Customer experience is king when you are out to grow your brand

The unrivalled success of US companies Apple, Uber and Airbnb has redefined what customers expect.

Salesforce senior vice president Eric Stahl.

The unrivalled success of US companies Apple, Uber and Airbnb has redefined what customers traditionally expect as acceptable and created a new gold-standard in customer experience.

Eighty-nine per cent of US companies surveyed by Gartner plan to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016. The sum of those experi­ences is your brand. Customer experience has overtaken price and product as being the No 1 way brands can differentiate.

Observing some key trends in how disruptive US brands are evolving their customer experience, I have listed five ways emerging Australian brands can tap into the age of the customer.

● People, places and spaces. The exponential growth of mobile devices illustrates a fundamental shift in how we interact with each other. Many US brands are experimenting by using mobile apps to send location-based offers. It is one of the best ways to convert foot traffic and online traffic into new customers.

US toy giant Mattel has had great success delivering a better customer experience through targeted messages that lead shoppers on personalised journeys from the physical to the digital store, and vice versa.

● Always on, on all channels. Disruptive US brands understand the value of an always-on, cross-channel approach. They find the perfect moment to engage and enable customers to respond to a call to action, in their own time, using their channel of choice.

This is the holy grail of customer experience; reaching the right person with the right offer through the right channel at the right time.

● Virtual and augmented reality. Virtual reality allows marketers to provide customers with immersive “try before you buy” experi­ences that can support important purchase decisions and increase brand loyalty.

The North Face successfully used VR to share a real-life experience of an expedition through Yosemite National Park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains by the brand’s athlete ambassador while trying on the new season’s outdoor wear.

As the technology develops, forward-looking marketers should be thinking about how they can use VR to transform the customer experience.

● Be intelligent. Remember when a map was the best way to navigate? The only problem was they could not deliver the optimal route because they could not adapt to events along the way such as traffic jams or road closures.

Marketers now can deliver dynamic real-time customer experiences and engage customers in a smarter way by predicting their likelihood to take a specific action.

Personalisation is more than a marketing buzzword; it is the reason some brands are light years ahead of others.

● Customer experience is everyone’s business. Customer experience is not the sole responsibility of the marketing department. It should start at the product development stage and continue as the focal point across marketing, sales and customer service.

Customer experience has been forever disrupted and consumers are more open than ever to immerse in brand creativity and experimentation. What this means for Australian brands is: if you make customer experience the key success indicator for your business, anything is possible.

Eric Stahl is senior vice-president of product marketing at Salesforce. Customer experience will be a key theme at the Salesforce Future of Marketing event in Sydney on Wednesday.