Out with the cookie cutter approach and into the customer’s head

You have created award-worthy advertising and invested heavily in media – and then your customer gets stuck on an incompetent hotline for over half an hour. You have sent out a perfectly personalised e-mail newsletter – but unfortunately your customer is redirected to a general category page of your online shop when they click on it. You start a limited sales promotion, but even weeks after it’s ended the retargeting banners follow your users everywhere. Marketing is a bit like dating: sometimes it’s the small things that can ruin a good first impression.

When customers gain experience with brands or products today, they do so in many places: in store, online, via social media, on the phone and on the street. In the best case, this customer experience results in a coherent overall picture. But in reality this is often not the case. Why? Because companies have structures that can often make it difficult for the focus to lie on the customer experience as a central element of their actions. And this is despite more and more companies being aware of how important this aspect is.

A consistent customer experience needs new structures

In times of increasing price transparency and decreasing brand loyalty, a coherent customer experience is an important differentiating feature. If you can’t find AND retain your customers, you’re in trouble. For brands this means concentrating on giving the customer reasons to become and remain a customer. And because the platform economy of the digital world is making (price) comparisons easier and lowering exchange hurdles, it often no longer comes down to ONE reason – a great product, an unbeatable price, a good brand image people like to show off and so on. The key to success and sustainability in the digital age is a coherent and above all relevant customer experience.

A further challenge is that digitalisation affects many, if not almost all, areas of a company, from product development to management, marketing and services. If companies really want to put the customer at the centre of their activities, they have to tackle this task across departments. This means breaking down the barriers between areas and/or promoting a different form of cooperation within the company. Admittedly, this is a complex and far from easy task. Let’s take marketing and communication as an example: traditional advertising, digital marketing, CRM or dialogue marketing, PR/corporate communication and social media often exist side by side in historically separate silos.

Utility and usability are what make the difference

Relevance is a decisive factor in determining customer experience. Relevance is determined by the customer’s subjective experience. Does the customer like the advertising? Was the person on the hotline friendly? Did the customer find what they were looking for on the website quickly? Every customer makes their own judgement. If you summarise the evaluation criteria, they can be divided into two general categories: First is utility and second, usability.

Utility describes how valuable the experience and the received content were for the user. How well does my experience correspond to my particular requirements? Does the content answer my questions? Does it solve my problems? Does it meet my expectations or even surpass them?

Usability is an overarching term for the user-friendliness of customer experiences. It’s not about the content, but about how easy it is to use, control and operate products or services. And of course the experiences at the different touch points must also result in a suitable overall picture and has to be very well networked.

Experience from many projects shows that utility and usability only form a coherent picture if companies enable their different experts inside and outside the company to work together on a relevant customer experience.

Lufthansa Personalisation Example: 500 million newsletter

In a digitalised world of brands, people expect meaningful personalised content. Every year a company like Lufthansa, for example, sends out 500 million newsletters to different target groups, in different locations, featuring a wide variety of services. The keyword “personalisation” encompasses an extremely complex and elaborate communication architecture designed to ensure a coherent digital user journey, starting from the user’s inspiration to fly long before take-off, all the way to when they land back at home. Plan.Net built its own newsletter cockpit for the airline for the sole purpose of personalising their newsletter. A shared platform for Lufthansa Marketing and its service providers with an intuitive interface, a modular system for content and a real-time preview. Dialogue communication via e-mail is also synchronised across the board with banners, apps and social media platforms. This is just one example of a project that could be realised with cross-departmental work coordinated between the brand and the service provider.

Audible, the subsidiary wholly-owned by Amazon, takes a different approach. The market leader in the digital distribution of audiobooks follows a 360-degree approach that combines communication, media, research and tracking. A wide variety of content is prepared and controlled via media placements in order to address the users in the right way – depending on their interests and needs, as well as what stage of the user journey they are at. The cost-per-lead can be significantly reduced by using content marketing tailored to the user experience like this.

There are many ways to ensure a coherent user experience, and each one is often unique to the company and products. I would therefore advise focusing first and foremost on relevant customer experience, and therefore on your existing customers themselves, when redesigning your marketing strategy. To do this you should ask yourself five questions:

1. Who are my customers?
   This may sound banal, but in many companies the available data and information is not evaluated as comprehensively as it could be, nor used across departments to the extent that could be possible.
2. What moves my customers?
   It is not only social media that gives you the opportunity to learn what people think about you and what their needs are. Take advantage of these opportunities and always think from the user’s perspective when creating your products and services.
3. Where do I reach my customers?
   Which media and non-media points of contact do my customers use in which phase of their relationship and what are their intentions?
4. What added value can help me to be more customer-centric?
   Product enhancements, services – there are many ways to expand a service in a customer-centric way. Use solutions from partners as needed – you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.
5. How can I personalise my offers?
   Communication, websites, services and products – almost everything can be personalised nowadays. Use this opportunity to create the highest possible relevance.

If you have answered these questions honestly and comprehensively, you will have created a very good basis for the best possible success today, and for the sustainability of your marketing tomorrow.