2. What is Long View Customer
Experience?
• There is a lot of discussion about user experience on a short-term basis, such as a visit to a
website, mobile app, or even a retail store.
– However, there seems to be less discussion about the user experience of a customer
across multiple devices, channels, and the online/offline worlds.
• With smartphone adoption growing from 31% in May of 2011 to 56% in May of 2013, it is clear
that consumers are serious about taking the Web with them wherever they go.
– As mobile continues to grow in prominence and usage, we’re seeing much more of a need
for a unified view and presentation of information, as well as calls to action and branding
across so many different possible touch points with customers.
• The Nielsen Norman Group notes that there are four primary components of a successful “cross-
channel” user experience:
– consistency
– seamlessness
– availability
– context specificity.
• Each of these highlights the fact that users no longer contain their interactions with a brand to a
single device or channel, and thus brands must not think in terms of siloed experiences either.
3. Introduction
• Long-view customer experience is a hybrid view of user experience and customer relationship
management. We’ll get to our definitions of both of those terms in a little bit.
• Quality of Engagement
– Success of our marketing efforts is not just about responses and comments, or
followers and fans. We need to concern ourselves with the quality of the engagement.
• Why call it Customer Experience and not Customer Relationship Management?
– Both of these terms are used in a variety of ways and it can get confusing,
especially now as we are mixing these two terms together. Let’s start by defining a few
terms:
• User Experience
– The term “user experience” (UX) is often used when referring to the creation of
websites, software, mobile apps, or other singular experiences that a customer has.
• Customer Experience
– While some apply the term user experience on a much more global basis to refer
to the overall experience that a user has in dealing with a brand, many others instead are
adopting the term customer experience (CX) for this instead.
4. How CRM, UX and CX Work Together
• Customer experience is
management of the user
experience over time, across
whatever channels are utilized,
and through a process that
begins with basic awareness
and ultimately ends in a
conversion
• Customer relationship
management is the process by
which interactions along the
customer experience journey
are handled
• In this way, CRM and CX are
really dealing with the same
thing, just from opposite views.
5. The Long View of Customer Experience
1 | The Customer
Experience Model
6. Awareness
• At this point, we are concerned with saturation on the channels
your audience uses and ultimately name recognition, along with
being top of mind with consumers.
• In traditional advertising, “awareness” was many times enough to
drive product sales.
• With less variety and therefore less need for focus on niche
marketing and audiences, in the Mad Men era of advertising it
was often enough to have good television and radio advertising
coverage in order to drive sales.
• As we as a society have adopted more marketing channels and
quickly adapted to the personalization and niche marketing that
continues to grow in adoption, simply achieving awareness of a
product or service is not enough to guarantee popularity.
• Instead of awareness with everyone, everywhere, think instead of
targeting more granular awareness:
– With an age demographic
– In a city neighborhood
– As the solution to a very specific problem
– With people who share a certain profession
7. Awareness
How do we track it?
• Google Searches, Press Mentions & Social Media Mentions
It’s a simple way to measure, but simply picking a few
keywords and measuring the volume of searches over time
can tell you something. The same goes for press and social
media mentions.
• Visits to Owned Properties
This is the easiest one, but not necessarily the most
beneficial one. Tracking website visits, visits to stores and
other properties are related to awareness, though it requires
a detailed understanding of how to read the numbers and
attributes of your visitors.
• Research
Both qualitative and quantitative research can be very helpful
here. This can be cost-prohibitive to smaller organizations,
and it requires very detailed expertise in how to structure and
conduct the research in order to compare apples to apples.
8. Perception
• Perception means the difference between knowing about
a brand and liking or considering a brand when the time
comes for a purchase.
• Perception also includes an emotional component that
awareness does not. We can know of something but not
have a strong opinion of it.
• Perception requires awareness
• Perception requires emotional involvement
• We are looking for a specific range of perceptions
• Thus, we are looking for the following:
– People with the desired perception: these are ideal
customers or audience members who we wish to
“graduate” to the next step in the Long-view
Customer Experience. People with negative
perceptions: in order to better understand how to
make our products or services better.
