A silent revolution is taking place in the way businesses are being nurtured. Brands that previously invested millions in advertising campaigns, influencer relationships and search engine optimization are realizing that their biggest marketing weapon has all been under their noses the entire time, that is the experience that they provide to the already existing customers.
Customer experience (CX) is no longer a functional issue of support teams or a parameter that customer success managers are monitoring. It is, in the most feasible sense, a marketing engine, an engine that creates awareness, trust and revenue, without even using a media buy.
The Shift Nobody Formally Announced
The conventional system of marketing is based on a broadcast approach: a brand develops a message, promotes it in paid and earned channels and hopes that it gets to the right individuals and makes them take action. It worked well for decades. It continues to work- albeit with declining returns.
Society places a lot of trust in the hands of other individuals more than it trusts the brands. It has always been demonstrated that word-of-mouth advertising rates in relation to purchasing decisions are higher than any other advertisement forms. The recommendation of a friend that the customer service of a particular company was outstanding or that a product simply surpassed all expectations without anyone noticing it, is more persuasive than a billboard could be.
What is behind that word-of-mouth? Experience. How a brand made someone feel. How a problem was either addressed or left unaddressed in grace. Whether the product fulfilled what it promised and more. These are the points of touch, seeded throughout the touchpoints between the initial visit of the site and the 10th purchase, as they are the ingredient of the most plausible marketing that has ever existed.
You are not providing service when you contrived those moments. You are building those stories that your customers will be telling on your behalf.
Why CX Works as a Marketing Channel
The reasoning is evident, albeit the implementation might be not.
Each happy customer has a referral base. Any extraordinary experience can move along that network in the form of recommendation, a social posting, a review or the word of mouth at dinner. The recipients trust these candid moments of sharing in a manner that they will never trust paid impressions. They are ad-block-free, skeptic-free and have no cognitive filter that consumers nowadays have developed towards branded messages.
Other than referrals, customer experience has a direct impact on retention. Customer retention is among the least valued marketing tools comment finder. The cost of acquiring a new customer is between five and seven times as much as the cost of retaining a new customer. A loyal customer is also a repeat customer who purchases over and over again, upgrades and extends his or her relationship with your brand. They yield lifetime value that over time is a lot higher than the original cost of acquisition. Retention as a marketing outcome puts CX investment into a new perspective as a revenue generator rather than a cost center.
It also has the compounding effect of reviews and ratings. In the majority of industries, online reviews are what a potential buyer will see when the search is made. In the e-commerce, SaaS, hospitality, healthcare and professional services sectors, star rating and written review serves as an indefinite, publicly accessible log of your client experience. Even the best campaign budget will not be able to push fifty one star ratings of how difficult it was to find support. On the other hand, a constant flow of comprehensive, excited reviews of actual customers is an asset that increases in value as additional customers are introduced.
The Touchpoints That Matter Most
The consideration of CX as a marketing channel would be imperfect without mapping the instances to be provided in the formation of experience. Not every touchpoint is important and not every touchpoint can be optimized simultaneously. However, there are disproportionately powerful ones.
The first impressions become fixed into long-term perceptions in onboarding. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling software, consumer goods or professional services, the tone of a customer relationship is determined by the first hours and days. An effortless, considerate onboarding to the customers to the point where they experience the initial value and can see the product as genuinely valuable in their life, will significantly increase the chances that the customers will remain, refer to other people and increase their interest.
Outsized reputational influence is on the support interactions. Studies conducted by Bain and Company and others, always discover that those customers who have an issue solved promptly and in a nice manner are usually more loyal than those who never had an issue at all. A challenging experience that is managed best is a narrative that a person recounts as a commercial promotion. The same case, mishandled, is a warning story that has been distributed among many.
The service or product itself is also a touchpoint in its day-to-day use. The consistency of a product in its functionality and pleasure gives silent trust in the brand. When it does not work – even in minor details – it is erosion of trust. CX investment is investing in product quality and hence in marketing investment.
The post-purchase communication is often disregarded. When the customer has already invested their cash and interest in a purchase, then it is during the post sale phase that the care a brand takes or lack of it is revealed or becomes conspicuous. The proactive updates, considerate follow-ups and the informative contents that assist the customer in deriving more benefits out of his/her purchase are all indicative that the relationship did not conclude at the checkout.
Building a CX-Led Marketing Strategy
Switching to CX- first mind of marketing does not imply giving up on traditional channels. It implies the leveraging of experience as the motivating force that makes all the other channels more effective.
Begin with auditing your customers where they are hurt. Interview them, survey them and test where they fall or even where they grumble or fall silent. Determine the top three to five customer journey moments that have the highest level of emotional significance and make early changes. Minimal friction at critical instances may result in retention and referral behavior lifts that are measurable.
Give authority to your frontline crews, such as support, sales and account management and make them make each interaction a brand moment. This does not involve scripting but giving them the power, resources and culture to be creative in their problem solving and get the customers a feeling that they are considered important. One of the surest CX investments is autonomy as a frontline staff.
Establish customer experience feedback that drives customer experience into marketing discussions. The operations teams should not be the only ones to review Net Promoter Scores, customer satisfaction ratings and support ticket themes but product and marketing leadership as well. Trends in customer experiences information can show the language customers attach to value-language that must be incorporated in the message and positioning.
Lastly, share CX stories with the inside team. In case one of the customers writes an outstanding review or leaves ten friends a referral write it to the entire team. Hold a support interaction beautifully when it works. Culture determines behavior and teams that see their work as a marketing activity are more careful and intentional in doing so.
The Long Game
It is not without reason that some of the most reputable brands in the world, Patagonia, Chewy, Zappos among others, became household-names with comparably small advertising presence. Their fame was earned experience after experience, by word of mouth, by a sincere loyalty to customer care which a customer could not but talk about.
Businesses of all sizes can avail of that result. It does not need a huge team, a complex technology stack. It involves the belief that the way you treat customers is, in the broadest sense, a marketing strategy– and the discipline of developing that strategy as carefully as you would develop an advertising campaign itself.
Those brands that realize this on time will always be ahead. A culture of exceptional customer experience is indefinitely compounding because it is not a process that occurs once in a quarter as is the case with a campaign.