Trust Is the Foundation of Customer Experience

The current marketing environment is saturated with loyalty solutions. One method brands have adopted to differentiate themselves in this environment is to curate engaging customer experiences. However, even as experiences promise deeper emotional connections with customers, delivering them presents other obstacles that marketers have to overcome.
 
In a recent webinar on this topic, Loyalty360 CEO Mark Johnson and Bernard Chung, Head of Product Marketing at SAP Customer Experience, discussed the challenges that offering relevant customer experiences creates. These include growing concerns around customer trust and data privacy, internal knowledge gaps, rapidly changing technologies, and legacy marketing systems that aren’t up to par.
 
The webinar was based on an SAP/Loyalty360 survey of marketing professionals designed to gather insights into how brands deliver successful customer experiences. The findings reveal that most marketers have an excellent vision for the kinds of experiences they want to curate and that they have the right objectives to deliver these experiences. However, the survey also shows that marketers lack the ability to achieve these objectives because of the aforementioned challenges.    
 
Chung characterized concerns around privacy as a constant issue. “GDPR and data privacy and protection are in people’s minds,” he said. “We hear about data breaches on a bi-weekly basis. There’s a concern that consumer data is well protected and used according to consumer will. We will see an increasing number of regulations and laws to govern how organizations can collect and use data. The key is to be transparent and to clearly articulate how customer data is collected and used.”
 
Johnson also pointed out that personalization is critical to any successful loyalty program. “82 percent of consumers demand it,” he said.
 
Chung agreed. “Personalization is now table stakes,” he said. “Marketers realize that they have to orchestrate the customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle. This is outside of the traditional customer interaction channels. You need to have the ability to affect the experience customers have across touchpoints. Innovative brands should consider implementing a personalization platform.”
 
Johnson also suggested that brands need to improve measurement, planning, and alignment. “70 percent of respondents [to our survey] felt there is a gap in the hard skills required to deal with changing requirements and expectations,” he said. Without the technical skills to keep up with evolving customer expectations, brands will be hard-pressed to deliver unique customer experiences. 
 
Chung elaborated on this issue. “In 2019, we will see the percentage of people using machine learning go up,” he said. “One of the reasons is that platforms like Einstein or Leonardo are developing package solutions that are specific in their purpose. For example, we’re developing machine learning platforms for product purchase, recommendation, and customer retention scenarios. They’re easily deployable for non-technical persons.” Hopefully, these “easily deployable” solutions will help to solve the technical skills gap that SAP and Loyalty360 identified from their survey.
 
Johnson also offered thoughts on the problem of data, privacy, and metrics. “The biggest challenge is creating actionable items from collected data,” he said. “Marketers have to plan and create campaigns that are responsive to what the data says. 45 percent of marketers see significant impact from regulations, and only 32 percent of marketers feel they have the right amount of data.”
 
In total, these challenges represent a significant problem for brands and marketers. To solve this problem, Johnson argued that brands need to be concerned with five themes: personalization, authenticity, responsiveness, consistency, and trust. The SAP/Loyalty360 survey found that respondents were extremely preoccupied with creating trust between brands and consumers. The only way to lay this foundation, Johnson said, was to construct four pillars (corresponding to the four other themes) to support it. Once brands build authenticity, responsiveness, consistency, and personalization, consumers will begin to trust them.
 
Chung concluded, “If we think about trust, it is the cornerstone of any relationship. It’s no different for a customer and a brand. We trust things first based on face value: what we know about it, what people say about it. As we continue to engage, we develop a certain experience and a certain expectation. If those are at least satisfactory, brands will begin to build trust.”
 

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