– Key conversations and perception points: what are
the points where people have strong feelings one
way or another, and what points are divisive
amongst different audiences?
9. Perception
• How do we track it?
– Before digital tools such as sentiment analysis and
communication channels such as social media
came along, perception was much more difficult to
measure.
– Social media channels such as Facebook and
Twitter have made it much easier for these tools to
extract sentiment from conversations around
brands and other topics.
• While not the end-all-be-all solution to
understanding perception, they can be a
very helpful tool that provides insights as you
look for your ideal customers or look to
change a negative perception into a positive
one.
10. Engagement
• Engagement is the “place” in the lifecycle that we can most
reasonably expect a loyal customer to stay for the longest
period of time.
–We can’t expect them to take a specific conversion action
on a regular basis, but we can provide a means for
regular engagement with our brand
• Engaged customers spend 30% more than regular customers.
• Not all engagement is positive. It takes knowledge of how to
handle negative interactions to provide a good customer
experience to all,
–By cultivating good relationships with engaged
customers, you can actually get support from these users
to help combat negative engagement.
• Engagement is the first step towards action
• Positive engagement is the first step to becoming a brand
advocate, repeat customer, and loyal supporter.
11. Engagement
• How do we track it?
–The good news about engagement, and about our
progression from awareness to action in general, is that
it becomes easier to measure as we proceed.
•Engagement can be measured across many
channels from social media to websites to in-store
interactions.
–The primary challenge becomes tracking engagement
behavior from online to offline and back again.
•While challenges related to this are far from
completely addressed, the tracking, tools and
analysis are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
12. Action
• This is the ultimate destination along the path of user
experience.
–This is your “sale” or whatever might be the
ultimate conversion point in your customer
experience lifecycle. You can now see how
awareness, positive perception and positive
engagement have all led to this point.
• The most direct connection between a brand and
consumer
• This last, and least frequently achieved, of all four
steps concerns the closest part of your relationship
with your customer.
–While engagement with a good customer will
happen much more frequently than a direct
conversion, the action is the part of your
relationship where you are most likely to not only
generate revenue, but also exchange important
information or transactional data with them.
13. Action
• How do we track it?
–It is safe to say that the thing that is easiest to track
and report on is something related to a direct
conversion
–Whether that is sale of a product or service or
something over which you have direct tracking
capabilities.
• After Action
• We proceed back through the process until we either stop at
one of the points (perhaps if we don’t like or need the
product again) or take action and convert again.
14. The Long View of Customer Experience
2 | Fundamentals of
Customer Experience
15. Introduction
• Now that we have an understanding of the long-view customer experience philosophy from an
engagement lifecycle perspective, let’s talk more about audiences and expectations.
• There are four primary expectations that one can have about this type of user experience:
– A user’s emotional connection to your brand grows as they progress through the 4 steps
– Not all audiences can be expected to reach the end of the process
– Each stage in the process takes a considerable amount of effort
– How the brand addresses a user’s “filters” determines both short-term and long-term success
16. Emotional Connection
• A user’s emotional connection to your brand grows as they progress through the 4 steps
• The explanation here is fairly obvious.
– As you go from just learning a product’s name, through the purchase process and ultimately
to using it on a regular basis, the place that product has in your life grows in prominence.
• With a good product or service, it will ultimately fulfill a need at a price you can afford, and will most
likely serve other purposes as well.
– This is a positive relationship that you have with something, albeit an inanimate (or virtual)
thing. The same goes with a negative experience.
– How often have you gotten angry at a slow computer or malfunctioning printer?
– Chances are, you didn’t have such strong emotions when you were in Best Buy making the
initial purchase. As your involvement with a brand grows, so does your emotional connection,
good or bad.
17. Understanding Audiences
• Not all audiences can be expected to reach the end of the process
• You may not need all audiences to take action, or even get engaged with your effort.
