Traditional metrics are single-channel only; but the reality is that customers are multichannel and multi-device. Eric Feinberg, senior director of mobile, media, and entertainment at Foresee, reminded attendees of this tenuous situation at eTail West.
“Customers walk in the door with expectations; sometimes you can control that, sometimes you can’t,” he said. “They have an experience. Will they be satisfied and then exhibit the behaviors you want?” Will customers, Feinberg posited, purchase (and in which channel), recommend, and refer? He also pointed out that customer satisfaction with those experiences will impact not only current, but also future behaviors.
Feinberg went on to explain that many elements of the customer experience are knowable across touchpoints; for example, site navigation and access to a depth of product information. So along with tracking customers’ behaviors to infer the pros and cons of the customer experience, marketers should ask for customer feedback directly. Collect in-channel insight and measures. Ask customers where they came from and where they went next. Doing so creates visibility into the cross-channel experience. Feinberg recommended that marketers do all this to uncover the gaps between the experience that customers expect and what a company is delivering, and then marketers can use that information to determine how they can then close that gap.
To accomplish this, marketers should ask themselves: How are we doing, what should we do to improve the customer experience and why, how do we prioritize? The answers should be informed by that customer insight. “Customer experience priorities are best viewed through the lens of the customer,” Feinberg said, adding that marketers should measure the customer experience to see where to focus. But, ultimately, the answer to “Why should we do it?” is revenue.
According to Feinberg, 57% of customers surveyed by Foresee are multichannel and tend to be more satisfied and valuable than single-channel customers. For this reason, he emphasized the importance of delivering a consistently top-notch experience across channels. “Every channel has to be excellent or every channel fails,” Feinberg said. “If a customer has a poor experience with a company in one channel, it’s unlikely he’ll visit another of that company’s channels.”
