In
all my experience working with organizations there has been a visible lack of
coherent strategy for customer communication via various touch-points. I am
referring to customer service, corporate websites, social forums, blogs and
marketing campaigns. To be fair, the challenge has been in rapidity with which
changes have been taking place across the above landscape, which makes the job
of “keeping up” all the more difficult. However, these have now been around
long enough that customers expect organizations to button-up and present a
consistent brand experience.
I believe the challenge is not in how to deliver a consistent experience instead, why
organizations fail to deliver a consistent experience across its customer touch
points!
I
find the lack of adequate investments, executive support and unclear role
descriptions as the key factors that companies need to focus on. The benefits of
a consistent communications approach are many – brand growth, customer retention, acquisition, etc., to name
a few. So where does one start? If there are separate sites for sales, customer service, account management, etc., consolidating all into one consistent look & feel
is a good start. Consolidating, with all reporting into one organization, will also help with messaging consistency that often gets lost in subjectivity across business units. Next step would be ensure customer can easily navigate between various sites as they engage with the brand. Now we are ready to actively interact with your community via, blogs (if? there
is one!) and across social spectrum. Also, providing information and self-service tools across
your company sites is trivial, yet engaging. Digital presence needs to be integral
to overall strategy and appropriate controls need to be in place to ensure
accountability, regular updates, monitoring and reporting.
Once
we achieve an integrated look & feel for our brand, we can then start to understand
customer behavior across these touch points and, in turn, start providing
better products/services/support to our customers.
