliveries and endlessly publishing your cleaning procedures.

The top 8 things you should have on your to-do list

  1. If you still have a message on your site or at your call centre that Covid 19 may mean longer wait times, you’re already too late. Customers know that the pace and power of technology mean that you’ve had more than enough time to get your organisation working professionally, even if it is remotely.
  2. Have you updated your marketing strategy to reflect how customers are living and working these days? Pressure on budgets might mean that you are reluctant to invest, but communications and materials that don’t reflect current customer emotions won’t have cut-through. That doesn’t mean it has to be sentimental; after all, your brand might be the one they rely on for a laugh or an escape. It just needs to connect emotionally to your audience.
  3. Keeping customers engaged still means delivering a great experience. During the first wave of crisis meant swift and compassionate action. Now it means reacting to new customer needs and wants. Are they now more engaged with your brand? Is your current model working for them?
  4. How have your customers changed during this year? The pandemic has led many to reflect on what’s genuinely important to them.  Have you updated your customer knowledge? Do your customer journey maps still reflect what they are thinking, feeling and doing now?
  5. Most of your customers have had their freedom of movement restricted due to lockdowns. This has fundamentally changed their ideas of their local area and the importance of travelling freely.  How does your brand fit into their new view of what’s local and what’s worth travelling for?
  6. Limitations in delivery and stock may have meant that even your loyal customers have tried alternatives.  Do you have a plan to keep your loyalists true?
  7. New customers may have used your brand for the first time for the same reason. Do you have a plan to convert these triallists to repeat customers?
  8. Have you measured the impact of your brand’s virtual experiences? You may have created them quickly to respond to this situation, but many have been astonishingly creative and even game changing. If you’ve helped educate, entertain or alleviate stress with virtual experiences, can you make them a permanent part of your brand?   
  9. Bonus thought: if you are still using the word unprecedented, strike it from your style guide immediately. It may be apt, but surely is the most over-used and underappreciated word this year.

If your brand needs strategic support to improve your customer experience, don’t hesitate to contact us here at Green Gables.

1Blake Morgan in Forbes, 50 Stats that Prove the Value of Customer Experience
Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst 

Posted on

There’s still no substitute for strategy

The wave of tech innovation has left no stone un-turned, including, and maybe even especially, marketing.
The best marketers and brands have embraced the new technology, using data science and AI to understand more about their customers’ behaviours and future desires.
Amazing platforms have enabled marketing to move from mere automation to best in class experiences using journey orchestration and astounding tracking and reporting.

It’s time to stop

However, somewhere in the rush, some brands have left behind the truly critical element of strategy. It’s worth stopping for a moment and considering if you and your brand have an actual strategy in place before you rush to use that great new platform.

Is a weak strategy holding you back?

Before creating content and crafting your messaging, pause for a moment. Are you sure that you have a strategy that takes your brand to the right customer? And have you tied this to the correct commercials so that you know exactly which customers will be the most profitable? Do you know when and where they are likely to purchase and why? Only when you have a sound strategy can you create content that works. The clearer and tighter your goal is, the better your content will be. And if you are working with agencies, you’ll see that clear strategy makes for tighter briefs that deliver the superior content you need.

Acquiring customers is just the first step

If you’ve got your customers aware and purchasing, you are on your way. However, many marketers focus on the short term: driving more acquisition. But you also need a strategy that gives your customers a clear path from purchase to repeat purchase and then ultimately on to becoming loyal and even advocates for your brand. If you’re a product with a long sales cycle, this is critical. You need to know how to keep them engaged during the fallow periods and even how to maximise them by getting them talking about and recommending your product.

No rest for the wicked (or the marketer)


Don’t be tempted by the pleasure of content creation. It can be the most fun part of what you do but your job won’t be done unless you are constantly evaluating your results. Measuring your success is only possible if you go into your campaigns with a clear vision and KPIs. And once your marketing is in place, you’ll need to revisit it regularly to make sure that it matches the company’s goals and future products. How will new products affect your customer mix and marketing approach? Depending on the brand’s future, you will need to make adjustments to your approach.

CX is critical

Customer experience is of course at the heart of this, but without strategy, you can easily be led into a path of CX that is too generic or too static. If you have a clear strategy for your customers, you’ll have a map to success. You’ll be able to create the perfect customer experience using those shiny new tools.

Has this got you thinking? Get in touch if you want to discuss your strategic approach.

Image credit (with thanks) : Samantha Hurley via Burst

Posted on

Why Customer Journey mapping works

If you’re committed to customer experience, you’ve no doubt been told that customer journey mapping is critical.

There’s a ton of resource out there to help you learn how to do customer journey maps, with a wide variety of styles and tools to make it easy.
The essential elements of the journey map are simple: a brief overview of the customer profile and needs, the actions or task that you are mapping and then a breakdown of what the customer is thinking, feeling and doing.

So why is it such a powerful tool? After all, on the surface, none of these elements are ground-breaking. You’ve more than likely been researching these facts about your customer for years. You’ve got research, NPS and analytics.

Everything in one place

The genius of mapping is that it brings all of your data into one place and forces you to map it against what your customer is actually doing.
Time and time again, when mapping with clients, one thing becomes immediately clear: what we think the customer wants and needs is inevitably NOT correct.

We’re missing pieces. We might know precisely what pages they land on, what content they consume and what they end up purchasing. But we may not understand why they do it or how they are feeling when they do.

Transformation using gaps

And looking at the gaps starts a powerful transformation : departments have to work together to collate all the sources of customer information that exist to find the answer. Perhaps NPS might fill in a piece of the puzzle but product marketing’s last round of research might be the other piece you’re missing.

By forcing you to look at the entire customer experience in the round, every department in your company sees how they contribute to the whole. And what might be missing: amazing customer service and next day delivery might not trump product longevity or colour choices.

Which leads to the ultimate reason that journey mapping is genius: it leads naturally to a discussion of opportunities for your company to improve customer experience.

  • Where can you improve?
  • What parts of the experience needs to be prioritised?
  • Are there products and services that you offer that might address what your customer feeling or thinking now?
  • Is there an opportunity to create new communications or even new products?

Feel the power

Simple on the surface, but powerful. You can of course, do customer journey mapping on your own, but it’s always better if you work across your organisation to produce them so you can challenge and push yourself and your company to be the best.

Image by Matthew Henry from Burst.com







Posted on

Should you be thinking about Customer Experience instead of marketing or branding?

Customer Experience (CX) is the sum of every interaction your customer had with your brand.

Yet for too long, the brand team, marketing and product owners have been on separate trajectories, at best meeting regularly to share updates or at worst, to stake their claim to the right to control various elements of the experience. Many people are still thinking of CX as something that customer service or the digital team is responsible for, whereas it should be the one universal language.

One language

As branders and marketers, we believe that the company’s mission or purpose should give everyone a common set of goals and language, but as customers it is often clear that this is not enough. Customers can love the brand but find the product difficult to use. Even a superior product drops to the bottom of our lists if buying it isn’t simple or quick. Compelling marketing can get us all talking but if the information you need to decide if it’s the right product isn’t easy to access, it’s not effective.

A CX Vision

A Customer Experience strategy gives you a vision of what your entire CX should be. It gives you a vision of what the experience should be at every stage of the customer relationship AND it gives teams both the knowledge and the tools to craft every detail of it. It can also identify when and where your customer experience might be failing and how you can change it to acquire the customers you crave.

CX tools will unite the power of branding, marketing and product development to the benefit of not only the customer, but your bottom line.

Image by Matthew Henry from Burst.com