Guest post by Harsh Nankani. 

How brands performs its research, marketing and advertising plays an important role in shaping customer experience.

In today’s cut-throat competitive Business world, aiming at CXM (customer experience management) might be the only most relevant investment any Brand can make. Customers can interact with brands in more places and ways than ever before. And this is why they can prove to be highly useful for branding.

As the ways of interacting with the customers are increasing, so are the customer expectations. We expect continuous and consistent services and products with immediate access on any sort of device. It is the responsibility of everyone to give proper attention to customer experience. Different teams of your company must work effectively and closely for delivering exceptional customer experience.

The term CX might be new to many, but the concept is not. Customer experience has been around as long as companies have. Insight helps you comprehend how the members of your business are communicating with you, the outside world, and other brands.

Innovate and experiment

According to the Walker study, CX will overtake product and price as the relevant brand differentiator. CX technology is required to support the sales assistants, equipping them with the correct tools for easing your shopping experience and making it more enjoyable.

Technology should not even feel like it is there, customers should not feel they are blasted by tech. The journey needs to keep the procedure seamless.

It does not have to be self-service or demanding. Newer eCommerce businesses usually need to work more diligently to build brand loyalty and reputation. They must demonstrate the effect that impressive customer experience will have on the branding.

Innovation and technology go hand-in-hand, as both play an important role in enhancing CX. Employees are motivated for trying out new methods of offering amazing service to the guests. For example, they provide free sunscreen at the pool. Ideas in which work is spread and circulated throughout the business.

Listen properly to the customers

As per Gartner’s research, businesses which successfully execute the projects of customer experience start by concentrating on how they analyse and collect customer feedback.

So we need to find out how do businesses develop the understanding of their consumers which leads to positive change.

To achieve successful branding with customer experience, your business has to tap into the minds of the customers through several methods:

1. Conducting daily customer reviews (like employee reviews) for staying in touch with important accounts as well as offering some kind of human contact.
2. Sending customer surveys continuously for capturing feedback on important touch-points and processes.
3. Accepting service feedback and feature requests from the customers
4. Offering omni-channel or multi-channel customer service that offers a voice to customers where and when they require it
5. Motivating collaboration between non-customer-facing and customer-facing teams

There is no denying the fact sustainable competitive practices significantly achieve effective branding with customer experience by enhancing the company’s reputation in the market. This also includes the sales factor, which will also get a major boost.

Aligning customer experience and brand 

Customers of an eCommerce business are to be influenced by marketing communications instead of their brand perception is the outcome of customer experience.

• Where and how do customers engage with your company?
• Is the brand delivering on its promise to the customers through the customer experience?
• How do the customers feel about your brand as well as the experience it offers?
• What do the customers say about your brand?
• How would the customers define their experience themselves?
• Is their experience the same at any of the touch-points, at any point of time?
• How would the customers express those promises that the brand is making to them?
• How does it fit with brand essence?
• Is the brand continuously displayed through people’s behaviours?

Fulfil the expectations

A major branding strategy for an eCommerce business to achieve exceptional customer experience is to make sure that they go beyond their customers’ expectations. Perception of the ‘satisfying’ customer experience will rely on setting expectations rather than the described standard of what ‘satisfying’ refers to. Delivery times are the best example here. In case the customer pays for immediate delivery and his/her package still doesn’t arrive on time, this will be the most terrible experience.

If the customer agrees to the standard delivery of 3-5 days and the item arrives in 3 days, this gives them a positive feeling. Your business has to meet the expectations around selection, service, and price so that customer experience gets a major boost which ultimately helps in branding. Another huge step will be around automation and personalisation so that you can understand the customer’s requirements on different occasions and moments.

This branding strategy can include more customised recommendations at frequent intervals in a day and offering certain discounts or special offers to the customers. If customers have a positive experience with the brand’s products and people, they will not hesitate in spending money. The most influential and best CX experts know that their business should keep up with the customer expectations time and again. Also to achieve the same with the help of innovative ideas that have a positive financial effect.

How people perceive the brand, whether they wish to spend money more than once, or not at all, comes down to customer experience. Innovative and consistent CX has a wonderful effect on the bottom line of a business, as the customers keep coming back to get more benefits. Time and again, it has been proved that when customer experience becomes a core part of a company’s strategy, it provides people with tangible benefits.

• All data and interactions should be in a single place – Customer might reach out to a business for getting eCommerce live chat support as this platform is the most convenient way of ensuring the incredible customer experience. Even if the interaction takes place through different channels, the person engaging with the customer should view them as a long conversation.
• Produce consistency in the procedures to produce consistency for the customer – When organisations get huge, they generally contain multiple teams along with multiple procedures. It can be annoying for those customers who had to talk to different people in different departments as it can lead to conflicting explanations and information. Thereby, confusion takes place which results in loss of confidence and worse, lost business.

Go for branded customer experience

There is a huge difference between ‘brand experience’ and ‘branded experience’. The former one is where your brand’s promise, essence, what it stands for, and values come alive with the help of its customer experience. The brand sets customer expectations for the experience.

Then, customer experience fulfils those expectations by a guided and intentional design framework so that the experience encountered by the customers is always true to the brand.

When it comes to ‘branded experience’, the focus here is on making sure that the CX journey goes one step further where the experience itself becomes recognisable and unique. Here, customer experience becomes the source of competitive differentiation.

New technology’s rise has modified our way of communication. At first, the Internet put data at our fingertips. In today’s era, social media, smart technology, and mobile devices have helped us in getting a continuous stream of content by a lot of channels. This exceptional accessibility has driven the customers for craving both convenient and instant experiences, as well as the most successful organisations that have risen for meeting and going beyond those expectations.

Exceptional customer interaction is something that gets blogged about which leads the company getting kudos from across the Internet, or the tasteless tweet turns out to be the PR nightmare that warrants the public apology. It is all about how you manage the CX journey as the bad, the ugly, and the good can become the viral story in only a few clicks.

An easy approach to CX in eCommerce leads to impressive branding opportunities

Begin with the brand (personality, UVP, or mission, whatever you think is the most important), then recognise goals as well as success metrics that associate with your brand objectives. This way, you can frame the thinking about customer experience around the brand, offering a clear context for goal setting and prioritisation. 

Optimise the use of eCommerce live chat support so that customers can easily reach out to you and have their questions answered without having to wait for a long time. In a nutshell, customer experience plays a major role in branding, thereby making your company a well-known name in the market.

About the Author:

Harsh Nankani is a Digital Marketer at Activant Solutions. He mostly focuses on content marketing. He believes that the prospects of any business should get something without paying anything. Apart from being a digital marketer, he likes to study business trends, technology, current affairs and scrolling through social media. He is also involved in Philanthropic activities.

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