Recently, several of my clients have gone to their senior management with goals of creating a customer-centric retail environment. The benefits, they say, will include increased retention and profitability, and reduced marketing costs. In addition, the customer-centric positioning will be challenging for competition to match, given their focus on solely bottom-line results.
What did they discover? Their management is also unwilling to risk bottom line results for a “culture” HR-like project. Just like the companies in this article, they ran afoul of the CFO, who wanted clear financial metrics for the initiative. Is the CFO wrong to want accountability for what could be an expensive, long-term effort? Is the CMO wrong to want to improve customer experience?
How have you resolved this dilemma?
Why customer experience is the new marketing
It seems pretty obvious that the experience someone has of a brand will colour their opinion of it and whether they go back to it.
This week’s cover feature is all about the experience people have of brands and it reveals some startling things. For example, Nationwide wants to put customers at the heart of its strategy but admits that doing this is a leap of faith for the accountants that run the business.
And Hilton hotels had to do 18 months of work to persuade the board that poor customer experiences were losing it money.
Easy? Not according to Forrester Research, which shows that fewer than 50% of customer experience professionals have a programme to improve things across all channels. Probably partly because they don’t have one view of their customers.
Added to this, it is also hard to prove that customer experience does relate back to the bottom line, as in the Hilton example. Alastair Macmillan from research firm ORC International tells me that it is difficult to get businesses to provide this kind of ‘bigger picture’ data.
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