Your customers interact with your brand across multiple platforms every day. While this access to branded content offers fantastic opportunities for your company to connect with your audience, it also begs a larger question: how do you connect these experiences? Creating a connected customer ecosystem can drive powerful insights for your team, build a loyal audience and boost revenue growth.
What Is a Connected Experience?
A connected experience is a collection of seamless, thoughtful interactions with a brand. These interactions are consistent and align with the company mission, giving a customer a clear picture of what the brand represents.
While you often hear customer experience (CX) discussed in broad terms, connected CX accounts for how customers interact with a brand across multiple platforms and points in time. Connected customer experiences run deeper than brand messaging—they’re about human interaction. While each channel offers something different, the core of the experience should be the same.
A core value in connected experiences is omnichannel communication. Every platform where a company exists needs to be aware of all other platforms. Brick-and-mortar stores should advertise the sales shared on social media sites and mailers. The website needs to highlight the same new products showcased in the app. Your customer is at the core of this connected ecosystem, and they can easily move from one platform to the next.
Why Do Connected Experiences Matter?
Connected customer experiences lead to three major outcomes.
Eliminate friction in the customer journey
A brand’s primary responsibility is moving the customer from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom. A disconnected experience introduces more hurdles to the customer journey, making it more challenging to complete the sale. A connected customer experience guides customers through the sales funnel across every platform.
A customer will receive the same product recommendations through email and social media ads that bring them to the website. Landing pages designed for these products make it easier to add them to the cart. Saved contact and payment information at checkout make completing the purchase simple.
These frictionless customer journeys build loyalty to a brand and keep customers invested in products or services.
Minimize risks of a disconnected experience
Measuring customer experience in silos leads to disjointed data and disorganized technology systems. More technology comes with higher costs, unclear ROI, and extra resources to manage them. Separate data silos require more time to generate meaningful insights, and some may even mislead and misdirect strategy if the analytics are incorrect.
Ultimately, a disconnected experience is costing many organizations more than they realize. Reduce the risks by creating a connected ecosystem of customers and internal teams.
Accelerate business growth
Businesses drive long-term growth by building customer loyalty and cutting unnecessary costs. Connected customer experiences create a positive reputation for a brand and strengthen lead generation efforts. Connected CX keeps customers at the center of organizational processes—and the business reaps the benefits as much as customers.
How Can You Create Connected Customer Experiences?
Your strategies will play an integral role in creating connected customer experiences.
Empower your team with centralized customer data
Data is the driving force behind personalized CX. Information about ad interactions, shopping history, demographics and much more reveals patterns about customer behaviors. When you inject personalization into 1:1 interactions, your customers feel more connected to your brand than ever.
Building this connection does more than impact the relationships with customers. It meets their expectations. A study from McKinsey reveals 71% of consumers expect personalization from the brands they buy from.
Introducing personalization across every platform goes well beyond sending an email with a person’s name in the subject line. Personalization includes:
- Product recommendations based on past purchases and browsing history
- Special promotions on birthdays and special milestones
- Messages that factor in real-time geolocation
- Calls to action based on a customer’s place in the marketing funnel
Define processes for your customer-facing teams
Connected customer experiences demand more than a cohesive front end. CX teams need to understand the mission and how to best reflect this mission in customer interactions. For instance, there are likely multiple paths for customer service, like phone calls, online chat and email. Define the recommended approach for these interactions.
Offering key phrases for employees to use can keep interactions consistent. Strong training programs instill confidence in employee-facing team members, ensuring they talk to customers with authority and empathy.
Keep everything human-centered
It’s easy to get swept away by the next revenue-generation strategy. Growing business is important, but focusing solely on financial impact decenters the human experience. When you think about what humans need above all else, revenue growth often follows.
Empathy is a valuable aspect of customer service. However, only 62% of senior executives say they can put themselves in the shoes of their customers, according to a recent Forrester Research survey. When brand leaders lack a strong awareness of their customers as humans, it limits their brands’ ability to create connected customer experiences and build meaningful relationships with buyers.
Whether you’re building an app or rolling out a new product, the team should think about how these projects will affect humans. How will the app support access to customer service? How will the latest product make your customers‘ lives easier? See the difference a human-centered approach will make and build more connected experiences in the process.
Use the right technology
With so many powerful tools available today, it’s easier than ever to create a user-friendly and consistent customer experience across all types of interactions. Consider what customers need in order to make working with your brand more pleasant and accessible. They might be searching for versatile payment methods or an intuitive e-commerce platform.
The best way to introduce the right technology for customers is to discover where the most friction exists. Reviewing customer support logs can be revealing in this area. Collecting opinions directly from customers by sending a survey to their inboxes right after an interaction can also be helpful. After pinpointing the friction, implement a purpose-built solution.
Create Connected Customer Experiences With CSG
CSG provides an intuitive solution for companies to build connected customer experiences. The customer journey is essential, and we provide the tools to create frictionless journeys no matter the interaction or channel. CSG Xponent is a customer journey orchestration platform that decisionings across the customer lifecycle to create meaningful interactions at every step. Contact CSG to learn more about Xponent.
