The customer experience isn’t just an abstract notion that lives in business school articles and consultants’ strategy documents. It’s the real, down-to-earth thing that customers, well, experience with the products they use every day.
“Too many of us, whether product marketers or product builders, forget (or perhaps have never experienced) what using our own offerings feels like,” states Brent Sleeper, who leads content marketing at SparkPost, a cloud email delivery service. Sleeper’s comments were made in an article written for the technology marketing website MarTech Today (MarTechToday.com). Although his message was targeted to marketers in technological fields, his points are pertinent no matter what industry you serve.
“Any disconnect between the people who build products and the people who market them inevitably results in less successful products with less satisfied users. And that’s not a place any of us want to be. Like any relationship, successful product/marketing collaboration is a two-way street. And there’s a critical, high-leverage area that we marketers need to step up and do a much better job at: connecting our marketing efforts to the actual experience our customers have using our products and services,” Sleeper says. “As a marketer, it’s high time you ate your own dog food.”
He offers three ways to keep the customer experience grounded in your customers’ reality:
Experience your product as a customer would. In technology, Sleeper says, marketers have earned a reputation for not having taken the time to use the products they are trying to sell. That has to change. “It’s easy to get inured to something that we take for granted. So stop assuming you understand your product, just because you market it every day.”
Walk through every onboarding step thrown in front of your customers, Sleeper says. You may be surprised that the customer experience is not as intuitive or smooth as you imagined. “As marketers, we suffer from a large amount of cognitive blindness when it comes to our own products. Our minds fill in what we expect to be there, rather than seeing what a customer actually experiences,” he says.
Sleeper shares a story of catching a long-running mistake he was making in a previous role writing taglines and calls to action for product collateral. For months, the documents he produced featured the wrong telephone number. “Not because I didn’t know better, but because I literally stopped comprehending the text that I was using over and over. In fact, I only noticed the typo when I happened to read my material
in reverse order; that forced me to see each word for what it was, rather than glancing at the whole thing as a unit and seeing what I expected. To really see what your customers see, you’ve got to experience it with fresh eyes — to read it backward, as it were.”
Get on the front lines to learn the truth about your customer experience. In addition to experiencing your products in your customers’ shoes, guess who else sees the down-and-dirty of how your products actually work? Your frontline customer support team. “Whether it’s by phone, email or novel channels like Slack, no one — and I mean no one — knows what’s working and what’s not in the customer experience like the support team,” Sleeper says.
“One of the most powerful things a company can do to nurture an understanding of the customer experience is to encourage every employee to hear it firsthand, on the front lines. That’s something my company does, and it’s been a real boon for building awareness of the overall customer experience. If you’re a marketer who’s serious about CX, you’ve got to get out of the ivory tower. Spending time on the help line, solving problems for your customers, is the surest way to develop an understanding of the real challenges your customers face.”
Remember that customer experience is a natural role for marketers. What are the skills that brought you to marketing? A knack for persuasion? An ability to write creative content? An empathy for customers’ challenges? All three of those attributes are key to being successful with understanding and enhancing the customer experience.
“There’s no question that marketers are well-positioned to champion a better customer experience. CX remains an aspiration as much as it’s a discipline in many organizations, so now’s the time for marketers to advocate for the responsibility and make it a reality,” Sleeper says.
He emphasizes this isn’t “just some kumbaya fantasy.” Better customer experience will drive the metrics that your CMO is being charged with — conversions, customer engagement and growth. “Making a bottom-line connection between CX and dollars is crucial for our success. Even the most numbers-driven among us understand that improving CX has a direct impact on results.”