– In some cases, ensuring that the correct perception exists might be a “win” with a particular
audience.
• For this reason, it is important to take into consideration a best-case scenario for all of your
audiences.
– For instance, there is probably a group of your audience members that may serve best as
positive influencers but can never be expected to take the ultimate actions that might lead to
a conversion.
• If you build your strategy around this idea, you can then prioritize the amount of effort required to
get various audiences to their optimal point within the long-view customer experience process.
– You will prioritize how important it is to have awareness across a broad audience versus
achieving high engagement or conversions from desired actions from a subset of the
potential audience.
18. Understanding the Process
Each stage in the process takes a considerable amount of effort:
• Awareness
– The goal of an awareness campaign is actually quite a simple one: consumers (or some
subset of the general public) must know who you or your product are.
– saturation point with awareness takes a considerable, sustained effort.
• Perception
– You will have to make a decision on how many resources you want to devote to changing
negative perceptions across however wide a population you deem strategically necessary.
• Engagement
– We all know the effort it takes to keep our audiences actively engaged.
– Many companies make the mistake of spreading themselves too thin on a single channel
such as social media, for instance.
• Action
– Ultimately, this is where all our efforts lead: conversion.
– No matter how much effort we put into the preceding steps, there is still a considerable
amount of optimization required to keep this final step working effectively.
– Whether this is your e-commerce workflow, mobile signup process, or whatever the case
may be, you spend a lot of time and effort keeping this in top form.
19. Understand Audience Filters
• When we say “filters,” we mean those criteria that a customer will either arbitrarily or by necessity
put into place in order to help make decisions.
• Gregory S. Carpenter, in Kellogg on Marketing, refers to a “Buyer Goal Hierarchy” that consists of
the following factors or “filters” with which to make a purchase decision:
– Emotional
– Economic
– Functional
• The emotional component is treated as most important, though none are independent.
– It is the proportion of each that can differ from person to person or even according to the type
of purchase decision (business to consumer versus business to business, for instance).
• Carpenter goes on to comment about the impact of so much choice in our society:
– The existence of such a vast number and range of goals, each with multiple dimensions,
creates a fundamental dilemma for individuals.
– Time is too limited to pursue them all, so we must prioritize.
• We can define filters, then, as criteria or categories that go beyond emotional, functional or
economic, or serve as subcategories of each.
– These filters are also changing and evolving as channels and types of interactions change or
come into being.
20. Understand Audience Filters
• Traditional goals:
– Emotional: Does the product or service provide for my higher-order needs (self-image, need
to belong, need for power or control)?
– Functional: Does it do what I need it to?
– Economic: Does it cost what my budget allows?
• Filters can include things such as the following:
– Emotional
• Does the messaging/branding speak to me and address my needs?
• Who is using the product or service and what do they have to say about it? Are those
people either relevant to me and/or do I respect what they have to say?
• Does the brand share my values?
– Functional
• How personalized is my experience and how can it be tailored over time?
• Can I access the product or service from anywhere?
– Economic
• Is the cost structure one that fits my preferences and usage?
• Is the balance of personal data collection vs. cost of service fair? (think Facebook or
Google, who use personal information as currency instead of charging for their
services)
21. The Long View of Customer Experience
3 | Optimizing Each Step
in the Process
22. Introduction
• Now we are going to talk about how to ensure that each step of the process is optimized.
– Part of the thinking behind the Long-view Customer Experience is that each particular
audience has an optimal place in the process and/or an optimal amount of time they will
spend there.
• In order to demonstrate this effectively, let’s use a hypothetical “client” or organization that we are
trying to market. We’re going to use a fictional neighborhood within a fictional city for this.
– Let’s just say we’re in the city of Metropolis and the neighborhood we are trying to market is
referred to as “Downtown.”
• In marketing the Downtown neighborhood, we are most likely going to be concerned about the
following things:
– Utilization of retail and office space, and ensuring the right type of tenants move in to fit the
feel of the neighborhood
– Attracting foot traffic or door swings in retail store
23. Awareness
• When we talk about awareness, let’s split our thinking into three parts:
– From which audiences should we not necessarily expect to achieve anything more than
awareness?
