A new wave of business disruption means brands should focus on joyful experiences

In today’s dig­i­tal era, com­pa­nies are being del­uged by data and ana­lyt­i­cal tools. This means there is often a painful mis­match between the infor­ma­tion they rely on and the brand expe­ri­ences their cus­tomers need across dif­fer­ent chan­nels. At the same time, as the glob­al econ­o­my expe­ri­ences tur­bu­lence, busi­ness lead­ers need to unlock new areas of growth through mod­ern cus­tomer acti­va­tion strate­gies.

Across indus­tries, PwC research shows near­ly six in 10 con­sumers feel com­pa­nies have lost touch with the human ele­ments of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, and busi­ness­es are try­ing to turn the sit­u­a­tion around. It is clear that joy­ful expe­ri­ences lead to stronger con­ver­sion rates, low­er churn and high­er cus­tomer life­time val­ues.

Emo­tion­al­ly con­nect­ed cus­tomers pro­vide twice as much life­time val­ue to com­pa­nies than those who are high­ly sat­is­fied, accord­ing to Har­vard Busi­ness Review. Cru­cial­ly, such con­nect­ed cus­tomers exhib­it less price sen­si­tiv­i­ty, are more engaged with brand com­mu­ni­ca­tions and buy more often.

Com­pa­nies are being held back in their change efforts by sev­er­al core fac­tors. “The first prob­lem for many busi­ness­es is that they have become stuck in the infor­ma­tion. Despite mas­sive inno­va­tion in data ware­hous­es, ana­lyt­ics tools and data stan­dard­i­s­a­tion, the tech is gen­er­al­ly not built for the cre­ation of joy­ful expe­ri­ences,” says Adri­ana Gil Min­er, chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer at the cus­tomer acti­va­tion plat­form Iter­able.

Brands have also seen the cus­tomer engage­ment land­scape shift end­less­ly as the vari­ety of chan­nels used, from web­sites to apps, emails to social media sites, expands. For many brands, the strug­gle to con­vert the mass of data points on these dif­fer­ent chan­nels into desir­able expe­ri­ences is a prob­lem that has wors­ened as cus­tomers expect ever more from dig­i­tal inter­ac­tions fol­low­ing two years of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.

“With the dig­i­tal accel­er­a­tion, each brand chan­nel has gone from com­ple­ment­ing the brand expe­ri­ence to being the brand expe­ri­ence,” explains Gil Min­er. “Com­pa­nies have treat­ed every chan­nel as its own world, with its own rules, capa­bil­i­ties and data. This is a mis­take. No mat­ter the chan­nel, it is the same cus­tomer want­i­ng to expe­ri­ence the same brand.”

This mis­matched effort has been exac­er­bat­ed by a grow­ing array of cor­po­rate sys­tems. Lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy, built before the advent of smart­phones, has led many mar­keters to assume their cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment tech­nol­o­gy can­not be updat­ed to meet their changed needs.

As a result, so-called ‘franken­stacks’ of solu­tions used for dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es are being piled on top of each oth­er, result­ing in what is, in effect, a mon­stros­i­ty of tech­nol­o­gy that fails to unite. Such is the lev­el of con­fu­sion that a Gart­ner study shows only 58% of mar­keters’ tech capa­bil­i­ties is nor­mal­ly used.

“This unhealthy sce­nario means it is near­ly impos­si­ble for those brands to cre­ate joy­ful, rel­e­vant expe­ri­ences,” Gil Min­er notes. “With­out that pos­i­tive emo­tion­al con­nec­tion wher­ev­er the cus­tomer is, there is low reten­tion, decreased cus­tomer engage­ment and lost rev­enue.”

