Customer Experience the Rolling Stones Way
“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you find, you get what you need.”
A brand may have hundred or thousands of customers and even millions of people in their target audience. Trying to tailor an experience to each and every customer would be impossible. Ignoring what they want and designing only the experience that a brand wants isn’t a good idea either. Fortunately, two things make this an easier endeavor: individual people are more alike than we think and fit into groups and categories, and the customer experience is now something that has been studied and refined and part of a strong marketing plan for any brand. What does “customer experience” mean, as a whole and to your brand?
As an innate human need, belonging and being part of a community stems from the early days of man and has stayed with us. Brands that incorporate community (Links to an external site.) into their customer experience see a much higher level of brand equity, lifetime customer value, and far less customer churn. Those customers are part of a family, a group like them. The iPhone vs Android communities are strong and repeat customers are strong. Salesforce specifically names their community Ohana (Links to an external site.)… “family”. But customer experience (CX) is far more than just establishing and nurturing a community, it’s how you look at the individual wants and needs of your customers and build an experience that takes that into consideration from the very first message they see, and then all the way through their journey with your brand.
The best example of this is when mobile devices started to outnumber computers in homes. Google recognized that far more online activity was generated by mobile users than on full-sized monitors. Developers everywhere started to design websites that made their CX optimized for mobile device use. Can they access the website from their phone’s browser without those changes? Sure. But the text doesn’t always line up well, and is oftentimes very small, and links hard to click with a finger vs a mouse. So to improve the CX for mobile users, who have a want to increase the ease of use, these new responsive websites were creative that stacked content in a longer and more streamlined design, with icons for tapping and larger text/shorter content. This became so important that Google heavily prioritizes mobile experience (Links to an external site.) search results if someone is searching from a phone or tablet. If your website is not responsive and your audience is searching on a mobile device, your results may not even appear on the first page.
So while they may not always get exactly what they want, like a coupon for 80% off, they can still get what they need. They can get a better digital experience and the ability to belong to a group of people like them who value the same things. When brands understand and implement these kinds of CX they not only keep customers, but they keep them happy.
