Over the past half century, acquisition has been defined as a hierarchy of influences: a willingness to act by changing attitudes from awareness to interest. The AIDA formula and its variants form the basis (and often the unconscious basis) of most companies' customer acquisition activities. It's an inside-out process where buyers go through one "funnel" or "pipeline" at a time.
But research shows a different reality. Buyers now work in a parallel stream of activities to make purchase decisions. Let's call these streams exploration, evaluation, engagement, experience.
Consider buying a car. US car buyers spend about 13 hours online researching a car model before making a purchase, compared to just 3.5 hours at a dealership. However, more than 90% of cars are purchased through dealers. But the behavior of car buyers is changing because they can research prices, product reviews and other information online. More than 50% of them leave the dealership after needing a test drive to find out the car's current value. About 40% will not visit a dealership that does not display vehicle prices on their website, and about 40% will leave the dealership if the vehicle prices are not displayed on the website.
Data sources have changed customer expectations. Even when implemented with good intentions, many traditional practices inadvertently increase customer dissatisfaction. In addition, buyers typically use online tools as a complement to their sales pitch, not a substitute, and are discriminating in their use of these tools.
Understanding where customers are located, how they navigate your market feeds, and how you interact with them in a given feed is now essential to creating a good customer experience, and it makes an impact. Among other things, companies must move from a value chain to an experience chain. The value chain deals with the movement of goods from production to consumption. The chain of experiences starts with the customer and aligns the key touchpoints of the purchase journey spanning all channels. This goes beyond "experiential marketing," where brands emphasize how their products can make a customer's life easier or more productive. It is the path from need identification to evaluation, including purchase and after-sales activities.
Procurement is a parallel process
Instead of the traditional AIDA approach, buyers engage more with brands through the following (often asynchronous and simultaneous) activities.
Research: Buyers identify a need or opportunity and look for ways to fill it, usually by interacting with potential suppliers and researching information online. The activation of a need can be caused by internal triggers (for example, a system fails, a machine or other machine dies, a process fails, a new initiative is created). External triggers can be regulatory requirements, new technologies or new markets, or advertising and sales promotions.
Evaluation: Buyers take a close look at alternatives when identifying a need or opportunity through research, peer interaction, and/or coordination with potential supplier sales personnel. This activity is not primarily about determining the specific product or service they will buy, but rather about the best method and way (eg, build or buy, own or lease, etc.). Buyers compare many options, determine types of solutions and choose options.
Engage: Buyers are starting to communicate more with suppliers to help them make purchasing decisions. Depending on the market and product category, this could include uploading a content marketing form, sending a formal RFP (request for proposal) to B2B markets, or comparing with competing vendors. One effect of websites, blogs, chatbots, and social media is to make the seller's organization more visible to buyers, who now interact with multiple groups and expect the company to tailor those interactions to a purpose.
Experience: A formal purchase decision is made, buyers use the product and develop a value proposition. As more and more services and applications are integrated into products, this value, which marketers call "experience value", grows and only becomes apparent in actual use after the sale.
Access to Information and Technology
In the evolution of procurement tools, information is essential. In particular, technology can help in the following areas:
Content management system
Businesses hire content managers to create blogs, email campaigns, white papers, and other materials that drive traffic to a website and download information. This practice recognizes that the exploration and evaluation stages of the customer experience can be triggered by content relevant to the problem or opportunity. But about 70% of this material is never used because it's difficult to access and organize, and much of the resulting data ends up in what some call a "black hole of lead." What starts well is more likely to end well, but the early stages of customer interaction are overwhelming for many companies.
Sales enablement (SE) technology helps solve this problem. Content management tools from HighSpot, ShowPad and others organize and update content, reduce time and other operational costs for sellers, and allow customization of content for different categories. Many of these tools generate reports on how sellers interact with content, what collateral is used, how often and even how much time a seller spends on content, starting a cycle of continuous improvement in content production and distribution. . Frontline staff, in turn, can use these tools to display and track content consumed by the customer and gain better insights for timely and relevant follow-up actions that are critical to the customer experience.
Channel Management Software
Today's shopping is a process where customers touch multiple points in the sales funnel. Therefore, creating an engaging customer experience usually means working with partners before and after the sale. Make it easy for partners to contact your company. For example, if you sell through a broker channel, low friction and easy communication are just as important as commissions to get brokers' attention and engagement with your product. Often, companies send their products to a partner, but do not provide the materials necessary for effective sales. As a result, sales costs are higher, the available sales force ratio is lower, and the customer experience is negatively impacted.
Partner site creation tools that provide documentation, case studies, web demos, transaction log data, and other materials are becoming cheaper and more widely available. Channel marketing software allows partners to use your knowledge of your content, messaging, and demand generation efforts to attract their customers and fill orders for your products. Pandora, a music streaming service, sells media on its stations to local advertisers, small businesses and large corporations. Its more than 500 resellers are located in 35 cities in the United States and work with a variety of distributors who sell to a variety of companies and organizations. Customer experience is a process that involves multiple functions and transfers between different groups and sales channels, from inquiry to closing and after-sales service. In most businesses, this is a recipe for silent treatment and customer confusion. But at Pandora, assistive technology helps salespeople organize or execute a campaign for a customer with channel partners. Important information is captured in the system, including updated marketing content, sales and channel interactions, channel commission payments and billing information.
