Market research shows that improving customer experience improves loyalty, advocacy, and spending, but it’s still difficult to tie back investments in overall customer experience to ROI within your organization. Marketers often have to rely on aggregate industry data to support the case for making these investments. Unfortunately, if you can’t get a customer experience practice going at your organization, you might end up on the wrong side of the Peak-end Rule.

Smart marketers understand that it’s no longer about overloading communication channels with top-down messages. As brands proliferate, diversity, and serve niches in the market this mass-market approach becomes less and less effective, and reduces customer experience though cluttering, irrelevant, and interrupting experiences. The landscape in which marketing works has fundamentally shifted, and our tactics must change accordingly. I argue that the solution is to focus intensely on customer experience and satisfaction. In order to do this, we must understand the forces that are changing the landscape.

• LOSS OF CONTROL:  Marketers no longer own the brand, their customers do. Not only that, many have lost their handle on communication channels through the proliferation of consumer generated media. Customers are empowered now, and marketing needs to transform itself into an amplifier of the customer’s voice within the company.
• MORE COMPLEXITY: it’s more challenging to create consistent experiences across channels and touch-points, because there are more of them. Marketers need to focus less on developing messages, and more building a platform to support existing conversations with resources that drive continuity.
• GREATER PARITY FOR PRODUCTS AND PRICE: With more competition in niche markets, feature sets are no longer the primary driver of competitive advantage. I like to say, “the feature wars are over” because we’ve entered the era of customer experience. Marketers need to develop a solid customer experience assessment practice.
• INCREASINGLY CRITICAL: More brands serving smaller niches means customers can be increasingly critical and discriminating. It also means there is less tolerance for poor experiences because there are lower barriers to exploring other options. Marketers need to leverage their platform to return value to customers in exchange for their input.

I like the expression “feel first, think second” because it emphasizes the need to listen to customers before acting. The thinking part is about building the infrastructure to be able to channel the voice of the customer into your organization. This is no small task because many of the internal organs within organizations are not used to, or set up to, get direct feedback from customers. Part of the challange that marketers face is how to take re-articulate the customer’s perspective in a way that is palatable and valulable to internal business units.

If you have an example of how you’ve re-articulated the costumer perspective in a way that drove change at your organization, please share!