Why the marketing hare beats the tortoise
Traditional marketing has been turned on its head by increasingly disruptive technology and the connected customer. It’s not enough to plan campaigns and follow best practices anymore; as a marketer you have to be agile.
Why is that? Because the connected customer, your customer, people just like you, is ‘always on’. You don’t have a small window in their day to try to reach them anymore, as they’re switching from screen to screen, device to device, which such limited spans for attention, you have to be able to keep up.
To be a customer centric business today means that you as a marketer need to be able to think, and act, in real-time.
As a result, marketing professionals are faced with a new age of engagement - an age in which a series of targeted short-term promotions or messages are beginning to outperform more traditional long-term “integrated campaigns”.…
Over half of businesses don't have any defined responsibility for multichannel customer experience
In our recent research, in collaboration with eCommerce Expo, on Managing Online Customer Experiences, one of the main challenges we wanted to investigate, is who is responsible for managing experiences - both online and across multiple channels.
Given that we are reaching and interacting with consumers across a multitude of touchpoints, all businesses are looking for the best ways to influence and engage with our consumers, to 'maximise conversion from lead to sale and customer loyalty'. But who is responsible for this?
Over 52.6% of respondents had no defined responsibility for managing for managing the Customer Experience
Well we think this is shocking, but understandable? What are the implications? Well, they're the same with any lack of management and likely include:
No / poor KPIs for evaluating Customer Experience
No / poor process for reviewing and improving…
An interview with Nick Dutch, Head of Digital at Domino's Pizza UK
Nick Dutch is Head of Digital at Domino's Pizza Group Limited in the UK and ROI. In this interview he shares the approach used to help manage customer experiences for Domino's. He will explain their approach in more detail at the Smart Insights Digital Marketing conference.
Q. Please outline your role and how your team is structured?
My role combines all aspects of the online customer experience from media to conversion, both on the desktop site and in mobile. So, I’m responsible for all online marketing activity that drives people to the site and in determining the customer journey whether on our desktop site, mobile sites and apps or our communities on social media sites which are also part of how the Domino’s brand is presented in the digital space.
From a strategic point-of-view, I’m responsible…
Or... why we have a love/hate relationship with Rubik’s Cubes?
OK, we don’t hate them, in fact we should probably be grateful to this 80s icon since we’ve won a lot of business recently because of it. However, when it comes to developing websites (or any type of software) we have to bury the Rubik’s Cubes. Let me explain….
Technical agencies, such as ourselves are often too quickly regarded as not creative. This can feel unfair and too hasty because we have seen some fantastic creative work from technical agencies over the years. It’s just that the strength of this type of agency is more in technical creativity, this blends all of these factors:
The elegance of the solution... The interaction design of the page (helping bring it to life from a static comp produced by a creative team). The integration of the solution into CRM systems and complex legacy IT platforms to create beautiful digital…
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May 12, 2014
Harnessing the 4 key drivers of customer control
The overwhelming choice of apps, websites and other digital platforms that customers have at their finger tips through multiple devices creates a swirling galaxy for brand owners to navigate and understand when looking to build customer relationships.
Brands need to take advantage of and be part of this technological 'galaxy of delights', as more and more time is spent by customers on electronic devices and the penetration and usage of tablets and smart phones continues apace. Since customers will interact with brands across this range of platforms, it's important to remember the context within a wider customer journey and develop integrated propositions.
But how do you make sense of all of this as a marketer? In this post I will explain a framework on how to approach different technology platforms to create advantage and deliver better customer…
New research: The SimpleUsability Online Experience Index for UK Fashion E-commerce sites
This article summarises our review of the clothing retail websites for Marks & Spencer, Hobbs, Karen Millen, French Connection, Boden, Oasis and Fat Face. Reviews were performed in the week of 10 March 2014. The aim is to highlight best practices and areas for improvement that can be applied by retailers. You will see from the Radar charts for the retailers that there are substantial differences in experience of each of the customer journey and overall.
Understanding, measuring and improving the customer experience is a pretty fundamental part of everything we do at SimpleUsability.
Whether we’re working on competitor or comparator testing at the start of a project, multi-platform testing across a number of devices, or an expert review, our research and the resulting recommendations help our clients to improve their customer experience and benefit from the associated commercial gains around…
Customer experience management (CXM) for multichannel commerce - moving from insights to action in 4 steps
In my previous post on practical improvements to CXM, the advice was around creating a path in your organisation that includes customer journeys. This article explains how you can plan a better customer experience for multichannel commerce. By implementing certain steps in your organisation you can overcome the difficulty of creating and implementing actionable insights based on qualitative data.
Planning is the process of thinking and organising a group of activities towards desired goals. There is not a convenient one-size fits all solution for structuring your customer experience. It is important however to build a structure that gives you the control and flexibility you need to grow.
Most organisations are now looking at the opportunity given by multichannel commerce by including their customers into the brand’s journey.
But to improve the customer experience all you need…
CXM vs UX - an introduction
The children’s TV programme Barney may not be the first place you would think to go to for business advice. But watching an episode last weekend (with my 3 year old cousin I must add) I did start thinking about Customer Experience Management (CXM), the new marketing phrase currently doing the rounds.
Barney and his cronies were singing a song about how 'everyone is special' and telling the audience 'you’re important' and 'you’re the only one like you'. I sat there with my cousin, (who was by now not sitting but instead jumping on the sofa with excitement) thinking that Barney had inadvertently done what many experts have managed to make a mess of in recent months, and that is define CXM without any marketing hyperbole or ridiculous buzz words.
CXM is essentially understanding that everyone is different…
