of planned customer engagements over
time. However, just like in marketing
the bottom line needs justification and
customer experience activities need
documentation. support of the complaint and compliment
volume tracker for numbers and nature. It
is from these very customer outputs that
marketing may tap in and measure the
response to product or service adequacy.
Measurement of customer willingness
to recommend via the net promote
score, or service levels achieved via the
customer effort score, whilst indicative
of satisfaction levels, requires the added If measurement and the metrics derived
thereof are important to guide decision
making at a corporate level, then both
the marketing and customer experience
strategies should benefit from harmonized
thought and synergistic strategy efforts!
The core structure of any great marketing
strategy will have the customer at the
center of focus. The strategic themes,
objectives, activities, and targets will
revolve around customer acquisition,
customer interaction, and customer
retention.
Whether the marketing angles in the
strategy are addressed from research,
business development, public relations
and communication or brand awareness
perspective, ultimately the target audience
for these activities is the customer. It
therefore calls for support from the
‘people’ driven arm of the organization,
whose sole focus is to ensure that anything
and everything to do with the customer
is done with excellence – the customer
experience team.
Winning customer experience strategies
on the other hand, need to take into
account that internal departments all work
towards delivery of great customer service
along the chain that eventually lands at the
external customer. In the same way that
the strategies these departments put in
place must focus on delivering internally,
towards seamless customer experiences
both ways, so must the marketing and
customer service departments ensure that
their strategies ‘talk’ to each other.
Being specific entities that are designated
custodians of the customer and for whom
customer contact is not only the highest,
but the most sensitive, the call to action is
loud. And to reiterate the earlier question
- are there any fundamental differences
between the blue print and framework for
the development of a winning marketing
or CX strategy? The answer is no … not
at all!
Carolyne Gathuru is the founder
and director of strategy at LifeSkills
Consulting. She has several years of
experience in customer experience strategy
development and training. You can
commune with her on this or related issues
via mail at: [email protected].