CX – Veronica Stenberg

6 factors to consider to create a successful customer loyalty program

Veronica — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 06:01:35 +0000

The market for loyalty programs is saturated. Looking to the US market, each US citizen is a member on average in 9 different member clubs*. Today’s customer is highly aware of the trade of their personal details and data for deals and discounts.

The paradigm shift that came with social media has also affected the customer club’s context and the issue of customer retention. The customer is at the centre today, not only in regards to marketing and communication but also in regards to their experience of being a customer of different brands.

If we look at member clubs of companies such as Sephora, Starbucks etc, they base their loyalty program on customer insight and engagement. They are both brilliant examples of brands that focus on creating an enhanced customer experience by digital partnerships with complementary brands and other new tactics to delight their most loyal customers.

Sephora has also found the key to motivating its customers to share their experiences in stores through social media. By rewarding their members when they behave in a way that is beneficial to the brand. Sephora is often praised for its innovative ideas and successful customer club. Which indicates that it is no longer about discounts and deals, instead Sephora focuses on being able to give the customer such a positive experience as possible of the brand. They also drive customer engagement by including their members in the decisions and development of the company’s product offering to lay the foundation for early commitment to both new services and products.

The roles of loyalty have changed, now companies need to prove to their customers that they are a loyal company, not a company with a loyalty program*.

So what does this mean for you who want to create a customer club, loyalty program or work to decrease customer churn in an existing customer base? This means that you need to rethink and adapt to the new game plan. There are five components that you need to consider:

A great product or service

Your product or/and service is an important component in creating loyal customers. Without a great product or service that customers appreciate, it is not possible to build customer loyalty or a customer club.

Incorporate customer insight and dialogue to your everyday work

Your team needs to work continuously to gather insights, opinions and reviews and to have a real dialogue with your customers. But insight without action is worthless, you need to know how to act and implement the findings in your business to drive both engagement and loyalty that effects the bottom line.

Craft better customer experiences

The customer experience today is your brand and a way for your business to truly deliver on your brand promise and ethos. It includes everything from

service level, product, the path to purchase, to personalization and beyond. To be able to create better customer experiences, you need to see the big picture.

Good customer experiences with your brand are the foundation to increase both repurchases, reduce customer churn and increase recommendations from existing customers to potential new customers.

Stay authentic and deliver on your brand values

Your brand values play an incredibly big role in whether the customers come back or if you want to get customers to become members of a loyalty program. An example of a complete disaster is Dolce & Gabbana that lost both customers and market share during 2018. This after one of their racist ads got questioned in social media and photos of one of the founder’s racist comments where spread in social media. To add further insult to injury he tried to lie to get away. Which in turn generated photos and videos of people burning their D&G clothes and accessories. And photos of department stores packing up D&G merchandise and sending it back.

Proving the point that both having and delivering on those said values are incredibly important to make customers want to buy from, make repurchases and recommend your brand to others.

Customers want to be able to stand for their choice of buying products from you. Just like Seth Godin says “people like us but things like this”. This is especially important when it comes to larger brands and especially so for millennials. You don’t want people that are more digitally savvy than your business to be against you in social media.

Understand the perceived customer value outside of your product benefits

In addition to being able to offer customers a great product, the perceived customer value is a big part of getting loyal customers. Both in the form of supporting repurchases but also when it comes to getting existing customers to want to join a customer club. How can your customer club add value to your existing customers? This does not have to be in the form of discounts. It can be other things like priority access for sales, events or other things that you know your customers appreciate and make them delighted or surprised. By working continuously with customer dialogue and insight, you will know exactly how to give your customers an increased value from the interactions with your brand.

Dare to collaborate

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, you do well to find complementary brands that you can collaborate with to delight your customers. Such as Starbucks and Spotify that collaborated together.

Who can your brand collaborate with to create experiences that will delight your customers?

Mentioned sources

* Source: Forrester – Rethinking customer loyalty

Links to inspiration for customer loyalty programs and initiatives

Useful statistics to use in internal debates and educational activities.

