Guest Service

So your reward program memberships rose in the last quarter. Congratulations! But how great is that net gain when factoring in the memberships that became inactive in the same period?

Recently, we’ve been living through a confluence of events that have forever altered the ecommerce landscape. From evolving shopping behaviors spurred by the onset of the pandemic to supply chain issues and now soaring inflation and global strife, there’s been a great deal of change.

People ask me a lot if there is a difference between experiences and creating customer loyalty when you are a business-to-business (B2B) organization as opposed to a business-to-customer (B2C) one. The short answer is there isn’t.

This year is all about leveraging data to deliver the individual, personalized experiences that customers are craving. It’s fair to say that the strategy and discipline of customer experience (CX), in general, has been challenged in ways like never before due to the pandemic. Customer experience leaders have had to modify how their teams work and to deliver great products and services in an unpredictable world—all the while with a smile on their faces. 

I believe that employees are a company’s first customer; why would companies prefer to not serve their employees as respectfully as they served paying customers?

My regular readers will remember that customers’ satisfaction scores across the board are falling or stagnating for most organizations. The American Customer Satisfaction Index published a report that suggested customer satisfaction was approaching a 17-year low. This finding leads to other stats that stood out to me in Zendesk’s research:

23% of organizations said that they were looking to increase customer satisfaction.
23% said they are looking to drive stronger relationships

Sadly, we waste so many opportunities to engage our customers, even when we have clues about what they might be most interested in. We rush to talk about what we are interested in, our products. And that’s why customers don’t answer our calls or respond to our outreach, even when their actions initiated the sequence of follow ups.

I design experiences. It’s a wonderful gig – especially given the remarkable brands that entrust me to help them engage their team members and customers. It’s also an amazing time to be a designer since tools like augmented, virtual, and mixed reality enable us to provide immersive and highly interactive experiences.

Marketers can better understand customers by knowing when someone will most likely buy from them and how much value each individual provides for advertisers. This shift means higher engagement rates on both sides. The data also helps measure success, whether you’re looking towards future campaigns or measuring past successes. These metrics matter to marketers.

Customers experience the world differently now than before the onset of COVID-19. The significant disruptions in how we work and live have lasting impacts on what customers expect and how customer experience (CX) leaders must deliver on those expectations.