You may have heard this statistic about the importance of the customer experience, but it is certainly worth a reminder – “By 2020, the customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.” In fact, 86% of buyers are already willing to pay more for a better customer experience. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, improving the customer experience brings some very real benefits.
According to research by Genesys, the top three reasons why businesses stated that they proactively manage and invest in customer experiences are to:
- 42% – Improve customer retention
- 33% – Improve customer satisfaction
- 32% – Increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
As companies are expected to compete mainly on the basis of customer experience, one of the most important tasks will be to ensure consistent multi-channel communications.Aberdeen Group Inc. claims that companies with the strongest multi-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak multi-channel strategies.
Companies with strongest multi-channel strategies retain an avg. of 89% of their customers.
;With more consumers today starting their purchase journey on mobile devices, marketers must place renewed emphasis on optimizing the mobile experience as part of a successful multi-channel strategy. According to a Mobile Consumer Study by Adobe, “Today’s mobile users have an insatiable appetite for mobile satisfaction—and companies that miss the mark are consequently folding to the competition. If consumers can’t find what they want, when they want it, they’ll find another brand in as little as two minutes who will deliver.”
Failure to deliver a great mobile experience can cause missed opportunities and lost revenue. According to WOW Local Marketing, 52% of customers are less likely to engage with the company because of bad mobile experience. Because a poor mobile interaction can be so detrimental, 84% of customer-centric companies place extra emphasis on the mobile customer experience.
Understand Your Customer’s Needs
An exceptional mobile experience certainly encompasses tactics such as ensuring websites are mobile-optimized, emails use mobile-friendly design, and loading speed and other design elements are optimized. But to truly cater to mobile consumers, businesses must understand these consumers, what drives them, and the context in which they are using mobile devices.
For example, are they using their mobile devices to buy products, or to research products to later purchase online or in store? Do they use mobile to research across multiple sites, check social reviews, search on a brand’s website, or to perform local search for a phone number and directions to a brick-and-mortar location? Or do they use mobile for all the above?
Just as important as understanding how mobile is used across the purchase journey is understanding consumers on a deeper level – their overall online and offline behavior, demographic and lifestyle characteristics, and what influences them to purchase. Knowing what motivates consumers is challenging, and according to IBM research, just under half of businesses (48%) say they have a good understanding of the types of content that make people more likely to buy, the reasons for making a purchase (43%), and the value of visitors from different sources of traffic (48%).
Why Personalization Matters
Mobile users consider their devices to be a part of themselves. A study of mobile behavior by ExactTarget found that 85% of respondents said mobile devices are a central part of everyday life, signifying connectivity to all that’s going on in their world. Mobile connectivity also represents personal space that can be customized to meet one’s needs. Companies must ensure that their messages to mobile consumers are also personalized based upon consumer behaviors, demographics, interests, and according to their stage in the purchase journey.
Consumers research and interact with multiple brands along the purchase journey and will seek out those companies who can deliver a deep level of engagement and rich experiences. This requires that marketers have the proper blend of consumer insights and real-time information, such as in-the moment browsing data, content downloads, or interactions with emails. In the online world, reacting and engaging with on-the-go mobile and digital consumers quickly and with relevant messaging is challenging. In fact, 33% of marketers cite delivering relevant and contextual challenges as one of their top challenges in optimizing the customer experience.
Marketers can implement technology solutions to perform data integration, advanced analytics and real-time campaign deployment within a single platform. Rather than having separate solutions for data management, channel execution, analytics, and so on, a single platform can perform all these functions to help marketers get to the right insights faster in order to deliver automated and contextual messaging at the right time. In doing so, marketers can create a highly personalized and relevant experience for their mobile consumers.
According to an interview with Simon Horton, founder of ShopIntegrator, “Mcommerce is seen as a quicker, easier and more convenient alternative to other shopping channels, and mobile customers are not tolerant of anything less than that. Getting the mobile customer experience right can open up a number of doors for businesses across their other channels.”
Download our Customer Experience Marketing Strategy Guide and learn best practices to gain more wins on the customer experience battleground.
