Is your marketing making promises that your customer experience (CX) doesn’t deliver? Aligning your CX, brand and marketing is an effective way to differentiate your business from the majority that send mixed messages. That dissonance confuses and frustrates customers.
Departmental silos are a major culprit, according to a recent Forrester Research report.
“Only 25 percent of U.S. marketing decision-makers report having complete alignment between their CX vision and their company’s brand promise,” write analysts Michelle Moorehead and Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha. “This isn’t surprising, given that fewer than half of CX professionals whom we surveyed recently said that their company’s brand and CX teams work cross-functionally on the design and delivery of customer interactions.”
A related problem is that different departments prefer different tools for understating customer needs, wants and behaviors. As the Forrester report notes, marketing pros tend to use segments, while CX pros prefer personas.
At Andrew Reise, we’ve found that customer segmentation doesn’t provide the rich, emotional story behind what customers see, feel and experience when they (fill in the blank) with your company. That’s not the same as saying customer segmentation is a complete waste of time. Just the opposite: It can provide valuable, actionable insights for multiple departments.
But those insights also tend to be few and superficial, which is why personas and journey maps have become so popular. They provide a deeper, comprehensive picture of each customer type and their evolution. Time and again, we’ve seen companies try the new approaches of CX professionals and quickly realize the value they add, including how they can get all departments working toward a common set of goals.
To help even more companies develop customer-centric strategies that they can apply organization-wide, we’re offering a complimentary copy of Forrester’s February, 2016 report, “The Convergence Of Brand, Marketing, And Customer Experience.” It’s a crash course in why it’s so difficult – and so necessary – for businesses to get everyone on the same page, with dozens of success stories and cautionary tales about when they do and don’t. The report also compares the tools that marketing and CX pros use and provides tips for avoiding brand and CX dissonance.
Is your company ready to improve the customer experience? Request a consultation to speak with one of our experts.
