Businesses are pushing harder than ever to improve or innovate products and services. They’re lowering prices to increase value perceptions, more sensitive than ever to competitors’ pricing strategies. They’re working on customer service issues. There’s nothing like a slowing economy to force companies to address shoring up response times to customers’ concerns and questions.

Yet all of these measures, taken individually, don’t ensure loyalty. So what’s a consumer product or service company to do? Every company understands the importance of customer satisfaction. It drove repeat sales and loyalty in the past. But now a challenging business environment and economy seem to be game changers. So what should the focus be on?

The impetus ought to be on addressing the customer experience issue, aligning every customer touch point and, by doing so, cementing much greater loyalty to their brands. Isn’t it time for businesses to develop a comprehensive, top-to-bottom customer experience strategy?

If they’re concerned about having to spend on a new initiative just when capital expenditures are being curtailed, companies ought to consider that this might be the best time to secure the customers they already have. It’s cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones, and, new customers aren’t attracted if there’s negative buzz from existing customers, either.

Working on one or two customer touch points is an inadequate approach. While improving any aspect of the customer experience is important, it’s far more crucial to address every aspect of customer interaction. And it’s impossible to reorient any of this correctly without conducting research first.

Key research questions must be answered:

• Who is the customer?
  
• What kinds of products or services is the customer looking for from the company?
  
• How can the company match the customer’s goals?
  
• What does the customer expect from the company and brand?
  
• What does the customer value?

In order to be successful, executive management, marketing, IT, customer service and R&D need to have the same focus and strategy. When a strategy has been adopted by the CEO and put into place, it won’t succeed without buy-in, even if it is firmly rooted in research. It has to be cohesively, holistically presented to the customer.

That signifies the need for a high level of cross-channel collaboration and discipline—two important functional aspects many companies struggle with. It has become more important than ever, a matter of survival in fact, to break down corporate silos—beginning today.

Designing a Compelling Customer Experience
Forrester Research compiled data recently that correlates the customer experience directly to loyalty. Translation: seamless, enjoyable experiences connect customers to companies. As relationships form, emotional attachments deepen. Let’s face it: enjoyment is a strong, positive emotion. To seal the deal, companies should remove customer frustration and potential sources of disappointment while unlocking the relevant drivers around a brand that fulfill customer expectations and help them reach their goals.

Strategy and design are the tools that help companies deliver consistently positive customer experiences. For a cross-channel strategy to work effectively, every touch point has to be designed to deliver not only deliver a great experience, but one that is relevant to the customer.

Designing an easy-to-navigate website is increasingly important as more and more consumers look for information online before making their purchases. Yet Forrester found in its surveys that consumers are consistently disappointed with their website interactions.

Websites must engage the customer. They should focus on using the same language as other touch points, providing the proper content and delivering it in the right manner for the target customers’ needs. Companies need to balance pushing a marketing agenda online with customers’ need to find information about products or services that help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. Otherwise: disconnect.

Customers may search for information online and still prefer to call in an order. If customer service representatives are armed with variant products, pricing or completely different promotions than the company website: disconnect. Solution: make sure all products are visible and available at uniform pricing across all channels. Make certain all promotions are also aligned.

When customer service staffers are short, rude or communicate they’re having a bad day, customers are a decidedly put-off. When employees’ language doesn’t match that of the website, consumer literature and advertising—or when it is condescending or rude—it becomes a major cause of customer dissatisfaction. Result: disconnect. Solution: hire, train and retain good employees who buy into the company vision and brand. Each employee IS the company to the customer.

Interactive Voice Response or IVR systems are universally detested by consumers. Companies use them for better customer service, but most IVRs are unusable, so what they actually achieve is customer frustration. Too many prompts and endless menu choices that do not always match up with their needs lead to customer perceptions that they are being treated disrespectfully, getting the runaround and having their time wasted. Negative impressions build as customers wait.

When they are connected with a customer service representative, things get worse if customers are routed to yet other reps after being told they chose the wrong prompt for their inquiry. This is another disconnect. Solution: redesign IVRs. Test them. Do not allow IVR systems to become an afterthought, an initiative buried deep within the IT department and the IT budget. Make IVR a priority since so many customers interface with it and take issue with it.

The last critical consumer touch point, and one of the most important, is packaging. Packaging makes the brand and product tangible to the customer. Yet too often packages are as commoditized as the products they contain. Without unique brand characteristics, structure or a communication hierarchy that is relevant to the target consumer, packaging is not the effective sales closer that it should be.

If packaging doesn’t speak directly to customers in their own language they speak, or present them with a clear-cut choice, then the products inside are perceived to be the same as every competitor’s at best, and totally irrelevant at worst. Solution: align packaging language and communications to target consumers’ needs and goals for total relevancy. Make certain packaging is aligned with the website, advertising, IVR and customer service communications to deliver a seamless, positive experience.

There are great opportunities for companies that set up customer-centric strategies and redesign every one of their customer touch points. Once they’re all seamless and in sync with the needs, desires and goals of their target audience, good things will inevitably happen.

Downturns in economic cycles and increased competition will have a minimal effect on experientially-driven consumer brands. Their customers will be unfailingly loyal. And isn’t that the number-one goal of marketers and design consultants?