Four Imperatives for Great Customer Experiences

Every suc­cess­ful busi­ness starts with a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. The more you take a holis­tic view of your cus­tomers, and focus on delight­ing them every day, the more time they’ll spend with your brand. And that means they’ll also be more like­ly to buy from you again, and to tell their friends to do the same.

In fact, stand­out expe­ri­ences are more crit­i­cal than ever in today’s mar­ket land­scape. We’re in the mid­dle of the expe­ri­ence-busi­ness wave right now. This new bat­tle­ground is where we expect busi­ness­es to con­tin­ue to com­pete for the fore­see­able future.

Through­out this series of arti­cles, I’m going to be analysing the process of becom­ing an expe­ri­ence busi­ness, from a wide range of dif­fer­ent angles. Here’s an over­all view of the main con­cepts we’ll be exploring.

Good expe­ri­ence, good business

Just three years ago, only one third of com­pa­nies said they com­pet­ed pri­mar­i­ly on the basis of their cus­tomer experience—but this year, that num­ber has risen to 90 per­cent. If you’re not tak­ing steps to become an expe­ri­ence busi­ness, you’re going to get left behind.

Time and again, research has demon­strat­ed that great cus­tomer expe­ri­ences result in sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness results. Com­pa­nies that are cat­e­gorised as “expe­ri­ence lead­ers” have net pro­mot­er scores 22 per­cent high­er than those rat­ed as “expe­ri­ence laggards”—meaning cus­tomers are far more like­ly to rec­om­mend their prod­ucts and ser­vices to others.

But the process of becom­ing an expe­ri­ence busi­ness takes not only time, but also a deep, robust under­stand­ing of your cus­tomers. That’s why we at Adobe empha­size four over­all imper­a­tives to busi­ness­es as they start out on this journey.

The four imperatives

First of all, con­text must be the start­ing line. In our own lives, we all intu­itive­ly think in terms of context—every expe­ri­ence hap­pens at a cer­tain point in our day, while we have cer­tain oth­er things on our mind. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ences don’t occur in a vac­u­um; and the bet­ter you’re able to under­stand con­text at scale, the more rel­e­vant your inter­ac­tions with cus­tomers will be.

This plays into the sec­ond imper­a­tive, which is to design for speed and scale. It’s cru­cial to evolve your data strat­e­gy into a con­text strategy—to analyse mil­lions of cues at any giv­en moment, and deliv­er the right mes­sage in response to each. This means you’ll need to rethink your glob­al con­tent work­flows, from ideation all the way through to delivery.

We all know that our rela­tion­ships with our cus­tomers aren’t based on sin­gle inter­ac­tions, but on a series of inter­ac­tions that hap­pen across mul­ti­ple devices and chan­nels, and affect mul­ti­ple depart­ments with­in our organ­i­sa­tions. Thus, the third imper­a­tive is to mas­ter the milliseconds—because that’s where great cus­tomer jour­neys happen.

The final imper­a­tive is to inte­grate to innovate—put the cus­tomer at the cen­tre, and use tech­nol­o­gy as a cat­a­lyst to break down the silos that exist in your organ­i­sa­tion, by uni­fy­ing data, con­tent and work­flows. The more these silos break down, the bet­ter able your teams will be to share data across depart­ments and plat­forms, and use every avail­able resource in a sin­gle inte­grat­ed strategy.

By pri­ori­tis­ing these four imper­a­tives, you and your teams will be able to keep rais­ing the bar for the expe­ri­ences you’re pro­vid­ing to your customers—both today, and future-proofed for tomorrow.

The expe­ri­ence series

In this series of blog posts, I’m going to be explor­ing the lat­est strate­gies for deliv­er­ing the ide­al expe­ri­ence to every customer:

• I’ll explain how to shape a brand expe­ri­ence that cre­ates a real con­nec­tion with your cus­tomers, and builds last­ing loyalty.
• I’ll lay out a roadmap for deliv­er­ing a stand­out cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, from con­tent cre­ation to deliv­ery, mea­sure­ment, and refinement.
• I’ll present best prac­tices on how organ­i­sa­tions of all sizes can cre­ate stand­out expe­ri­ences that gen­er­ate gen­uine con­nec­tions with their customers.

In the next post in this series, I’ll be div­ing into per­son­al­i­sa­tion and automa­tion, and explain­ing how to cre­ate com­pelling inter­ac­tions with your cus­tomers at scale, no mat­ter how lim­it­ed your bud­get. See you there!