Is customer experience the marketing department's job?

Answer this: What makes your brand different from your competitors?

In this blog, long-time friend and sponsor of the Marketing Association, Engaging Partners share their insights into the customer experience and the marketing department.

Many organisations struggle to hone-in on features that can differentiate their brand from others. It’s not easy to create something truly unique these days - and product, service and even price aren’t enough to make your brand rise above the pack. So what’s something that can elevate your business?

Your customer experience.

But isn’t that the job of customer service? Or sales? Think again! Marketers hold the key to driving differentiating customer experience (CX) - and we can prove it.

Keen to learn more about CX? Watch our on-demand webinar 'Is your customer experience differentiating or damaging your brand?’

Why marketing is best suited to handle CX

Marketers have a unique position. You’re set up to listen, analyse and act on the customers’ needs. You’re also set up to work across departments to action feedback and identify the themes that will aid business growth (all of which you gathered from customer insights).

This unique position has the power to propel customer experience through the entire organisation all from the very first touchpoint.

The first touchpoint

The customer experience starts with the very first touchpoint your customers have with your brand. As a marketer, you have direct influence over the experience customers have with your brand as they move through your funnel. So any point of friction - you aren’t able to respond to an enquiry on time, for example - that stops them from moving through that funnel damages your efforts.

That means the customer experience begins before you even identify someone as a prospect. At this stage, it’s the job of the marketer to be helpful. From the first touchpoint, marketers need to be consistent and responsive to interactions. They need to supply the relevant content and be mindful as to when prospects are ready to move on to the next stage in their journey with your organisation.

The handoff - from marketing to sales

There can be a lot of room for error when passing leads from marketing to sales - that’s why every customer experience plan needs to include a sales enablement strategy.

When your sales and marketing teams are on the same team - speaking the same language, striving for common goals - your customers will feel it. Marketing can offer sales support with the insights gained from the prospect to lead stage so sales can pick up right where marketing left off. Providing basic information (name, product/service interest, enquiries about a product, etc.) reduces friction from marketing to sales, setting them up to have a helpful conversation with the lead.

The CX tactics

So if it’s not already, customer experience needs to become a serious component of your marketing strategy. Here are some suggestions to put it into action straight away:

• Implement a good CRM to streamline communication between teams, capture customer interactions and make handoffs easy for everyone to follow.
• Invest in a marketing automation platform that gives you control over communications so you can deliver responses in a consistent, timely and professional way.
• Develop helpful content so it solves for the pain points and goals of your customers. Having persona profiles on-hand will help you identify the most important points to consider.
• Map out buyers journeys so you have an understanding as to where your personas are in their purchasing journey so you can always offer relevant, helpful content.
• Set up live chat/chatbot to offer support to customers right when they’re interacting with your brand. It can help no matter where they are on their journey.

Together, all of these components make up a good inbound marketing strategy. Combined with the right marketing automation platform means you can deliver a good quality experience for your prospects’ journey to becoming a customer.

If you need a hand getting started, or want to talk more about the customer experience, get in touch with the Engaging Partners team today.