It’s a fact: Today’s consumers have higher expectations of your business than ever before. 

It’s increasingly rare that a customer is loyal to a brand just based on price or availability of their products. There will always be someone who can make it cheaper and gain wider distribution.

Today, customer loyalty is driven primarily by a company’s interaction with its customers and how well it delivers on their wants and needs. Understanding and effectively developing a positive customer experience (CX) has become a requirement for any brand seeking to be relevant and combat growing competition. According to a Gartner survey, as competition and buyer empowerment compounds, customer experience itself is proving to be the only durable competitive advantage. What’s more, by the end of 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience versus 36% four years ago. How are these experiences being captured and spread? Influencers.

Unfortunately, 95% of businesses fail at exceeding the expectations of their customers. Quite simply, keeping a relentless focus on winning on experience across all touchpoints is the only way to retain customer loyalty with today’s savvy, complex and restless customers.

It should come as no surprise that customers expect you CX their everything - leaving no stone unturned in improving their experience. This means that every customer touchpoint needs to be evaluated, improved and optimized from first interaction to after the sale.

What are touchpoints? Here are a few examples:

Before the Sale

• social media
• online reviews
• online testimonials
• word of mouth
• community involvement
• advertisements
• news coverage

During the Sale

• store or office
• website
• catalog
• promotions
• staff or sales team
• phone system
• point of sale materials

After the Sale

• billing process
• transactional emails
• marketing emails
• service and support team interactions (call center, in-person)
• online help center
• follow-up communication

These touchpoints are by no means everything and each one can have underlying elements. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes or better yet, ask them to walk you through their experience with your brand and you’ll likely identify new touchpoints and complexities, issues and opportunities inherent in each.

Important to note is how many of these touchpoints exist almost entirely online and how many are driven by word of mouth.

Which leads us to this: Social media and online influencers provide the greatest potential for communicating and validating the customer experience throughout the buyer’s journey. Here are three examples:

• Before the Sale: Consumers go online to research your product/service. Increasingly, they check with their social networks to get recommendations.
• During the Sale: Consumers pulse their social networks to seek validation for their decision, sometimes asking others about their personal experience with your brand.
• After the Sale: Particularly when there’s a very positive or very negative experience, many customers go online after the sale to share their experience with those in their networks. And before you wonder “who has time for that?”, remember that expertise and a sense of insider knowledge about a topic or product is a form of virtual currency and are credentials for many in the era of social media. Also remember that the post-sale experience has a “boomerang effect” in social media, meaning, it’s both searchable on may platforms after-the-fact and is sometimes shared again and again in response to an inquiry by someone in the early stages of the buying process.

What Do You Need to Do?

Embrace the power of social media as the ultimate bridge between empathy and convenience for your business and your customers. Here’s how to get started:

• Research the social conversation, examining the key narratives, influencers and conversations about your brand.
• Evaluate what’s being shared. Which topics are popping up the most? Is your website providing enough product information? Is the check-out process easy? Is your online chat function unreliable? What are the sources of friction and frustration in the buyer’s journey? At which points are you delighting your customers?
• Pinpoint and engage your most influential customers, past and present for additional feedback. Let them know you’re listening and appreciate their input. With the help of a tool that provides both influencer analytics and engagement in one platform, this is easier than it may seem.
• Remember that feedback goes beyond the disgruntled; delighted customers provide more than feedback. Their support can help drive awareness, consideration and most importantly, growth -- whether by virtue of their pocketbook or that of the others they influence. Partner with them to share their positive experience. We provide a step-by-step process in our eBook, Influencer Engagement for Brand Leaders: A Customer Experience Requirement.

Your next question may be “what will this cost me”? It varies. For some, the virtual currency of increased credibility and thought-leadership within their networks is enough. Others just want to know that their input is making the buying experience easier for them and customers like them. Some desire an inside-the-ropes experience from your brand or the benefit of inbound links provided through sharing their content on your brand channels. Others will want compensation of another form. The key is to be open to different scenarios and to be creative.

Regardless of how in-depth you go with engaging influencers, to estimate how you’ll fare tomorrow, you need to know how they feel about you today. Tapping into the insight they provide improves your odds of having more positive interactions between your business and customers across the buyer’s journey.

To learn more about how VizSense is solving and simplifying influencer marketing and CX for today's marketers, contact us. We encourage you to download our free eBook, Influencer Engagement for Brand Leaders: A Customer Experience Requirement.