Customer Experience Is Not About Redecorating It’s About Remodeling

EC has been writing for some time now about the rapid transformation of marketing in this digital and mobile-first era. Marketers in every sector are being challenged like never before to market with the customer instead of marketing to the customer. While branding and advertising are still important elements, marketers are challenged to re-engineer omni-channel customer experience and engagement in order to provide timely and relevant offers and content to customers and prospects while shopping or researching considered purchase items.

Customer Experience Is Not About Redecorating It’s About Remodeling
by Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX

We all know that customer experience is hard to implement. It can’t be fixed using surveys and promotions, social media influencers, viral videos, or faster call handling times.  Customer Experience requires a new way of thinking and working.

Customer Experience is more than digital transformation. It requires that we build relationships over time using multiple channels to interact and connect. We need to put the customer first by understanding their needs and building shared experiences.

This requires we rethink how we organize and incentivize our teams to achieve success. It means we need to establish training to get all our employees on the same page as to what we are trying to deliver and what success looks like. Unfortunately, this takes a long time. There are no overnight successes. Most organizations have been doing this for 5+ years before they see significant financial gains.

Customer experience needs to be lead from the top of the organization. It requires the effective integration of product innovation, marketing, sales, operations, service, finance, and legal. The customer doesn’t care how you are organized they want to be understood and served regardless of how difficult that may be for the organization. They expect you to know about all the products and services they use, not just for one brand but for all the brands in your portfolio.

Corporations and employees have a natural resistance to change so delivering this new experience isn’t easy. It has to be done by people who have good listening skills, strong influence management skills, and people who are passionate and willing to stand up for what they believe. Companies like Amazon, Uber, and Google are setting customer’s expectations and we need to respond accordingly.

Here are some ways to get started:

1. Stop hiding from customers. Make it easy for customers to reach you any time , any place by phone, email, or text. Don’t send them to Google to try to find a customer service connection.
2. Customers rely on what other people say about your brand -not what you say. Start listening and learning about your reputation and make changes to improve it.
3. Hire and train for customer experience skills across the organization.  Most likely you need more user experience skills, user testing and prototyping, design skills, ethnographic skills and customer analytics skills.
4. Integrate all your customer information in one data repository to make it easier to use machine learning to recognize patterns.
5. Technology will not replace the human connection but technology can be used to provide your team with the right customer information at the right time. Customer service is what happens when the customer experience is broken. Be sure customer service has what is needed to create a happier customer.

Get started and keep focusing on improvements. You will get better and build your brand reputation and increase your customer life time value.

Forrester reports that customers who report an excellent customer experience will be 2 times a likely to refer your brand as compared to others who rated you as good or  worse. Accenture reports 51% of customers switched brands due to poor customer experience . Cap Gemini says 81% of customers will pay more for a better experience.

We all know a better customer experience pays, so let’s focus on growing our market share and building our brand for the future.

Aileen Cahill, Director of Customer Experience : Prudential Insurance – Worksite Solutions Group

EC is pleased to announce Aileen Cahill has joined our client Prudential Financial – Workplace Solutions Group as Director, Customer Experience. Aileen is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) & Classically-trained CPG brand marketer who blends “Big Data” analytics with marketing expertise to create engaging omnichannel CX.  She began her career in CPG with such brands as Hershey, Pepsi, Conagra. She worked in consulting  with a variety of companies including Peppers and Rodgers helping major brands become more digitally savvy and driving them towards 1 to 1 Marketing. She has also served as a CMO for an internet startup and global Veterinarian healthcare company. She has specialized in Customer Experience since 2009 when she became the chief customer officer at Hurley travel. In the last few years she was the SVP Client Partner Retail and Consumer Goods for Merkle, and the cofounder of a small full-service Customer Experience consulting firm called Agile Marketing. Aileen has been a professor and lecturer at Cornell, Northwestern Harvard, Chicago and the USM. She also published a book Internet Marketing -Building Advantage into a Networked Economy. She has a BA in Applied Analytics from SUNY Binghamton and an MBA from in Marketing from Cornell. Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX at EC, managed this exclusive search for Prudential.

Liza Amezquita, Manager of Customer Experience: Prudential Insurance – Worksite Solutions Group

EC is pleased to announce Liza Amezquita has joined our client Prudential Financial – Workplace Solutions Group as Manager, Customer Experience. Liza is a certified Customer Experience professional. She has been working at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield for the last 11 years, earning 4 promotions along the way. She worked in Customer Experience, Product Development, Underwriting, Sales, and Customer Service. Prior to Horizon Liza worked at Rapid Recovery as a project manager and sales leader. In her early career she worked in medical billing for Ortho Shockwave Consultants, Pediatric Ophthalmic Consultants and EBI. Liza has a BA in Theatre Arts from Rutgers and an MBA in Risk Management from Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City. Darcy Bevelacqua, Managing Director, Analytics & CX at EC, managed this exclusive search for Prudential.

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