Customer Experience And The ‘X Factor’

What makes great experiences break through the noise and have a deep impact on customers?

What makes great experiences break through the noise and have a deep impact on customers?

The X Factor.

The X Factor is what makes us “feel.” It’s what makes us laugh, cry, and connect with an idea. It turns commoditised content into standout digital experiences.

With a multitude of channels providing limitless options, having a breakthrough customer experience is critical. Powerful experiences impact how we interact, entertain, work, and relate to the world around us. It can be one-to-one–friends, family, and co-workers collaborating or engaging on social media–or one-to-many–B2C, B2B, teacher to students, government to citizens, artist to audience.

The X Factor content has three qualities:

• Personal: The experience understands who customers are, where they are, and what they like.
• Compelling: The experience captures the customer. This means it looks beautiful, inspires, is dynamic, and displays perfectly across devices.
• Ubiquitous: The experience reaches customers where they’re working, reading, watching, and purchasing. The experience finds them in a context that makes them curious.

These three characteristics can prove challenging for marketers, but, in many cases, technological approaches can help.

Making It Personal

Marketers often struggle to craft highly targeted content that resonates on a personal level due to a lack of strategic clarity. Business plans must map to digital goals, initiatives, or metrics. But without the right tracking platforms, it becomes impossible to measure performance.

By using technology to target specific audiences and map their digital behaviours, marketers have the ability to formulate digital KPIs and gain insight into a campaign’s performance. Understanding these metrics helps narrow the focus to the data most closely aligned with business goals.

Making It Compelling

The difficult process of creating the foundation to an experience that emotionally charges the receiver is made even harder when resources are disorganised. A lack of process commonly hinders campaign progress, and it can be tricky to find and use assets located in multiple repositories or stuck on single-user hard drives.

Centralised asset repositories are becoming the clearest answer, particularly for companies producing digital experiences. Clearly meta-tagged assets, streamlined collaboration on work-in-progress (WIP) and final digital assets will go a long way in addressing efficient resource management.

Making It Ubiquitous

For brands today, a seamless experience is the goal when reaching out to customers at all stages of the decision-making process. The challenge is to deliver these continuous experiences through an omnichannel approach. This can only be accomplished with the right systems; there is no excuse for marketers to use tools insufficient in measurements, automated content delivery, and search optimisation.

Creating a branded experience online that explicitly appeals to your audience is not easy. But if you equip your marketing team with the right tools to gauge the numbers, you will soon be delivering powerful, memorable, and consistent online experiences.