A Carousel30 White Paper The Long View of Customer Experience:

An Engagement Approach for Omni-channel Marketers

October 2014

Written by

Greg Kihlström

Founder & CEO, Carousel30

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Table of Contents

Part One: Introduction What is Long-View Customer Experience?

How CRM, UX and CX Work Together

Part Two: The Long-View Customer Experience Model Introduction

AWARENESS

PERCEPTION

ENGAGEMENT

ACTION

After Action

Part Three: The Fundamentals of Long-View Customer Experience Introduction

1. A user’s emotional connection to your brand grows as they progress through the 4 steps

2. Not all audiences can be expected to reach the end of the process

3. Each stage in the process takes a considerable amount of effort

4. How the brand addresses a user’s “filters” determines both short-term and long-term success

Where do we go from here?

Part 4: Optimizing Each Step in the Process Awareness

Perception

Engagement

Action

Conclusion and Next Steps

About Greg Kihlström

About Carousel30

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Part One: Introduction

This white paper is for digital marketers who are looking for a clear, concise way to talk about and address the relationship that their customers have both to their marketing-specific efforts as well as to the larger efforts of the organization as a whole. A customer-centric view of organizations is not by any means a new thing. A long-view customer experience philosophy simply builds upon this by looking at the primary ways that our global audiences relate to our brands, our services and our products and finds ways to engage them in a natural, meaningful, and realistic way. You will not read the word “viral” in this white paper, nor learn how to start such an outbreak with your efforts. In fact, we might prefer to believe no such guide actually exists, though many have written on the topic. We’re concerning ourselves here with genuine relationships and those that are appropriate to the degree to which a customer is engaged, or willing to be engaged, with our brand. This can sometimes be on a large scale, and at other times can be on a very micro scale, even one-to-one.

What is Long-View Customer Experience?

There is a lot of discussion about user experience on a short-term basis, such as a visit to a website, mobile app, or even a retail store. However, there seems to be less discussion about the user experience of a customer across multiple devices, channels, and the online/offline worlds. With smartphone adoption growing from 31% in May of 2011 to 56% in May of 2013 , it is clear that

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consumers are serious about taking the Web with them wherever they go. As mobile continues to grow in prominence and usage, we’re seeing much more of a need for a unified view and presentation of information, as well as calls to action and branding across so many different possible touch points with customers. The Nielsen Norman Group notes that there are four primary components of a successful

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“cross-channel” user experience: consistency, seamlessness, availability and context specificity. Each of these highlights the fact that users no longer contain their interactions with a brand to a single device or channel, and thus brands must not think in terms of siloed experiences either.

1 DigitalBuzz Blog “Infographic: 2013 Mobile Growth Statistics” October 1, 2013 2 Nielsen Norman Group “Seamlessness in the Cross-Channel User Experience” November 24, 2013

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Jon Fisher of Nomensa puts it this way : 3

When evaluating cross channel services and the construction of a pervasive information architecture the user is often free to drift back and forth between channels as many times as they wish and (depending on the service) over an undefined time period.

Clearly this makes our jobs as marketers challenging, but it is, as they say, the new norm. Long-view customer experience is not just about cross-channel marketing. It’s also about a customer’s relationship with you and your brand over time. Thus, it’s really a hybrid view of user experience and customer relationship management. We’ll get to our definitions of both of those terms in a little bit.

Quality of Engagement

Success of our marketing efforts is not just about responses and comments, or followers and fans. We need to concern ourselves with the quality of the engagement. In order to do this, we need a basis for evaluating our strategies, tactics and the results we are getting.

Why call it Customer Experience and not Customer Relationship Management? Both of these terms are used in a variety of ways and it can get confusing, especially now as we are mixing these two terms together. Let’s start by defining a few terms:

User Experience

The term “user experience” (UX) is often used when referring to the creation of websites, software, mobile apps, or other singular experiences that a customer has. Part of addressing and optimizing the user experience includes doing testing on interactive prototypes and creating wireframes and mockup designs. These help to simulate as closely as possible the user experience of the thing that you are creating.

Customer Experience

While some apply the term user experience on a much more global basis to refer to the overall experience that a user has in dealing with a brand, many others instead are adopting the term customer experience (CX) for this instead. So, for instance, searching on your desktop for a product, researching on your mobile phone, then physically visiting the brick-and-mortar store would all be part of the customer experience.

3 Fisher, Jon. Nomensa Blog. “Making Sense of the Cross Channel Experience.” July 19, 2012

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While individual experiences matter, the long view of a customer is that every interaction they have with your brand is a positive one, and one that is catered to their needs and preferences. This is why we’re choosing the term customer experience over user experience to describe our approach in this book.

Customer Relationship Management

What it often means: Customer relationship management (CRM) has been defined as “the infrastructure that enables the delineation of and increase in customer value, and the correct means by which to motivate customers to remain loyal, indeed to buy again. ”

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CRM is also known as a methodology that acknowledges that our customers are central to the success of our organizations, and because of this, it is important to put processes and systems in place to ensure we understand them and cater to their needs and desires. It is also important to make a distinction between the methodology of customer relationship management and software that is referred to as CRM. While tools such as salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics are used successfully to enable organizations to interact with customers, they do not provide guidance on how or when to interact with them. What it means here: We will not be referring to specific software or tools in this book and will be staying slightly more abstract when referring to CRM. Thus, the meaning of customer relationship management we will be employing is the methodology explained above. Simply put, “CRM is a strategic methodology that recognizes customers as the core of the business. ”

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How CRM, UX and CX Work Together

Customer experience is management of the user experience over time, across whatever channels are utilized (or available), and through a process that begins with basic awareness and ultimately ends in a desired set of actions, or what might be counted as a “conversion.” Customer relationship management is the process by which interactions along the customer experience journey are handled from an organizational or brand perspective.

4 Greenberg, P. (2001). CRM at the Speed of Light: Capturing and Keeping Customers in Internet Real Time. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media. 5 Depaul University (2013). Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Certificate Program.

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In this way, CRM and CX are really dealing with the same thing, just from opposite views. Customer relationship management looks at things from the eyes of the organization, and customer experience (as well as user experience) looks at things from the eyes of the customer. They both, however, are looking at the same series of interactions with the same sequence.

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Part Two: The Long-View Customer Experience Model

Introduction

So when we talk about the long-view customer experience model, we are referring to a customer “pathway” that has the following steps:

1. Awareness 2. Perception 3. Engagement 4. Action

First, we will discuss each step, including the critical point where we have the opportunity to move from one to the next. Then, we will discuss how to be realistic about our ability to move audiences through the steps, and how each step plays an important role in supporting the other.

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AWARENESS

The first stage and foundation of your customer’s experience with your brand , the goal of awareness is not a monetary one. The goal of this stage is to increase name and product recognition in the eyes of your target audiences. At this point, we are not concerned about sales in the short term but instead with saturation on the channels your audience uses and ultimately name recognition, along with being top of mind with consumers.

Its Evolving Role

In traditional advertising, “awareness” was many times enough to drive product sales. With less variety and therefore less need for focus on niche marketing and audiences, in the Mad Men era of advertising it was often enough to have good television and radio advertising coverage in order to drive sales. As we as a society have adopted more marketing channels and quickly adapted to the personalization and niche marketing that continues to grow in adoption, simply achieving awareness of a product or service is not enough to guarantee popularity. As we’ll see later on, with endless options, we need to rely on

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arbitrary choice criteria or self-created “filters” in order to grow our relationships with brands and make purchase decisions.

Not All Awareness is Good There is a potential downside: “awareness” does not always mean good things for your brand. For instance, awareness of AIG grew considerably between late 2008 and 2009 due to the bad press it got

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concerning its collapse and its relationship to the economic downturn of the time, but a growth in awareness of a problem with the brand did not signal awareness of anything positive.

Awareness is a Building Block

As it is the first step in our series of four that lead to action, awareness is a building block. While it is important to have high levels of awareness, it is also resource-intensive to get mass awareness of anything (just ask Kleenex what it took to be the ubiquitous choice for tissues). Thus, it is necessary to be realistic about your goals for awareness. Instead of awareness with everyone, everywhere, think instead of targeting more granular awareness:

● With an age demographic ● In a city neighborhood ● As the solution to a very specific problem ● With people who share a certain profession

As we progress to the next step, perception, we’ll see how targeting a more specific type of awareness increases our chances of gaining positive feelings about our brand or product, because our goal is to provide a relevant solution to a potential customer’s challenges.

How do we track it?

As we go through each of the four stages, we will briefly talk about how to measure each one’s effectiveness. While this book is not intended to go in-depth on the subject of measurement and analytics, we’ll give some ideas here on approaches to tracking as we progress through the process:

● Google Searches, Press Mentions and Social Media Mentions It’s a simple way to measure, but simply picking a few keywords and measuring the volume of searches over time can tell you something. The same goes for press and social media mentions.

6 Davidson, Adam. How AIG Fell Apart. Reuters. September 18, 2008.

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● Visits to Owned Properties This is the easiest one, but not necessarily the most beneficial one. Tracking website visits, visits to stores and other properties are related to awareness, though it requires a detailed understanding of how to read the numbers and attributes of your visitors.

● Research Both qualitative and quantitative research can be very helpful here. This can be cost-prohibitive to smaller organizations, and it requires very detailed expertise in how to structure and conduct the research in order to compare apples to apples.

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PERCEPTION

Many do not make the important distinction between awareness and perception, but it is important to treat this as a separate step in your process of converting your audiences from awareness to action. Perception means the difference between knowing about a brand and liking or considering a brand when the time comes for a purchase. Perception also includes an emotional component that awareness does not. We can know of something but not have a strong opinion of it. Shauna Hoffman of Stamats Healthcare Marketing defines it as such:

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Perception is more complex; it’s the “what” and the “why” of the brand. Perception is created through experience with the brand’s product or service and it reflects the values consumers have attached to it. Digging deeper than questions about awareness and familiarity, perception studies score the attitudes that consumers have about a particular brand.

Perception requires awareness

7 Hoffman, Shauna. “Brand Awareness Versus Brand Perception.” Stamats Healthcare Marketing Blog. April 12, 2012.

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As we move from awareness to perception in our view of the user experience, one thing is clear: in order for a customer to have a perception (whether good or bad) about our company, product or service, they must already be aware of it.

Perception requires emotional involvement Since it is true that emotions affect our perception of the world , then, in order to have a strong opinion

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about something (whether it is positive or negative), there must be an emotional component involved.

We are looking for a specific range of perceptions Just as we discussed in the section on awareness, there can be both positive and negative perceptions of something. Thus, the optimal outcome at this stage of the user experience is the positive perception that we desire. This, however, will not always be the case with all users. Thus, we are looking for the following:

● People with the desired perception: these are ideal customers or audience members who we wish to “graduate” to the next step in the Long-view Customer Experience. These people also help us understand what positive attributes are most valued, as well as how those attributes are expressed in conversations between potential and current customers.

● People with negative perceptions: in order to better understand how to make our products or services better.

● Key conversations and perception points: what are the points where people have strong feelings one way or another, and what points are divisive amongst different audiences?

By paying attention to these factors, you can make the most of this phase of the user experience.

How do we track it? Before digital tools such as sentiment analysis and communication channels such as social media came along, perception was much more difficult to measure. For those not familiar already, sentiment analysis can be defined as the following, courtesy of Seth Grimes :

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Sentiment analysis is a set of methods, typically (but not always) implemented in computer software, that detect, measure, report, and exploit attitudes, opinions, and emotions in online,

8 Jonathan R. Zadra and Gerald L. Clore. “Emotion and perception: the role of affective information” J. Wiley and Sons. 2011. 9 Grimes, Seth. “The Future of Sentiment Analysis.” Social Media Explorer. November 2, 2011

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social, and enterprise information sources. (As an aside, what makes it “analysis” is that you’re doing it systematically, with some goal in mind.)

Social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter have made it much easier for these tools to extract sentiment from conversations around brands and other topics. While Grimes goes on to explain that some of the more commonly-used tools still have a way to go as far as their methods and accuracy, over time these tools will undoubtedly become more sophisticated. While not the end-all-be-all solution to understanding perception, they can be a very helpful tool that provides insights as you look for your ideal customers or look to change a negative perception into a positive one.

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ENGAGEMENT

The word “engagement” is used often these days when talking about the goals of digital marketing. When looking at the overall user experience, we can say that engagement is the “place” in the lifecycle that we can most reasonably expect a loyal customer to stay for the longest period of time. We can’t always expect them to take a specific conversion action on a regular basis, but we can provide a means for regular engagement with our brands. There are many good reasons for this, including the fact that it has been shown that engaged customers spend 30% more than regular customers .

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Keep in mind that just like both awareness and perception, not all engagement is positive. It takes knowledge of how to handle negative interactions to provide a good customer experience to all, but by cultivating good relationships with engaged customers, you can actually get support from these users to help combat negative engagement.

10 Bain and Company. “Putting Social Media to Work.” September 12, 2011.

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According to Mitz Pantic on Social Media Today : 11

If you generally make your customers happy, they’ll often eagerly leap to defend your honor in public, giving you lots of great testimonials you can use for years to come.

Engagement is the first step towards action While it takes many forms, positive engagement is the first step to becoming a brand advocate, repeat customer, and loyal supporter. It is now such a critical part of marketing budgets (alongside brand awareness and direct response) that according to a Strongview survey of restaurants in 2013 , 93

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percent said they would be maintaining or increasing their marketing budgets in order to increase customer engagement.

How do we track it?

The good news about engagement, and about our progression from awareness to action in general, is that it becomes easier to measure as we proceed. Engagement can be measured across many channels from social media to websites to in-store interactions. The primary challenge becomes tracking engagement behavior from online to offline and back again. While challenges related to this are far from completely addressed, the tracking, tools and analysis are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

11 Pantic, Mitz. “How to Handle Negative Comments About You and Your Business.” Social Media Today. July 22, 2013. 12 FastCasual.com. “Marketing Budgets Focused on Increased Customer Engagement in 2014.” December 18, 2013.

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ACTION

This is the ultimate destination along the path of user experience. This is your “sale” or whatever might be the ultimate conversion point in your customer experience lifecycle. You can now see how awareness, positive perception and positive engagement have all led to this point.

The most direct connection between a brand and consumer

This last, and least frequently achieved, of all four steps concerns the closest part of your relationship with your customer. While engagement with a good customer will happen much more frequently than a direct conversion, the action is the part of your relationship where you are most likely to not only generate revenue, but also exchange important information or transactional data with them.

How do we track it?

As we said earlier, when we proceed from Awareness to Action it becomes easier to track. In the case of Action, it is safe to say that the thing that is easiest to track and report on is something related to a direct conversion, whether that is sale of a product or service or something over which you have direct tracking capabilities.

After Action

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So what happens after the user reaches the “action” step in our process? If we think of the process as a circle proceeding from awareness to perception to engagement to action, the customer will then move straight back to awareness and ultimately continue through either the remainder or some portion of the entire process at least one more time. You see, before we buy a product or service for the first time, we have a different type of awareness of it than we do after we have experienced it. Des Traynor of Intercom discusses this in terms of a website

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user experience as the following:

User experience designers are great at making software friendly and usable for new customers. We design clean, clear sign-up forms, smooth on-boarding experiences, and even helpful blank slates once users are inside the app. Once customers have used the software for some time and have integrated it in their workflow, their relationship with the software becomes more complex. UX designers have no stencils for designing “how the customer feels about the software after six months.”

Obviously, this can be applied to a customer experience with a brand across multiple digital and traditional properties as well. So we proceed back through the process until we either stop at one of the points (perhaps if we don’t like or need the product again) or take action and convert again.

13 Traynor, Des. “Taking A Customer from Like To Love: The UX of Long-Term Relationships.” Smashing Magazine. August 26, 2011.

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Part Three: The Fundamentals of Long-View Customer Experience

Introduction Now that we have an understanding of the long-view customer experience philosophy from an engagement lifecycle perspective, let’s talk more about audiences and expectations. There are four primary expectations that one can have about this type of user experience:

1. A user’s emotional connection to your brand grows as they progress through the 4 steps

2. Not all audiences can be expected to reach the end of the process

3. Each stage in the process takes a considerable amount of effort

4. How the brand addresses a user’s “filters” determines both short-term and long-term success Now, let’s go into each in more detail:

1. A user’s emotional connection to your brand grows as they progress through the 4 steps

The explanation here is fairly obvious. As you go from just learning a product’s name, through the purchase process and ultimately to using it on a regular basis, the place that product has in your life grows in prominence. With a good product or service, it will ultimately fulfill a need at a price you can afford, and will most likely serve other purposes as well. This is a positive relationship that you have with something, albeit an inanimate (or virtual) thing. The same goes with a negative experience. How often have you gotten angry at a slow computer or malfunctioning printer? Chances are, you didn’t have such strong emotions when you were in Best Buy making the initial purchase. As your involvement with a brand grows, so does your emotional connection, good or bad.

2. Not all audiences can be expected to reach the end of the process

You may not need all audiences to take action, or even get engaged with your effort. In some cases, ensuring that the correct perception exists might be a “win” with a particular audience. For this reason, it is important to take into consideration a best-case scenario for all of your audiences. For instance, there is probably a group of your audience members that may serve best as positive influencers but can never be expected to take the ultimate actions that might lead to a conversion.

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If you build your strategy around this idea, you can then prioritize the amount of effort required to get various audiences to their optimal point within the long-view customer experience process. You will prioritize how important it is to have awareness across a broad audience versus achieving high engagement or conversions from desired actions from a subset of the potential audience.

3. Each stage in the process takes a considerable amount of effort

At first consideration, it may seem that addressing each of the four stages takes more effort as you go, but consider the following:

● Awareness The goal of an awareness campaign is actually quite a simple one: consumers (or some subset of the general public) must know who you or your product are. In order to get true, global awareness, you really need the marketing and distribution power of the Coca-Colas and Apples of the world. This is why many companies and organizations have much better success focusing on awareness within a niche audience or need. It is still no small feat to reach saturation in an audience’s mind, however. Reaching a saturation point with awareness takes a considerable, sustained effort. You can easily see how this type of effort might drain the resources of a smaller organization to the point that a stronger focus on further areas in the process would be preferable.

● Perception You may be in an industry that is not very controversial. Chances are, however, there are always going to be controversial issues somewhere in your world. It comes down to a strategic decision as far as how much effort you feel should go into this area and how broad the audience will be whose perceptions you are trying to change. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time.” To apply this to you and your customers, you will have to make a decision on how many resources you want to devote to changing negative perceptions across however wide a population you deem strategically necessary.

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● Engagement We all know the effort it takes to keep our audiences actively engaged. Many companies make the mistake of spreading themselves too thin on a single channel such as social media, for instance. After securing a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and Pinterest, companies quickly find themselves with half-empty rooms and little to no conversation. Or, as Melissa Caughill of Third Person puts it, think of these channels in terms of Customer, Content and Channel in order to determine which are best for you and your audience. Now think of this

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across multiple channels and you can see how true engagement becomes even more difficult. Add to this the added dimension of keeping multiple audiences engaged. Whether that means different demographic segments, different customer types (prospective, current, lapsed), or however else you decide to slice it, and you can easily become exasperated trying to keep everyone in a conversation with your brand.

● Action Ultimately, this is where all our efforts lead: conversion. No matter how much effort we put into the preceding steps, there is still a considerable amount of optimization required to keep this final step working effectively. Whether this is your e-commerce workflow, mobile signup process, or whatever the case may be, you spend a lot of time and effort keeping this in top form. Although there are less people in your funnel at this stage than during the other stages of the process, you’ll agree that this is certainly a very important component, and given its transactional nature, it is imperative that you keep it in perfect working order at all times.

Because it takes so much effort to address each of the four stages of engagement, any organization, especially one whose resources are constrained by time, employees and/or budget, must prioritize some stages in the process over others. It is true, however, that at least tracking can become much easier the closer you get to “action” from awareness.

4. How the brand addresses a user’s “filters” determines both short-term and long-term success

When we say “filters,” we mean those criteria that a customer will either arbitrarily or by necessity put into place in order to help make decisions.

14 Caughill, Melissa. “Social Media’s Three C’s: Customer, Content and Channel.” Social Media Today.

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Gregory S. Carpenter, in Kellogg on Marketing, refers to a “Buyer Goal Hierarchy ” that consists of the 15

following factors or “filters” with which to make a purchase decision: ● Emotional ● Economic ● Functional

The emotional component is treated as most important, though none are independent. It is the proportion of each that can differ from person to person or even according to the type of purchase decision (business to consumer versus business to business, for instance). Carpenter goes on to comment about the impact of so much choice in our society:

The existence of such a vast number and range of goals, each with multiple dimensions, creates a fundamental dilemma for individuals. Time is too limited to pursue them all, so we must prioritize.

We can define filters, then, as criteria or categories that go beyond emotional, functional or economic, or serve as subcategories of each. These filters are also changing and evolving as channels and types of interactions change or come into being. Traditional goals:

● Emotional: Does the product or service provide for my higher-order needs (self-image, need to belong, need for power or control)?

● Functional: Does it do what I need it to? ● Economic: Does it cost what my budget allows?

Filters can include things such as the following:

● Emotional o Does the messaging/branding speak to me and address my needs? o Who is using the product or service and what do they have to say about it? Are those

people either relevant to me and/or do I respect what they have to say? o Does the brand share my values?

● Functional

o How personalized is my experience and how can it be tailored over time? o Can I access the product or service from anywhere?

● Economic

15 Carpenter, Gregory S. et al. “Kellogg on Marketing.” 2010. Northwestern University

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o Is the cost structure one that fits my preferences and usage? o Is the balance of personal data collection vs. cost of service fair? (think Facebook or

Google, who use personal information as currency instead of charging for their services)

Where do we go from here?

Understanding the fundamentals will help you understand what to look for as you optimize each step in the journey of a customer’s engagement. Next we’ll talk about our strategy to do just that.

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Part 4: Optimizing Each Step in the Process Now we are going to talk about how to ensure that each step of the process is optimized. Part of the thinking behind the Long-view Customer Experience is that each particular audience has an optimal place in the process and/or an optimal amount of time they will spend there.

In order to

demonstrate this effectively, let’s use a hypothetical “client” or organization that we are trying to market. We’re going to use a fictional neighborhood within a fictional city for this. Let’s just say we’re in the city of Metropolis and the neighborhood we are trying to market is referred to as “Downtown.” Not very creative, perhaps, but it suits the need! In marketing the Downtown neighborhood, we are most likely going to be concerned about the following things:

● Utilization of retail and office space, and ensuring the right type of tenants move in to fit the feel of the neighborhood

● Attracting foot traffic or door swings in retail stores For now, let’s just concentrate on the above as we go through the process.

Awareness

When we talk about awareness, let’s split our thinking into three parts: ● From which audiences should we not necessarily expect to achieve anything more than

awareness? ● Which audiences require awareness as a baseline but have the possibility to become much more

engaged? ● How much effort will it take to achieve awareness across all the audiences we are engaging at

this point?

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So first, there is an audience who will probably never achieve more for your neighborhood than an awareness of it. This can still be beneficial. Someone being able to recall directions to it, recalling a store that exists there, or even some of your marketing language are all beneficial things. They will never be a diehard supporter, and might never shop in your neighborhood, but they can still support your cause. Second, there is an audience for which awareness is just the beginning. These are people for whom the Downtown neighborhood could be a great place to shop, eat, move their business, or engage with in some other desired capacity. Awareness is where all of those things start. Finally, when considering all of this, make sure to take into account the effort it will take to move a group of people into this stage of engagement. When we talk about awareness, we can think on a local, regional, national or international scale. For the purposes of our neighborhood, it might not serve us (or our marketing dollars) well to have high awareness in the general (non-traveling) population of northwestern Canada, if our Downtown neighborhood in Metropolis is on the East Coast of the United States. We probably want to focus our efforts on nearby residents, employees, and likely travelers. If others become aware, that is by no means a bad thing, but focusing on a smaller universe of potential targets helps push more people to the next level of engagement.

Perception

With perception, we follow a similar train of thought as awareness by splitting our thinking into several segments. There is an audience that we know we need more from than simply a positive perception. These are the people for whom perception leads to further engagement and action. Using the tools at our disposal in order to monitor and measure this perception, we can then push these people to the next step. There is also an audience with which positive perception is all we can reasonably expect, but that is enough to influence others and drive engagement and action in our more core target audiences. We want to spend effort on this group but realize that driving them to a conversion may be difficult, costly or impossible. At the very least, with these people, we know that not only will they know directions to our Downtown neighborhood, they will also be able to follow that with “and it’s a really great place to shop.”

Engagement

At this stage, we have the people who are going to be actively talking about how great the Downtown neighborhood is. They might not eat or shop there as much as you’d like them to, but they sure do recruit others to take those actions, and thus they are very beneficial.

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As far as what to do with your audiences at this step, you’ll see a trend emerging here. First, we identify those who we can push to further engagement. Then we find those who will probably never get beyond this level of engagement and find the best way to utilize their contributions. It’s really not any more complicated than that.

Action

These are the people who go shopping in the Downtown neighborhood, work there, move their business there, rent an apartment there, or take some other type of action we would label a “conversion.” The action part of our engagement process is the same as the others, with one exception. Because there is not a next step in the process, we will now identify those who we can simply expect to take an action, and those who will not only take this action but do it repeatedly, tell others about it and become not only a great advocate, but a long-term customer. We can refer to these two audiences as either buyers or engaged buyers. Both are valuable, but we can treat each very differently if we’d like. The engaged buyer is going to drag their friends to their favorite store, or at least tell them all about it on Facebook. The buyer might be a very loyal shopper but is not necessarily someone we can count on to bring a lot of extra foot traffic. As you can see, different opportunities exist with each.

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Conclusion and Next Steps

This is where things can get very specific very quickly. While this series of articles has been written from a very general perspective in order to apply to just about anyone in any industry that has users they wish to have an experience, putting Long-view Customer Experience into practice will require tools that are specific to you and your business. That being said, there are a few things that everyone will need to do:

● Identify the steps in the process as they relate to your organization e.g. for your company, the “action” step might refer to the sale of a widget

● Identify your audiences and their optimal end state in the process

e.g. if you are a higher education institution, a high school counselor or a parent would never reach the “action” stage that would signal enrollment in the school. Instead, they might be perfect candidates at the “perception” or “engagement” stage.

● Identify the tools needed to measure and analyze the process

e.g. CRM tool (such as salesforce), Marketing Automation (Eloqua, Marketo), Analytics (Google, Omniture), CMS (Ektron, Sitecore, Drupal), etc.

How do you measure success?

Every organization has different KPIs and measures of success, as well as methods of measurement. The best advice here is to ensure that, along with all the financial measures that you have in place, you have measurements for customer satisfaction, retention and other data that helps you understand your customers and their reactions better. Increasing customer satisfaction will have a direct, positive result in sales. According to a recent Econsultancy survey , nearly three-quarters of respondents said that an improved user experience

16

provides the benefits of increased sales and conversions. That survey was talking more specifically about a website (or Web and mobile) user experience. Again, extrapolate those answers across an enterprise-wide omnichannel brand presence and you can imagine that the answer would be the same.

What next?

16 Moth, David. “74% of Businesses Believe User Experience is Key for Improving Sales.” Econsultancy. March 13, 2013.

Greg Kihlström | Carousel30 | The Long View of Customer Experience | 26

The next step is up to you. Putting the longview customer experience model to work is relatively simple, as it does not require you to approach your conversion process differently and is truly meant to help you manage your efforts and resources in order to optimize each step in your sales funnel. We also hope there are a few things in this white paper that have added a new dimension or new way of thinking about your efforts with regard to a specific audience at a specific point along the way.

Greg Kihlström | Carousel30 | The Long View of Customer Experience | 27

About Greg Kihlström

Greg is the Founder and CEO of Carousel30 and a digital strategist and creative director who has worked with top brands on a number of campaigns, including AOL, AARP, Ben & Jerry's, Geico Direct, MTV, Starbucks, The Nature Conservancy, Toyota, TV One and Washington Wizards. He has received numerous awards and honors from the Webby Awards, ADDYs, American Marketing Association, iMedia's Digital Agency Awards, Summit Creative Awards, and others over 15 years of experience in the advertising industry. His work has been published in books by Rockport Publishers and Cresent Hill Books and industry-related magazines such as Communication Arts and Graphics. He has been featured in and interviewed by several prominent news outlets and publications such as Advertising Age, The Kojo Nnamdi Show, SmartCEO, Website Magazine, Web Designer Magazine, Bisnow, The Washington Times and The Washington Post. Greg has participated as a judge in renowned design competitions around the country. He frequently speaks at industry events on a global basis and has served as keynote speaker, presenter and participant in panel discussions at such events as Internet Week New York, Internet Summit, SMX Social Media, Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, Digital Capital Week, EventTech and DMAW's Digital Day. He has written several white papers on industry topics and has written articles for Target Market Magazine, Website Magazine, Capitol Communicator, and is a regular contributing writer to Washington Business Journal, Search Engine Watch, and iMedia Connection, a leading online publication for the digital marketing community. He is President of the Board of Directors of the DC Ad Club — the Washington D.C. chapter of the American Advertising Federation, where he has also served as Vice President, a member of the steering committee of ADWKDC and on the ADDYs and Communications Committees. Greg is also the Division 1 Chair on the National Board of Directors of the American Advertising Federation, representing the largest chapters in the nation. He serves on The Trust for the National Mall's Communications Advisory Committee along with a group of marketing experts from agencies around the country. He recently served on the board of AIGA DC, the Washington, D.C. chapter of the world's premier design association. He is also an active member in the American Marketing Association, and the International Academy of Visual Arts. In addition, Greg frequently helps young professionals in the advertising industry with career development, by serving as a mentor to young advertising and marketing professionals through the DC Ad Club's Career Catalyst program, speaking to college students at events such as the American Advertising Federation Student Conference, and speaking to classes at colleges and universities such as Georgetown University, American University, Virginia Tech and Westwood College.

Greg Kihlström | Carousel30 | The Long View of Customer Experience | 28

About Carousel30

Carousel30 is a digital agency that focuses on building audience engagement and conversions for top brands. Our diverse team translates business objectives into digital strategies that incorporate websites, mobile apps, social media marketing, email marketing, display advertising, and other efforts. Since our founding in 2003, we have had the opportunity to work with and help grow our clients’ businesses, while leading the digital marketing industry as it continues to mature. We've worked with top brands around the world, including Toyota, AOL, Geico, CQ Roll Call, The Nature Conservancy, United Nations, National Audubon Society, AARP, MTV, and more. We consistently provide clients with engaged audiences and tailored experiences that connect them to the people, brands, causes and products they love. As a full-service agency, our offerings include:

● Strategy and Customer Experience ● User Experience ● Creative ● Technology ● Marketing & Advertising

Carousel30 is headquartered in Washington, D.C. More information is available on our website at: http://www.carousel30.com

Greg Kihlström | Carousel30 | The Long View of Customer Experience | 29