More information about Sephoras customer engagement tactics

Photo by Amir Mahmoudi on Unsplash

Uncover the power of human interactions – the benefits of speech analytics for your business

Veronica — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 08:00:41 +0000

Every day I try to feed my brain something new either it be a podcast, article, book or video. That offer ups new perspectives or knowledge that I can ponder and hopefully contribute towards me becoming better at what I can do for others.

The other day I was sipping green tea and getting to grips with Speach Analytics and how this can be utilized to provide both better customer service and business growth.

For you who did not have the luxury of attending this mornings seminar hosted by Access Nordics on this topic, here are my notes and key takeaways – enjoy:

What is speech analytics?

Speech Analytics is the method used to harvest insights from human to human interactions. Trough phone calls, (cal also be complemented with emails or social media) and gather actionable insights from these interactions. Its the use of analysis of the tone, words and so on to identify emotions, stress levels etc to uncover the reason for the call.

What is speech analytics not?

Speech Analytics is not the same as Siri, Google Home or Echo as today humans need to adapt their speech interactions to fit the software. Eg we do not speak normally to our home assistants – we need to adapt our speech to them. So they will understand us. (But I’m sure the big corporations use speech analytics in some form or another when they listen into to us through these devices, but that’s another topic )

Understand your customers

You can utilize speech analytics to faster and more effectively harvest insights to understand your customers from customer call centre interactions. Instead of listening in to calls, you can use this type of software to visualise, search for and work with customer call centre interactions to find the specific recordings that you want to screen.

Cultural differences do make a difference

When working with speech analytics between various markets, let’s say you work at are an international company, you need to take in account how that culture, generally express anger, happiness, frustration and disappointment when you set up the systems etc. As we tend to – very generalised express ourselves differently based on the country we live or are from.

Identify broken digital customer journeys

Utilising this type of software you can identify broken digital customer journeys and work to streamline the customer experience and minimize login problems, missing confirmation, technical issues and self-service failures/issues.

Here are 7 additional notes that are food for thought from this morning on how speech analytics can contribute towards both better customer experience and business growth:

Half of the calls to customer service centres are unwanted calls
Identify the pain in waiting for the customer and what your company can do about this
Identify what poor service sounds like
Identify insights that can support your digital agenda
Empathy increases NPS scores
Identify drivers for CSAT and NPS scores
Uncover insights for fact-based management decisions for your organisation
Identify how to improve the customer service agents performance and service levels

Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash

The 3 keys to be more successful in your marketing – no matter the channel

Veronica — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 05:19:01 +0000

If you want to reach everyone, you are relevant to no one. Yet, with the most advanced technology available for marketing today, there is still a huge gap in terms of being specific in both targeting and messaging towards the desired audience.

One can, of course, argue that with increased targeting parameters comes an increased cost for a specific campaign or activity. However, the cost of being irrelevant is far greater. Why risk your company’s brand by being irrelevant? And in the long run, you want to craft marketing that reaches the right people when it matters, something that I argue is worth paying a premium for. Especially since in order to be able to make decisions based on data you cannot “spray and pray”.

Relevance is the key.

To increase the relevance I’m sharing the incredibly three key questions and steps that will take your marketing to the next level.

Who specifically do you want to reach?

The first thing you need to do is identify who specifically you want to reach. Create well-defined target groups from an overarching perspective.

Examples:

People in New York City that want to discover things to do nearby/outside New York City

Can be broken down into

Residents of New York City

Tourist in New York City

From these two overarching segments, you can drill down further

Residents of New York City: retired couples, hipsters, couples with children etc

Tourists in New York City: US tourists, UK tourists, German tourists etc

Goal: get specific about who you want to reach

What do you know about them?

For each specific and identified target audience that your company wants to reach, what do you know about them besides the classic demographic data? Can you craft a story about an individual that represents a person from each identified target group from the exercise above?

To be really on point with creating your customers’ persona, add their pain points. That is, the challenges they face. As well as including the gain points, in terms of positive results they are looking for. This helps you position yourself in your customers perspective and avoid the illusive trap of thinking from the “inside out”.

