Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Research confirms and we know this intuitively, positive customer experiences will keep our customers coming back. No one wants to continue doing business with a company after a bad experience, poor customer service, wrong product shipments that aren’t quickly rectified,  or for any number of other reasons that can ruin a consumer’s attitude towards a brand.

According to research by Accenture,  72% of consumers have switched brands after a poor customer experience. Of the 11 industries that were surveyed, retail consumers were most likely to switch after a negative experience (30%).

And perhaps just as bad, 73% of those who switched said they would not consider doing business with the brand again....

53% of customers who ask a brand a question on Twitter expect a response within one hour.However, if a customer makes a complaint to a brand using Twitter, that figure goes up to 72%.These stats come from the latest research by Lithium Technologies and perhaps contradicts the previously held notion that just 11% of people expect to receive customer service via social media....

Loyal customers are extremely important for businesses as constantly attracting new shoppers and converting them into customers is a costly process.

In fact data from the new Econsultancy/Responsys Cross-Channel Marketing Report 2013 shows the value of building customer relationships, as 70% of respondents agreed that “it is cheaper to retain than acquire a customer.”

Similarly, nearly half (49%) agreed that “pound for pound, we achieve better ROI by investing in relationship over acquisition marketing”.However businesses aren’t necessarily making a huge effort to retain their customers, as just 30% of companies say they are “very committed” to relationship marketing, with 22% conducting no relationship marketing at all....

Organizations the authors describe as “flat-earthers” look at customer experience from the rational and physical perspective — focusing on how quickly a delivery is made or how quickly a phone call is answered, or the objective quality of the product. 

The authors contend that more than 50% of customer experience is about how a customer feels. Here are the seven imperatives for moving to the next level of customer experience, as defined by the authors....

Forget content marketing, mobile, and personalization. Customer experience outranks them all as marketers’ most exciting opportunity this year, reveals a recent report from Econsultancy and Adobe.

Based on a survey of more than 6,000 marketing, digital and e-commerce professionals from around the world, the study shows that customer experience is a growing priority and one that’s unlikely to go away any time soon. Retailers in particular recognize this, with 9 in 10 North American retailers responding to a newly-released survey from SDL strongly agreeing that customer experience defines their brand....

In my recent post, I talked about the need for Agility, Authenticity and Passion along with the “four C’s” which describe the pillars of great marketing today. Let’s take a look at some examples of great marketers and great companies who are putting these pillars into practice.

Customer-centric. Customers are in control. They decide how and when to connect with you and your company and they vote with their online voice, dollars and attention. Customer engagement – an elusive achievement — is the number one asset to a business today and the number one goal for marketing to pursue. Customer engagement is only possible when customer’s wants and needs are put at the center of everything we do....