As technology quickly evolves, so too are sales practices, business models, customer engagement strategies, and virtually everything else under the entrepreneurial sun. These are the sorts of topics the Modern Marketing Experience was designed to address.
Presented by Oracle in Las Vegas, the 2015 conference brought together a wide range of industry professionals that offered their expertise to help brands and marketers deliver better customer experiences in today’s challenging business landscape.
One talk in particular offered an exclusive look into the myriad of ways a diverse group of brands considered the customer experience. Moderated by Oracle's Michael Richter, the session simply titled, “The Modern Sales Experience Panel,” brought together Dan Green from LinkedIn, John Carr of Visa, Tim Handorf of G2 Crowd, and Galen Myers from Presence to discuss a wide range of perspectives.
Each speaker offered particular viewpoints on the subject. LinkedIn, for example, has six core values and the first two are directly related to member and customer experience. In fact, No. 1 on the list is that the “member always comes first.”
“We have a large member base that joined LinkedIn because they see value in it, and we want them here,” said Green, a Global Solutions Account Executive at LinkedIn. “So anything that affects the members, whether it is a corporation or anyone else that may want to do something that could potentially disrupt a member base, we have to protect our members from that. We put a lot of controls around how the member experience is achieved.”
LinkedIn’s second core value is “relationships matter.” This philosophy is a fundamental principle that drives the direction of the company. It is, in fact, another foundational base on which the entire site’s networking is built.
“So what sales reps at LinkedIn do with clients is to try and approach them from a relationship standpoint as best as they can,” Green continued.
LinkedIn’s take on the customer experience strategy makes sense in the context of its mission to connect global members.
Visa, on the other hand, diverged from LinkedIn’s clearly defined take on what an excellent customer experience means. It may not be literally written into the annals of the company as with LinkedIn, but that does not mean Visa ignores the customer experience. Not at all. Visa also considers it to be a crucial component of businesses success. It does, however, approach the concept very differently.
Carr, Head of Co-brand Relationship Management at Visa, was on hand to explain further.
“Visa has such a broad base of customers including 14,000 financial institutions, 36 million merchants, and 3.2 billion card holders all around the world, so there is a lot of diversity there.” Carr said. “So the definition of customer experience really depends on which segment we are talking to.”
Visa, as much as possible, caters to the experiences of each segment in an attempt to create more meaningful and relevant interactions as the needs and opportunities to do occur.
Myers, the Principal of Strategy & Innovation at Presence, also presented his perspective regarding what constitutes an engaging customer experience. And for Presence, a developmental solutions and consultancy firm that also designs integrated web and mobile products for a wide array of businesses, the scope of his perspective was quite large.
“Customer experience is any place where the customer touches your brand,” Myer said. “From a product or service standpoint, it is anywhere there is awareness, consideration, purchase, first use, on-going use, and reuse or upsell of a product. So when talking about customer experience, you need to understand all of these areas, deliver on these areas to your client, and also to your client’s customer. When working with a client, you need to understand all the different touch points that they have with their customer. You need to
understand what will directly make them successful, which will then make you successful.”
For G2 Crowd, a small company known as the “Yelp” of business software that aims to increase transparency though peer-to-peer conversations, the answer to the customer experience question was similar to the foundational response established by LinkedIn.
“Customer experience is anything that makes the customer want to do business with your brand, or not,” said Handorf, Co-founder and President of G2 Crowd. “We do have a core set of values that are indoctrinated into everybody. It is trained, and it is talked about every week. Our culture is centered around the belief that customer relationships are built when your brand is caring, authentic, and transparent.”
Throughout the session, each speaker presented varying viewpoints regarding their role and place all long the entire customer experience spectrum. Each brand had different goals and perspectives. But what was unanimous, however, was the importance each placed on offering a superb customer experience in the manor that best addressed the needs of their respective customers.
And this is also universally true for brands across every industry. It does not matter if you’re dealing with a single person across the counter in a family owned store or with 3.2 billion credit card holders all across the world. Every single brand will benefit from offing an engaging customer experience.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.