A monumental shift is ongoing in the marketing arena in terms of channels used by brands to reach out to consumers. Slowly but surely digital is taking over the world. It gives the traditional channels a run for their money, and the starting point of this transformation is the Customer Experience – CX. CX is a philosophy that takes into consideration every point of the journey a customer undertakes to buy or connect with Brands. Customer experience is not just a set of actions. It also focuses on feelings.
Therefore, the Brand is more relevant and important than ever before as the brand experience is a result of customer expectations from the brand – a constant cycle of expectations and experience and so on…
The expectations of service or quality set easily by constant advocacy from friends and relatives shared virally at the “touch of the screen” through a mobile device. The resulting experience better meet or exceed the expectations or it is an instant disaster for a brand. There are countless examples of unsatisfactory service bringing a brand an instant disrepute and loss of its market. One annoyed customer and the news spreads all over the internet.
Companies have meticulously built their brand image over the years. They now must work on a new paradigm of not only taking care of the product or marketing but organize and streamline the entire value chain across every touch point of the customer interaction:
- How does the company setup support its delivery?
- How does the after-sales service ensure that the customer gets maximum value out of the product purchased by him?
- Do all the departments of the company understand the profile of the customer?
- How do you recognize and acknowledge a customer (personalized) during every interaction across all the touchpoints?
Customers expect that the company values their time, and every interaction is handled in the same way and with the same service quality. Continuous interest and investment into the processes that meet the above objective is very important. This exercise must be undertaken by the company to make the brand experience a quality process enhanced across the company so that it is not people dependent, but people innovated through process excellence.
Never in the history of mankind, has so many communicating to each other to collaborate, share & search information, celebrate success, buy & sell goods and take part in many such transactions effortlessly to become a connected world. The digital therefore is a channel no company however small or big can ignore.
The endeavors to build a brand in the digital age consists of mapping the customer journey and segmenting the audience for personalization. Another aspect is the value a customer brings across her lifetime and therefore fostering the prospect ensures profitable return on the marketing investments.
The merit of technology in digital media is widely understood and it is not just about technology of the platforms but the technology of analytics.
Digital is a media, which stands out over traditional media in terms of getting insights of views, engagement and conversions through well-planned campaign analytics.
All said and done, the process of building a brand is more complex with the traditional media due to various reasons – communication clutter, platform deluge and the most important being the user interface being larger than the digital media and added to this is the ever-shrinking attention span of the user.
How to go about:
Understand the platforms: Website, Blogs, Social Media and other digital channels and its role across the promotional plans.
Channel relevance: Although different mediums can target different audience, it pays to be nimble and quickly adapt your messaging based on channel-specific needs and trends.
Customer Centric Process: Outdated department structures do not appeal to consumers anymore; When the client speaks, the company better present itself as a single face across all the interaction points.
Content: Customers like to consume content that is relevant to their lives. Developing content that is more about them than about the brand is the norm in content-driven marketing.
Research indicates that brands in today’s world are all about relevance and the companies who can strategize on building the brand on the lines of customer expectations will sustain in the decades to come…
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