I recently had the chance to sit down with CMSWire to discuss Alloy’s new playbook: The Era of Engagement. One of the questions we explored was the measurement stack and metrics needed for companies that effectively prioritize engagement.
However, most marketers already have a plethora of tools and KPIs. Since the true key to engagement lies within the customer experience, and experience is intrinsically tied to internal alignment, teams should be focused on increasing collaboration instead of introducing new tools and metrics. After all, lack of alignment is what often makes for a poor customer experience.
Don’t toy around with customer experience – a cautionary tale
Take for example my recent experience buying a birthday gift for my daughter. We ordered her a custom-built doll she designed herself from a popular toy company. Because it was a custom build, we knew it would take up to 4 weeks to receive, and prepared our impatient 10-year-old for a wait. And wait we did. After 5 weeks, I contacted customer support, and got a generic response that the doll was delayed. Upon pushing, they said it “would be delivered within the 4-week window,” which didn’t make sense to me. Meanwhile, I received DAILY marketing emails asking me to purchase more. After calling support, I realized they had no real information on where the doll was, and after repeated false promises of a returned call, I finally spoke to a manager who told me about production issues, gave us a concrete delivery date, and solved the problem.
But with better internal alignment, I would never have thought to write about this experience. What should have happened?
An email explaining the original delay and setting expectations
Throttled down marketing emails as soon as they knew I had an issue
Customer support team members armed with accurate data on my order
In short, if customer success team members had been aligned both within their team and with marketing, my frustration would have been avoided.
The Era of Alignment
We see similar scenarios play out in B2B marketing – customer success reps that lack information on your engagement history; emails touting product features you are struggling with. Ironically, most B2B organizational structures silo the very departments that need to collaborate in the Era of Engagement. In fact, in our 2022 State of the Modern Customer Journey, we asked survey takers if they thought their organization would be more successful if sales, RevOps, marketing, CX and customer success were more closely aligned – nearly 70% said “definitely.”
As I mentioned to CMSWire: “The first key to engaging customer success programs is aligning internally, and making sure everyone that interacts with customers has the data that they really need to make smart decisions on behalf of their customer. The second step is alignment with other departments that impact customer success. There should be a feedback loop between customer success and product teams to ensure customers get the best experience.
An aligned customer success team creates brand loyalty, which can help grow existing revenue streams and bring in new customers.”
Ultimately, these are the true metrics of successful customer engagement.
Need ideas for creating this alignment? Here are a few from our playbook:
Create an engaged customer persona book in addition to your buyer persona book to illuminate how both highly loyal and un-engaged customers behave
Hold regular roundtables with the CMO, CRO, CIO and CPO to mindshare on engagement strategies and opportunities to better serve these engaged customers
Evolve the “customer success” department into a “customer growth” team comprised of sales leaders, product marketers, revops professionals and marketing partners with a mission of delighting customers during each interaction.
A shared goal – customer delight – is key to reaching true alignment, and ultimately engaging customers in a way that creates a measurable impact on your business. For more ideas, download our full playbook here.