A lively debate between five panel members – all with expertise in the above area – took place at our most recent masterclass at the end of September. Our five panellists were:
Maja Smith – Former Head of Customer Experience at Ford Motor Company – now Head of After Sales
Palesa Tshabala – GM Marketing and Head of Brand Experience at Nando’s
Heidi Brauer – CMO of Hollard Insurance
Haydn Townsend – Managing Director – Accenture Interactive
Kevin Power – Managing Director – Conversation Lab
With an audience of more than 35 agency and marketing executives in the audience, the debate got off to a flying start with viewpoints on where customer experience sits in an organisation. Does it belong to marketing? Or does it belong on its own but across the entire organisation – with marketing only involved in the communication aspects?
The panel had wide ranging views on this particular question – and all three of the brands commented that, although their respective organisations spent a lot of time collecting data from the customer journey relative to their particular companies, how to action this data and what it could mean was the much bigger issue.
More and more, customer experience needs to happen “in real time” not after the fact. This means that front line staff and executives need to be highly trained and highly skilled in solving issues. “No one remembers a perfect customer experience” said one panellist – but everyone remembers a bad or difficult situation that was resolved expertly, efficiently and with real empathy.
How can agencies help marketers with customer experience issues? And indeed can they?
Generally – the view was that agency partners need to be empowered by marketers to assist them in the quest but agencies need to spend time understanding the client’s business as well as the client understands it.
Is there a gap in the understanding of customer experience? Yes – the panel members concluded that agencies do not necessarily understand the customer journey as well as they could do.
Although the importance of customer experience has been around for many years, it has become more of a focus since the advent of online communication and social media and the ability of customers to be able to talk directly to brands. Having the fairly instant feedback, direct communication channels, has enabled more of the stakeholders in an organisation to understand what customers are looking for and what they need. There is a much greater level of two-way interaction. However – this often has to be focused on and forced across the organisation in order for those executives who do not have direct interface experiences with customers to understand better.
Tips on customer experience?
Customers do not want to fill out a form – they want immediate answers
Customer experience can be predicted and planned
Make sure everyone in the organisation understands that “ it takes a village to build a brand” commented one panellist
CX is the future – investment in this area is key and critical to success
Collecting the data is pointless unless you have tested the reason for collecting it first. Make sure that the data has a relevance and purpose and can be used in future – thus avoiding the mountains of useless data.
Tech has enabled CX so far but the intersection of tech and the human intervention is the critical point.