An Extraordinary Customer Experience Stands Out

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about the full customer journey – designing the experience one has with their brand, from awareness to post-purchase support. My employer even hosted a couple webinars about it earlier this year, and their focus is not marketing. A phenomenal experience, however, isn’t just about marketing. It should be considered in every part of a business.

This concept got my gears turning. As a marketing professional, I formerly considered our job as gaining awareness, building relationships, and supporting sales. That’s just part of it. Every touchpoint a person has with a brand is an opportunity to make an impression. We can design those experiences. We can develop a system that provides value well beyond the sale.

It comes down to expectation setting and understanding the human element. Treat your past, present and future customers with respect, first and foremost. Then, seek to understand their process when it comes to buying from your company. Hopefully you already know what value you serve to your customers, but do you know how they go about searching for the solutions you offer? Do you know what they expect and aim to exceed those expectations? Do you consider what kind of support they need before, during or after they purchase from you? Are your employees trained to seek customer satisfaction and given the autonomy to make it happen?

Let’s go through an example.

1. A 37-year-old woman wants to finish Christmas shopping for her kids. She’s already feeling overwhelmed with getting ahead at work before the holiday break, taking care of her children’s daily needs, and all her other responsibilities.
2. She’s served up your ad for the robot building kit because she’s been searching for engineering toys for her 12-year-old. It’s perfect! She clicks to read more about the kit.
3. Things she might want to know include:
   – Does the kit come with everything the child will need to build the robot?
   – What’s the price?
   – Are there other kits like this?
   – Have other people purchased this? What was their experience?
   – How fast is shipping?
   – Can she get anything else from your store for her other children?
4. She decides to purchase. The site seems to ask for a litany of information, but she fills it all out because she has precious time invested in the purchase now. (Did your company need all that information, or can you cut some out of that process?)
5. The receipt shows up on the screen and is delivered to her email.
6. It’s been five days and she hasn’t heard anything about her package. Is it coming? She starts to worry and calls to ask when it’ll be delivered. Your employee is kind and empathetic, but he can only say that the package was shipped out of your warehouse. He doesn’t know where her package is now or when it will be delivered. It’s one more thing on her busy mind. (Set up a process for shipping confirmation. Give a tracking code and estimated delivery date.)
7. The package is delivered the next day. A relief!
8. It’s December 26th and her 12-year-old is excited to start building the robot. They build it and the robot doesn’t work. Did they miss something? They followed all the instructions. They turn to the internet to see if there are videos of someone building the robot.

The scenario could go on forever, but I’ll stop there. Would your company think to provide tutorial videos for the products you sell? What’s your customer support and refund process like? Going back to the rest of the purchase process, I’d say that the company had an effective retargeting campaign and the ecommerce site was fine, but the payment process and follow-up could be improved. Did anything exceed expectations?

Exceeding expectations might include the confirmation email with a video tutorial or other supporting materials for the items purchased. It might be an employee equipped with information or resources on all the company’s products and trained to guide the customer through anything they need.

Successful businesses understand the importance of relationship-building and support, and their goal is to blow their customers away, figuratively speaking, of course. From a marketer’s perspective, we can influence how our customers experience our brand throughout their journey with us. We’re always focused on serving the customer. Now that our customers’ attentions are pulled in a million directions, our company will only stand out if we provide extraordinary service. That’s memorable. That’s worth loyalty.

Respect the humanity of every customer – their needs and challenges, their journey. Show up in such a way that each customer knows you value them.