Customer experience is widely viewed as a key differentiator among loyalty marketers and the challenges associated with it are always apparent.
Many elements are attached to customer experience and some of those were discussed during a session titled, “CX Revisited: A Retrospective Panel Discussion with Engagement Expo “Alumni”,” Monday at the 6th annual Engagement & Experience Expo presented by Loyalty360.
“There is an increased focus on retention of your best customers, using all of your data to personalize, and customer journey mapping is also more of a focus,” Bond Brand Loyalty CEO Bob MacDonald told attendees. “Everybody is talking about customer experience now.”
Kim Delaney, vice president, customer experience, Guardian Life Insurance, told attendees that it is a challenge for any business to keep customers engaged with products or services, such as insurance products that are not used by the customer daily or even monthly.
"Since the customer touch points for insurance products may not be as frequent as other products in the retail consumer space, our customer touch points need to be amazing," said Delaney.
Despite operating in the nonprofit industry, the Canadian Red Cross faces many of the same challenges as other companies regarding customer experience and customer loyalty. Brand loyalty is obviously a crucial component of the Canadian Red Cross, as the company cannot operate without the donations of contributors both in Canada and around the world.
Andrew George, manager, national donor loyalty and retention, Canadian Red Cross, said the company hired a new chief development officer.
“We’re investing in technology and new systems,” George said. “We’re becoming more sophisticated in moving our data fluidly. We’re moving toward showing ROI in everything we do.”
Delaney said Guardian Life Insurance conducts considerable research and found an interesting trend among millennials.
"For us now, our focus is on the influencers of millenials for certain products," said Delaney. "While we run a parallel track focused on appealing to millennials for other products."
Given the global explosion of mobile an all things digital, it seems that is the way of the world for current and future connectivity that impacts the customer experience. Not so, according to Macdonald.
“As much as we’ve become digital, people want to speak with live people,” Macdonald said. “The customer experience, for us, is about combining digital data with human data.”
George said the Canadian Red Cross encourages customer feedback and uses a keen response approach.
“We make it easy for people to complain,” George said. “Our response team follows up with them immediately, within 24 hours. Responding to people has a meaningful impact on their customer lifetime value.”
Loyalty360 has written extensively about the need for companies to break down department silos to create more efficiently run, customer-centric organizations. But, Macdonald isn’t so sure this practice leads to better customer experience outcomes.
“The breaking down of silos with a focus on customer-centricity has led to too many voices across the board, and with so many stakeholders involved, it becomes exponentially more challenging to cut through that noise,” Macdonald said.
George, who noted that, after the fires in northern Alberta earlier this year, 95 percent of the donations received by the Canadian Red Cross through their mobile channels were from brand new donors, added that the organization is making headway in breaking through the siloed approach, along with implementing a more robust CRM system.
“We had a lot of silos, but no one had an idea of who’s talking to who,” he explained. “Our new chief development officer has led this charge.”
A highly engaged employee base, Macdonald said, is critical to having a great customer experience.
“There are many metrics out there, and many use NPS, but, ultimately, it’s constantly trying to make the right adjustments,” he added. “We’re living in an era of hyper-personalization and high expectations.”
Delaney also described the challenges industries face in measuring emotional engagement in the digital experience as it does not have the personal element experienced in the phone channel.
Delaney said Guardian Life Insurance has identified three key themes tied to NPS: Effort, personalization, and emotional engagement.
“We have very strong historical evidence,” Delaney added. “We’re working on the predictive.”