Mailchimp's Gene Lee discusses how seamless customer experience will not be achieved without collaboration and integrated workflows, and how designers can effectively solve for fragmented customer journeys.
Customer loyalty is no longer based on price or product. Instead, their loyalty lies with companies that provide the best customer experience (CX).
According to the 2017 Gartner Customer Experience in Marketing Survey, in two years’ time, 81% of marketers expect to be competing mostly or completely on the basis of CX.
With that, if companies cannot keep up with increasing customer demands, it’s very likely they’ll lose customers.
Enterprise tech companies today are dealing with more challenges than ever in creating a seamless CX throughout the entire customer journey — from marketing and sales, to product, to customer service, and beyond.
Additionally, in today’s hyper-connected world, it’s common for consumers to move between channels and devices daily, making it even more challenging for marketers to create a unified experience.
The key to creating a seamless CX is ensuring every touchpoint a customer has with a brand is personalized, relevant, timely, and connected.
While designers are appointed to tackle this challenge, they’re not the only ones responsible.
Every department needs to buy-in and prioritize it to avoid operational silos and a fragmented CX.
Simply put, CX strategy must focus on the mindset of the user and how the pieces all fit together.
Let’s break down the components that make up a solid CX strategy and discuss how a holistic CX cannot be achieved without collaboration and integrated workflows.
Customer journey mapping is helpful for businesses to truly see things from the customer perspective, who your customers are, what their pain points are, what pushes them to make a purchase, and ultimately how their experiences can be improved overall.
It’s important to map out a customer’s holistic journey in detail — from interface, to emotional intent, to data points — breaking down the barriers of marketing, product, customer support, etc.
From there, teams should focus on how these features and touchpoints work together to deliver a connected experience, rather than focusing on perfecting the individual features themselves.
Disney is a brand focused on the business of selling experiences, not just rides.
It is a prime example of how data insights from journey mapping can be leveraged to cater to the customer and enhance their overall experience.
Although they have millions of customers worldwide, they ensure every single touchpoint is magical and personalized to the individual.
Disney leverages data, such as birthdays, meal preferences, celebration moments, park visits and more, to provide ways to anticipate customer needs.
For example, a common pain point when visiting a Disney park is the never-ending lines. It aims to address that issue with the FastPass service.
Creating personas is another way to gain an understanding of users’ needs, experiences, and behaviors.
Personas are fictional customers, created based on research in order to represent a user type that might use your product and services in a certain way.
Qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific segments.
Personas will help ensure you’re always starting with the customer problem or “jobs to be done”.
This is a good way to get started while parallel tracking on setting up voice of the customer programs.
Businesses should have a solid content strategy with a consistent message and unified voice.
When approaching customers, tone should be adjusted based on the situation, context, channel, and who they’re speaking to.
For example, you might use one tone when you’re out to dinner with your closest friends, and a different tone when you’re meeting with your boss.
Your tone also changes depending on the emotional state of the person you’re addressing.
You wouldn’t want to use the same tone of voice with someone who’s upset as you would with someone who’s laughing.
In addition, your tone over email may be more formalized than if you were communicating with someone live over chat or over the phone.
CX is not only the responsibility of the respective product and design teams, but the responsibility of the entire company.
Setting accountability, incentives, and goals that focus on a seamless experience across the organization blends operation and execution to create a unified focus on the experience.
When teams aren’t siloed into different parts of the customer journey, it’s easier to gain a solid understanding of customer emotion to be able to address their needs holistically.
It’s inevitable that more customer touchpoints will continue to emerge and challenge the experience, which is why it’s crucial for companies to invest in a purposeful foundation designed to accommodate that seamless CX.
Gene Lee is the SVP of CX and Design at Mailchimp. Partnering closely with marketing, product, engineering, and customer support, Gene and his team are responsible for connecting the dots across Mailchimp’s brand to drive customer loyalty and continued brand affinity.
