Not so long ago, a customer’s interaction with a brand was done face-to-face or over the phone. Companies like Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom and Disney built their reputations on excellent customer experience training and delivery. It’s not as much the case anymore. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, the customer will manage 85% of its relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. This is just four years after 89% of companies expect to be competing mostly on the basis of customer experience.
Arguably, a benefit of today’s many virtual manifestations of customer touchpoints and, as a result, customer experience (CX), is that it can be engineered, deployed, tested, analyzed, improved and re-engineered to a more predictable degree than human interaction could ever do. But an almost entirely virtual customer-to-brand relationship creates a new set of challenges.
Most notable is that brands have done such a great job at creating virtual, multi-event, multi-channel touchpoints along the buyer’s journey. So much so that customers expect to share their product questions and issues with brands online entirely, 42% of them expecting a response within an hour, day or night. (Source: The Social Habit by Edison Research)
Today’s consumers are more informed, more in charge and more impatient than ever before. They aren’t picking up the phone, seeking out and submitting a feedback form to voice their pleasure or displeasure and they certainly aren’t waiting around for your answer; they’re using social media to get the answers they need and share their experience, sometimes in the far corners of the web. Essentially, their actions, comments, and rants reveal emerging narratives that will affect your brand’s health. These signals are hard to find, and in many ways are much like intercepting a terrorist plot on Twitter, among billions of other tweets. In simplest terms, these signals (clues) are sending a message to your potential customers every day. Are you watching for these smoke signals? Are you equipped to see and respond to the campfires before they become wildfires?
Whether a small-to-mid size brand or a large brand with a global footprint, the concern I always hear is that it’s challenging to identify the most critical CX issues and opportunities across a hydra-like social media universe rife with noise and distractions.
Monitoring the content and context of online conversation regarding a brand everyday, including identifying conversations specific to the customer experience, is important. Many brand marketers do this and for good reason; 95% of dissatisfied customers tell others about their bad experience and those who have positive social customer care experiences are nearly three times more likely to recommend a brand.
Where marketers often fall short is being hyperfocused on identifying the specific people whose comments are like flames being stoked by their networks. In a world where brand perceptions are formed daily and almost entirely online, the smoke signals they send reveal much about the health of a brand and their customer experience.
So who are these people? They’re likely not celebrities and they probably don’t have a million Twitter followers, however, the impact of their content shared about an experience with your brand is proof they’re a credible, trusted voice. They’re your brand’s influencers.
Identifying CX issues through the smoke signals that influencers are sending is less time consuming than you think. Some brands use an analytics tool to cut through the clutter, quickly analyze, pinpoint and prioritize the most critical brand conversations, which influencers are creating them and their network impact. However, organizational readiness and agility are common issues. For this reason, we recommend a technology-assisted service which can operate like a special forces team trained in finding the smoke signals so you’re better positioned to address CX issues and capitalize upon opportunities. A technology-enabled service can ramp up a team’s capabilities, even train in-house marketers and their agency partners on how to analyze and translate this social media data into meaningful, actionable insights.
Regardless of how you approach it, the key is to watch for the smoke signals and use the information they provide to help you pull every lever possible in improving the speed and quality at which you manage your customer experience and, as a result, brand health.
Contact us and download our free eBook, Influencer Engagement for Brand Leaders: A Customer Experience Requirement, to get help finding the influencer smoke signals that matter for improving your brand's customer expereince.
Image credit: Kalyani Phansalkar
