Some of you may have been asking yourselves, “where has Rob been these past couple months?”. I wish I had an exotic story to tell you, but the truth is I’ve been working like crazy!
At the end of November, my work asked me to step in and take the reigns of our Service Coordinator position while they search for a replacement. So, I traded in my marketing hat and dove in to manage the servicing of our thousands of customers and their life safety and security needs. Don’t get me wrong, I'm way over my head, but what I was able to bring to the table was a fresh set of eyes and a willingness to learn a new area of the business. I’ve learned a lot over the past two months, but what I wasn’t expecting was the lesson I would learn about the relationship between customer experience and marketing.
Customer Experience Marketing
Customer experience is all about the holistic impression your customers have of your brand across all of their touchpoints with the company. From my recent experience, the two main touchpoints are with your product and your people. By working to ensure that the customer has a positive experience, you are promoting brand loyalty while also taking steps to retain customers and encouraging brand advocacy.
The Flywheel Model
I’m a visual learner, and what really helped pull this together in my mind is Hubspot’s Flywheel model. Hubspot uses this model to demonstrate the momentum you can attain when you bring together your organization around delivering a great customer experience.
At the basic level, you attract visitors through useful content and by eliminating barriers that may prohibit them from learning about your company and/or product(s). From there, you engage them further by making it easy to shop and buy all the while starting to build a relationship with them. Finally, you delight them with customer service, helping, supporting, and enabling customers to reach their goals. In this concept, the more customers you add and the more quality service you provide, the faster the wheel spins as momentum builds. This model unifies all of our various departments: admin, sales, service, and marketing in one common viewpoint.
Next Steps
I still have a little time left in this service position, but it has left a lasting impression that will stay with me when I return to my marketing role. What I know for sure is that I will move forward with an eye on customer experience management (CXM). This will allow me to focus on our many customer touch points and help my team evaluate how we can improve the customer experience related to each.