There are far bet­ter ways to go about cre­at­ing joy­ful expe­ri­ences. They involve mov­ing towards har­monised, indi­vid­u­alised and dynam­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions with cus­tomers. This means inter­ac­tions must be cross-chan­nel and coor­di­nat­ed across all touch­points, from mar­ket­ing pro­mo­tions to cus­tomer ser­vice and trans­ac­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Brands also need to bet­ter pre­dict and antic­i­pate cus­tomer needs by using data and AI to deliv­er high­ly-per­son­alised com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Last­ly, brands must approach mar­ket­ing with a ser­vice men­tal­i­ty of always-on, adap­tive jour­neys, so they rapid­ly adapt to cus­tomer behav­iour and chang­ing pref­er­ences.

“This should be a top pri­or­i­ty for brands and the first step is trad­ing in the dis­parate lega­cy sys­tems,” explains Gil Min­er. “Then they can move to cloud-based, flex­i­ble, no-code and auto­mat­ed tools, which draw in data from mul­ti­ple sources, in a pri­va­cy-com­pli­ant man­ner and enable effec­tive expe­ri­ences to be orches­trat­ed across chan­nels.”

Such con­sis­tent­ly pos­i­tive brand expe­ri­ence across every chan­nel is par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant giv­en that 83% of emo­tion­al­ly engaged cus­tomers want mul­ti­ple ways to inter­act with the com­pa­nies they buy from, accord­ing to Capgem­i­ni research.

Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, per­son­al­is­ing those inter­ac­tions is essen­tial giv­en eight in 10 high­ly emo­tion­al­ly engaged con­sumers expect brands to know their indi­vid­ual pref­er­ences. Mean­while, expe­ri­ences can be made more dynam­ic, a cru­cial step giv­en that McK­in­sey research shows 59% of con­sumers expect time­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tions from brands at key moments.

Mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy lead­ers are aban­don­ing best-of-breed approach­es en masse in favour of sin­gle ven­dors with inter­con­nect­ed, inte­grat­ed stack capa­bil­i­ties. Many are turn­ing to the Iter­able sys­tem, which is a cus­tomer acti­va­tion plat­form that deliv­ers uni­fied cus­tomer expe­ri­ences and allows users to cre­ate, opti­mise and mea­sure every inter­ac­tion across entire cus­tomer jour­neys. Mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als use the intu­itive inter­face for cross-chan­nel jour­ney orches­tra­tion across email, mobile, text mes­sage and web, with flex­i­bil­i­ty and scal­a­bil­i­ty, and AI that under­stands users holis­ti­cal­ly to inform pow­er­ful deci­sion-mak­ing.

Among those using Iter­able are the mak­ers of the men­tal health brand Calm, which can now sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly engage mil­lions of cus­tomers on an indi­vid­ual lev­el while adapt­ing to the ebbs and flows of cus­tomers’ stress lev­els dur­ing these uncer­tain times. Mean­while, Fiit, a UK-based sub­scrip­tion fit­ness app offer­ing on-demand work­out class­es, uses Iter­able to test push email and in-app con­tent to boost its con­ver­sions of free tri­als to sub­scrip­tions.

Else­where, Spain-based Dgtl Fundrais­ing uses Brand Affin­i­ty, an intel­li­gent per­son­al­i­sa­tion solu­tion pow­ered by Iter­able AI, to iden­ti­fy and seg­ment poten­tial donors based on cross-chan­nel engage­ment sig­nals.

Busi­ness­es face grow­ing expec­ta­tions from cus­tomers, who they must pos­i­tive­ly engage via an ever-expand­ing and increas­ing­ly com­plex array of chan­nels. Giv­en com­pa­nies’ dis­parate sys­tems, mass­es of data, lim­it­ed resources and enor­mous pres­sure to make key mar­ket­ing cam­paigns deliv­er suc­cess, many are turn­ing to auto­mat­ed, future-ready sys­tems that deliv­er con­sis­tent­ly joy­ful expe­ri­ences across chan­nels. This move will be essen­tial to them cap­tur­ing and retain­ing high­ly valu­able cus­tomers.

To find out more about the con­sis­tent cre­ation of joy­ful expe­ri­ences for cus­tomers, vis­it iterable.com/thetimes

Pro­mot­ed by Iter­able