• This can still be beneficial. Someone being able to recall directions to it, recalling a
store that exists there, or even some of your marketing language are all beneficial
things.
– Which audiences require awareness as a baseline but have the possibility to become much
more engaged?
• These are people for whom the Downtown neighborhood could be a great place to
shop, eat, move their business, or engage with in some other desired capacity.
– How much effort will it take to achieve awareness across all the audiences we are engaging
at this point?
• When we talk about awareness, we can think on a local, regional, national or
international scale.
• For the purposes of our neighborhood, it might not serve us (or our marketing dollars)
well to have high awareness in the general (non-traveling) population of northwestern
Canada, if our Downtown neighborhood in Metropolis is on the East Coast of the
United States. We probably want to focus our efforts on nearby residents, employees,
and likely travelers.
24. Perception
• With perception, we follow a similar train of thought as awareness by splitting our thinking into
several segments.
• There is an audience that we know we need more from than simply a positive perception. These
are the people for whom perception leads to further engagement and action.
– Using the tools at our disposal in order to monitor and measure this perception, we can then
push these people to the next step.
• There is also an audience with which positive perception is all we can reasonably expect, but that
is enough to influence others and drive engagement and action in our more core target audiences.
– We want to spend effort on this group but realize that driving them to a conversion may be
difficult, costly or impossible.
– At the very least, with these people, we know that not only will they know directions to our
Downtown neighborhood, they will also be able to follow that with “and it’s a really great
place to shop.”
25. Engagement
• At this stage, we have the people who are going to be actively talking about how great the
Downtown neighborhood is.
• They might not eat or shop there as much as you’d like them to, but they sure do recruit others to
take those actions, and thus they are very beneficial.
• As far as what to do with your audiences at this step, you’ll see a trend emerging here.
– First, we identify those who we can push to further engagement.
– Then we find those who will probably never get beyond this level of engagement and find the
best way to utilize their contributions.
– It’s really not any more complicated than that.
26. Action
• These are the people who go shopping in the Downtown neighborhood, work there, move their
business there, rent an apartment there, or take some other type of action we would label a
“conversion.”
• The action part of our engagement process is the same as the others, with one exception.
– Because there is not a next step in the process, we will now identify those who we can
simply expect to take an action, and those who will not only take this action but do it
repeatedly, tell others about it and become not only a great advocate, but a long-term
customer.
– We can refer to these two audiences as either buyers or engaged buyers. Both are valuable,
but we can treat each very differently if we’d like.
• The engaged buyer is going to drag their friends to their favorite store, or at least tell them all about
it on Facebook.
– The buyer might be a very loyal shopper but is not necessarily someone we can count on to
bring a lot of extra foot traffic.
– As you can see, different opportunities exist with each.
28. Conclusion
There are a few things that everyone will need to do:
• Identify the steps in the process as they relate to your organization
– e.g. for your company, the “action” step might refer to the sale of a widget
• Identify your audiences and their optimal end state in the process
– e.g. if you are a higher education institution, a high school counselor or a parent would
never reach the “action” stage that would signal enrollment in the school. Instead, they
might be perfect candidates at the “perception” or “engagement” stage.
• Identify the tools needed to measure and analyze the process
– e.g. CRM tool, Marketing Automation, Analytics, CMS, etc.
29. Conclusion
• How do you measure success?
– Every organization has different KPIs and measures of success, as well as methods of
measurement.
– The best advice here is to ensure that, along with all the financial measures that you have
in place, you have measurements for customer satisfaction, retention and other data that
helps you understand your customers and their reactions better.
– Increasing customer satisfaction will have a direct, positive result in sales.
• What next?
– Putting the longview customer experience model to work is relatively simple, as it does not
require you to approach your conversion process differently
– It is meant to help you manage your efforts and resources in order to optimize each step in
your sales funnel.