Marketers must focus on customer experience

Chris Underhill, chief executive of Smartfocus, considers what businesses can learn from sports teams, and explains why marketers should put customer experience at the top of their priority list.

What makes teams like Manchester United so popular? Having talented players, a fantastic heritage and winning trophies all helps.

Clever and innovative advertising does not hurt either.

But more important than these is the positive engagement marketers develop with fans and the experience it offers them.

The owners of the biggest teams understand that careful management of their marketing, based on a complete understanding of their fan base across the globe, can inspire more than mere passionate support - it can create customer loyalty and turn fans into brand advocates.

It's a lesson that applies to all marketing - making the customer experience a top priority is crucial if a company is to meet its business goals and stay in the premier division of its industry.

Customer service guru, Ken Blanchard, coined the term 'raving fans' to refer to customers who are so impressed by a company that they tell everyone else about it.

Football teams routinely inspire that kind of response, but other companies can too.

Think of companies like Apple, IKEA, Nintendo, Ebay and Facebook, and it's hard to separate your perception of the company from its community of fans and their passion for it.

How can companies build that kind of relationship? The key is to understand the essence of the customer, what makes people want to be a customer, and what is it they share that the company serves.

Building experiences that reflect this shared need and using it as a basis for communication provides a focus for marketing and reinforces why a business has customers in the first place.

This core knowledge can then be enriched to serve the differences in group of customer.

Marketers must talk to customers in a way that reinforces their shared needs, but alongside it demonstrate a real understanding of their specific and personal needs, and deliver on it consistently.

Unfortunately, companies are often hampered by the poor quality of their customer data.

Many have a fragmented view of customers because their data is collected through multiple channels: call centres, e-mail, online functions, counter service, and often from abroad.

As a result, data can be scattered across numerous data stores, and duplicate records can easily appear, with changes to a customer's status tracked in one data store, but not another.

Without a complete and detailed record of each customer, the business will be unable to analyse its data to create the information needed to build a real understanding of what defines customers and what drives behaviour.

It is crucial that this sort of insight can first be created, and second, accessed by marketers to craft customer experiences and support targeting communications, to deliver more relevant, timely and personalised messages, building a cohesive communication strategy and ongoing campaign activity.

With data integrated into a single customer view the information is consistent, accurate, up-to-date, and complete.

This supports examining personal details, such as age, gender, family and relationships, and analysing it alongside purchase history.

With this in place, a business can take advantage of analysis to develop a detailed profile for each customer, allowing it to identify and group those individuals that are likely to be interested in similar messages.

By ensuring customers only receive messages that are relevant to their lives, a company greatly increases the connection between itself and its customers.

It shows it understands and is listening.

A major reason why the big sports teams are so successful is that they understand the importance of making fans feel like they are a part of the same organisation with shared beliefs and a common passion.

Establishing what is common and shared can form a powerful part of regular communication.

Take a newsletter, for example.

This needs to go beyond keeping customers updated with what is going on and blasting them with sterile messages.

It must reinforce shared beliefs, but also be personalised, recognising groups and individuals that need different messages to stimulate positive behaviour.

Content can be personalised for each individual, so that they are not only greeted by name, but they also see only those stories that matter to them and offers they will be motivated to act on.

Content also needs to be timely, using what is known to recognise life changes, for example, that a customer has moved house, had a child, or changed their preference to be communicated via the web.

These factors make communication more compelling but it can go further.

Communication can also be made interactive, for example, to encourage customers to share it with friends and family through digital medium such as e-mail, the web or SMS.

Applying this intelligence to communications can create campaigns that take on a momentum of their own.

As customers feel part of the same organisation, they will spread the word; acting like advocates and ultimately providing access to people that are not customers yet.

At half-time, the team on the pitch will gather to review the first half and make subtle and sometimes dramatic changes to formation or tactics.

The best marketing teams do the same, at regular times during any campaign.

A digital campaign is live and can be reviewed instantly.

For non-digital campaigns, success can be created by watching which message variants generate the best response and what type of response is delivered.

When responses happen, what people did first, second or last are all required.

By observing the combination of responses with behaviour and purchases, campaigns can be refined and tweaked in light of this unspoken feedback from the customer base.

Like all teams, sharing the information is vital, so that nothing gets missed and everything is coordinated.

Of course, there is usually one captain, but like managers and coaches, marketers work as a cohesive team, each needing to analyse, understand and share their views, then take action to get the right result.

Marketing efficiency, combined with customer intelligence, makes it possible to forge a relationship between customer and organisation, fostering loyalty and dedication on both sides.

As on the pitch, there are many different strategies that can be employed.

In marketing, the key is never to lose sight of the experiences customers want, crave and aspire to.

Like a fan, a customer's decision is underpinned by the knowledge that other people have a shared experience.

Using this and what you know about the individual will keep customer support and ensure they keep coming back for more.

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