Also, in the media business, orders are given to work at specific times and stations in the future. Invoicing (and sales commission) occurs only when the ad is delivered. The Pandora system increases buyer and channel trust, freeing up time to focus on the customer instead of verifying the correct processing of customer service and incentive payments.
Measurement and fitting experience
Improvement requires feedback that can be used to drive alignment across teams and experience touchpoints But traditional survey methods for customer satisfaction feedback are limited and often confusing in the multi-channel shopping world. Surveys generate information about attitudes and preferences, not behavior, and there is a difference between what people say and what they do. For example, in a survey of more than 1,000 companies representing all industries, respondents indicated that their most important purchasing criteria were price and product features. However, further analysis showed that service and sales experience were the most important factors in their actual purchase behavior. The same goes for online interactions.
Technology can help provide more relevant and timely feedback. Enterprise platforms like Qualtrics, Medallia, inMoment, and others are tools for gathering feedback faster than traditional methods. Others offer technology that collects data from multiple communication sources (e.g., email, inbound marketing, content uploads, etc.) and helps determine the ROI of each source. From initial interest to distribution, companies like Sentah Track equipment; GetRev provides this type of tracking while using predictive AI algorithms to improve lead generation. There is the InnerView tool InFront, which is especially important for companies that sell through intermediaries. Brand transfer scores help assess whether desired brand experiences are aligned with channel partners, which places and people are positive or negative brand ambassadors, and provide continuous data to track the impact of change.
Another often-overlooked source of insight for improving the customer experience comes from ongoing conversations with customers — what some call "conversational intelligence." Companies like CallMiner, Corus, NICE, TalkMap, and others use real-time natural language processing tools to collect and analyze call logs, chat transcripts, and product documentation from call centers, sales pitches, and customer support teams. These technologies help clients become aware of the key determinants of customer experience, while their first-party data captures the "voice of the customer" in their own language, not an engineer's or an A-brand slogan. . Increasing privacy regulations and restrictions on customer data from Apple and others make this post increasingly valuable
These metrics help identify the root causes of satisfaction or dissatisfaction: Does the response depend on product, service level, channel issues such as vendor or retail location, website, or a combination of these factors? Trying to do this without the help of technology is an unnecessary hurdle.
The role of customer experience leadership
Information and technology are important, but they alone are not the answer to the management challenge of customer experience. Data interpretation and conclusions are key tasks. Effective leaders help people in their organizations manage change, thereby increasing their contribution and productivity. For this, leaders must complement the vision or mission with good organizational arrangements in areas such as priorities, people and processes.
priority
Communicating priorities to the frontline is highly correlated with business performance. priorities are related to competitive decisions that a company makes. some decisions are clear and defined in a plan or KPIs. But many of the decisions that affect the customer experience are embedded in day-to-day resource allocation decisions. For example, each budget includes decisions about who and what will receive more or less of the available resources. How does customer experience fit with your company's budget priorities? Each sales model decides: the money and time spent on research and maintenance of Account A are resources available for Account B, C, etc.
Prioritizing and communicating is a leadership responsibility. Many ambiguous or ambiguous decisions cannot be tested when market conditions change. People talk abstractly ("We care about our customers!"), while everyday behavior carries the illusion of sunk costs: wasting money after a loss. When priorities lie in the insight of a gifted leader, the alignment required for a compelling customer experience is only as strong as that leader's reach and as weak as the organization's weakest link.
Without a clear priority, people just get random hints about the strategy, and over time the company gets good at many aspects of customer experience but not great at one. and the essence of a competitive advantage is to excel at things that your target customers appreciate and that are difficult for others to imitate.
man
Technology is changing the way things are done around the world, and the frontline groups most involved in customer interactions (sales and service) are no exception. One study examined more than 95 million online job postings in the United States and ranked between 10,000 and 1 million postings as "best jobs" each year. Within this category, "sales representative" grew by double digits, as did "customer service representative." The most in-demand skills during the study period included 'general sales practice' (9% annual increase), 'general sales' (8%) and 'customer service base' (11%). . skills, so far, in job postings. Talking about talent management and the "future of work" without focusing on this important customer-facing task is idle talk.
Top leaders create the foundation for talent development in their organization. To keep talent relevant, companies must align recruitment and training initiatives with the desired customer experience. For example, as explained above, selling today often means working with channel partners on the omnichannel buying journey. But when sales reps have channel and sales responsibilities, the individual rep must be a manager, someone who gets things done through others. These skills are rarely taught in most sales training programs. How often are these questions part of your company's business review?
proceedings
A compelling customer experience is a set of processes, not a buzz word it requires minimal continuous customer feedback and then, after implementation, a relevant performance management process. Consider value: To realize true value, you need to tie together price, value, customer experience and frontline behavior. Does your sales compensation plan provide incentives for the necessary behavior? Do you have the data you need to connect value with customer experience drivers? How often do executives debate defining the value of the customer journey? Quarterly financial results are closely monitored in most companies. But the key driver of customer experience and the information needed to examine the bottom line—how frontline employees create and deliver value propositions—are often missing. Or worse, incentives undermine the desired experience. When a leadership team can't make these critical connections, they can push for better execution when the business truly needs a more market-relevant strategy or strategic direction change, at the cost of major disruption if it focuses on sales. fundamental
Managers cannot leave this process to chance. Your oversight is just as important here as the capital budgeting process. Leadership teams that fail to consider the impact of the purchasing process on the customer experience will inevitably share the fate of organizations where "customer centricity" is a persistent buzzword but not an organizational reality.
