Opportunities Enter When Marketers Open Up To CX

Consumers have growing demands and expectations raised by what they can do with other brands. How do you keep up, build the right culture, and master complex customer journeys?

Customer experience is the single most important opportunity for marketers in 2017.

That was the key finding pulled out of Econsultancy’s Digital Trends 2017 Briefing by the firm’s research director Jim Clark at Adobe’s CX Forum in London (Adobe is CMO.com’s parent company).

“The focus on customer experience shows no sign of abating, and it’s driven by brands like Uber and AO.com,” he said.

Clark highlighted the approach taken by Domino’s Pizza.

“Domino’s has changed the way it thinks, from being a pizza company to being an ecommerce company. As a result, they’re seeing 60% of orders coming through digital, and half of those coming through mobile.”

At the same time, Clark pointed out a shift in attitudes to the digital transformation that underpins the delivery of great customer experiences. The research found the proportion of companies that said they were digital-first fell from 14% in 2015 to 11% in 2017, while the proportion that said that digital “permeates most of our marketing activities” increased from 42% last year to 46% this year.

Clark attributed the drop in the number of companies saying they’re “digital-first” to a growing understanding of the difficulties involved. At the same time, he suggested that the growing number of companies saying that digital permeated most of their marketing reflected the increased use of software-as-a-service and cloud-based solutions.

Culture Clash

He also talked about a marked difference in opinion regarding building the culture required to support great customer experiences. The research found that 12% of companies think culture change is the hardest part, while almost the same proportion (13%) think it’s the easiest. This, Clark suggested, reflects the different types of companies surveyed, some of which are struggling with legacy systems, not using SaaS-based approaches, or having problems with skills.

“Skills are key to engendering cultural change,” he said. “Companies are looking for ‘full-stack’ employees, people who have in-depth knowledge of specific channels, but who can also see the big picture. But people like that are hard to find.”

This point came up again later in the session. Jamie Brighton, product & industry marketing manager at Adobe EMEA, emphasised that skills and technology have to go hand in hand.

“We’re seeing the rise of the data scientist,” he said. “They’re coming into marketing from other industries as marketing is increasingly seen as a credible career for them.”

Clark also highlighted the importance of having the right people in customer service roles, citing the approach of white goods etailer AO.com as an example.

“They realised you can’t pay people to be nice to customers, so the focus is on hiring the right people from the start,” he explained. “They believe in treating everyone like you’d treat your grandma, and they also empower customer service staff to solve people’s problems when they call.”

Segmenting The Customer Journey

In a subsequent breakout session, delegates heard how segmenting its audience was one of the biggest steps taken by budget accommodation booking platform Hostelworld to improve its customer experience.

The company, which acts as the booking gateway to 30,000 hostels worldwide, splits its marketing communications into four stages: “welcome,” “engage,” “grow,” and “retain.”

“‘Welcome’ is when they first come to the site and make their first booking,” explained David Dwyer, who works in the CRM team for the Hostelworld Group. “‘Engage’ is prior to arrival; ‘grow’ is about deals and offers while they’re there; and ‘retain’ is reminding them to come back.”

The data captured at each stage is fed into an analytics dashboard and spread through the business automatically and in real time.

“The life cycle stages are based on what customers tell us,” Dwyer said. “We keep all the data and mine it for information to reinforce the changes we make to the customer experience.”

Bringing Data Together

The biggest challenge Hostelworld faces here is pulling data together from different parts of the organisation. Cathy Thomson, Hostelworld’s head of CRM and customer insight, explained that the group was addressing this by setting up a cross-business customer experience group.

“We’re focusing on pilot projects to help us systematise the way we work with data,” she said.

Hostelworld is already innovating on the back of the data it collects.

“We’re starting to do things like sending reminder emails to people who leave the site without making a booking,” Dwyer said. “We want to involve customer service in this too.”

And as part of the “engage” part of the customer life cycle, the group is using real-time data to allow emails to carry different information when they are opened on successive occasions. Dwyer gave the example of an email that, if opened before arrival, would have details of the accommodation the customer had booked, but, if opened after arrival, would show information about local attractions. The group is also building what Dwyer calls recommender engines to personalise this information.

Start Small, Start Big

In another breakout session, Chris Worle, digital strategy director of Hargreaves Lansdown, the U.K.’s largest online platform for private investors, explained to delegates that the great challenge the organisation faced in improving customer experience was complexity.

Hargreaves Lansdown was finding that its customer journeys had become more complicated with the rise of tablets and mobiles as additional channels to voice and online, which had previously been dominant. At the same time, its customer base had grown substantially and so, too, had its range of products. As a result, it was far more difficult to give consumers a seamless experience during a typical 11-month research period across three or more devices before they make their first purchase.

Worle’s quandary in addressing this problem was where to start. After a couple of small projects to improve aspects of the desktop and mobile sites, he told delegates that the company hit on the mantra “start small, start big.”

“You need to pick a small part of the website or app, but one which is really important so the impact will be big,” he said. “Pick where most of your customers are focused, work on that, and test the results.”

This approach was put into action when designing the company’s new home page. It has been simplified for non-customers to prevent visitors being put off by the wall of financial information customers receive. Twenty-four versions were tested 370,000 times before today’s look and feel was rolled out, leading to a rise in conversions of 39%.

Meeting Expectations

Worle also picked up on the point made by Econsultancy’s Clark that customer experience is not just about a brand and its customers alone. The public will have expectations raised by what they can do with other brands, so standing still is never an option.

“We thought our app was great, but we started getting awful reviews,” he said. “People were moaning about long-winded logging in and not being able to use their thumbprint. The world had moved on, but we hadn’t, so we’ve just rolled out a new version of the app to meet these expectations. It has been a lesson to us. Your customer experience will not just be judged by what you offer, but what anyone else lets customers do.”

For more on the Digital Trends 2017 report, see Seamless CX Calls For Change.