From here, you can start building a persona that helps you to increase the relevance of both communication and marketing tactics to specific audiences. Then you go from a personalized target group to a more specific person, with a laser focus on their specific needs.

Goal: craft a persona

Where are your target groups online and what existing behaviour can you tap into?

Once you have clearly defined and specific target groups, with a persona for each group you are in a much better position to start crafting compelling and relevant communication towards each specific customer target group.

As well as starting to research and brainstorm where you can find them online.

What channels to utilise and when in their decision journey they may be relevant.

Goal: channel selection based on existing behaviour for each target group

Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash

How to measure customer experience

Veronica — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 05:57:00 +0000

There are various ways you can approach the measurement of CX. Either you can take a holistic view and from a customer journey perspective identify common touchpoints and areas where you can assign KPI’s for each overarching area in the customer journey and have one overarching metric. Or you can go even deeper and identify ways to measure CX at each touchpoint and interaction. You’ll have to find a way to make the measurement relevant to your business, customer and organisational capacity and maturity.

A good starting point is to find at least one KPI to measure and follow-up on CX, instead of having none at all.

Here are some suggestions for metrics that you can use as an indication for customer experience and satisfaction, beyond NPS®:

Customer churn rate

Helps you identify how many customers that leave your company during a specific timeframe. You’ll get this by dividing the amount of lost customers with the amount of new customers during a period of time.

Loyalty club member acquisition rate

Or number of customers that join any loyalty club that you may have. This helps you understand if your customers find your brand good enough in terms of wanting more from you. An indication of a relationship if you may.

Customer satisfaction scores

In any customer surveys you do, even in newsletters. Design a scale where the customer can easily grade their experience with you. Ensure you use the same scale throughout the company.

Reviews

Either it’s product or company reviews on Facebook, this can give your brand insights on what type of customer experience you provide.

Response times

How long does it take to respond to customer queries in the channels you are present in?

Customer Support query resolution/case times

Before closing queries. Are these improving? I.e are customer support closing queries quicker?

Sentiment

Add this to your social listening and analytics to follow up on the tone of the online conversations about your brand.

Want more insights on how to work with CX for you brand?

Download my free Customer Experience Workbook, complete with more insights and templates to get started today.

Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash

The benefits of open customer journey mapping

Veronica — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 04:23:13 +0000

I’ve previously written about creating a framework for marketing around a very basic customer journey containing four phases – see, think do and care which is a very basic but very useful in terms of planning marketing and communication focusing on the path to purchase.

Open customer journeys on the other hand, are a more in depth look at specific customer segments actual journey pre and post purchase.

So what do I mean with an open customer journey?

With an open customer journey, I want to emphasise the actual process (outside your company context) that your customer goes through before buying a product or service that you sell. This can and should include before and after a purchase. This process is usually mapped out by a user experience designer after both research, interviews and other insight work is performed to really understand what the customers go through. Before deciding to purchase a specific product or service and to help you stand out by catering for their needs at every touchpoint with your brand.

Why is mapping your customer’s journey useful, how you can use this – and how it will have a positive affect your business bottom line:

Understand your customer’s behaviour, challenges and pain points
Understand your customer and know when you can be of service, useful, helpful, informative and inspirational
Design triggers for marketing automation
Find insight for target group segmentation
Find insights for micro-moments
Find insight for content, communication and marketing creation
Identify opportunities to improve your service offering, apps, homepage and other touchpoints
Spot new business opportunities by identifying up and cross-sell possibilities to increase revenue
Design a better customer experience
Understand what is important in your customer’s path to purchase
Understand how you can increase customer loyalty and return purchases within existing customers

To better illustrate this, I’ve created one very basic customer journey for an airline company in this image above. Each target group of customers will have a slightly different customer journey of course. In this case, a leisure travel customer and a business travel customer will have two similar but different journeys.

In the image above, There are “six main events” for the customer in the big circles, which will take most of the customers time. Then we have the purple lines which indicate other important check-points. This is the customers context and what I mean with an open customer journey.

There are plenty of opportunities here, post-purchase, to design a better experience with an airline company. That, however, is it’s very own article.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash