The Best Customer Experience That Creates Your Data- Valutrics

The Best Customer Experience That Creates Your Data

Remembering that business is ultimately about the people you serve.

For pilots, instrument rating puts them a level above a typical private pilot. It means they can fly without any visual clues. Just by looking at their instruments, they can tell where they are and where they’re going, and they’re able to get there safely even through clouds and at night. It takes a great deal of skill and a lot of extra training.

Reaching that ability is an achievement but it comes at a high cost. If you’re flying by instruments, you’re not looking at the view… and it’s the view that makes flying so much fun! Instead of admiring the mountains and the fields and the towns below, instrument-rated pilots are just staring at a bunch of numbers.

Marketers are in the same position. Numbers tell us everything we need to know. We can see the proportion of leads that click away at specific points in the funnel. We can make adjustments to copy and offers, and measure precisely the effect. When we run tests, the results that come back always take the form of metrics. The bottom line is just a line. Above it is a number made up of all the other numbers on pages of sheets.

Like pilots, looking at those numbers will take us where we want to go. But like pilots, how we get there matters. Marketing is more than a numbers game. It’s also a relationship game. It’s about people, the effect that brands have on them, and the lasting impression that effect leaves on them.

Every piece of content a brand produces impacts that brand’s customers. Television commercials are designed to create an emotional relationship between the brand and the viewer. Marketing campaigns aren’t just an exchange of a 20 percent discount for higher overall sales; they’re promoted with a sense of fun associated with the product. The constant stream of social media content that every company produces gives the brand a real personality. Together, that mass of content generates a customer experience that defines the company.

For small firms, feeling that interaction between the brand and its market is hard enough. But it’s even harder for large companies. When they divide up the marketing tasks and hire teams to pore over the numbers, some people always end up with nothing to see but an instrument panel.

What every marketer needs to do is spend some time with customers. That doesn’t mean they have to head out into the malls and chat with buyers. But they should be reading the social media content and watching the clips. And they should also be reading the comments, and maybe even taking part in those discussions. Nothing turns a number back into a person faster than actually talking to them.

This is an amazing time for marketers. We’ve never known so much about our customers. We’ve never had such a giant heap of data about them to break down and analyze. But most important of all, It’s never been so easy to take our eyes off the instrument panel and enjoy the view.