#CXSecrets: The Importance of Aligning CX with Marketing

Customer Experience often lives within Marketing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the two are always aligned. There is even more room for disparity when CX lives in departments other than Marketing. Today we're talking about your advertising and marketing versus your customer experience, and the importance of making sure that the experience being advertised to your customers is consistent with what your customers actually experience when interacting with your brand. 

Watch this edition of CX Secrets above, or click here to download the video transcript.

When advertising doesn't align with experience

A lot of money and resources are spent on marketing and advertising -- creating wonderful visions within customers’ minds about what an experience with any given brand is going to feel like and look like.

We’ve all been to hotels, restaurants and other businesses that provide incredible pictures and a feeling on their website, but then when we get there it doesn't quite feel the way it did online.

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This leaves us feeling like "Wow - my expectations from this brand's advertising is very different than what the actual experience is."

That’s an extremely dangerous place to be.

When the expectation set by marketing is incongruent with the actual experience, it will not only deter people from returning to your business, but it will also drive those people to potentially go online and share it with the world.

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Getting on the same page

At PeopleMetrics, we advise our clients to bring customer experience together with marketing. In fact, many of our clients even house CX within the marketing world. Whether CX is its own department or housed within marketing, alignment is key because the way a brand positions themselves via marketing and advertising has to be exactly congruent with what customers actually experience, or those customers are never coming back.

Design your customer experience in a way that you can deliver consistently through whatever channel(s) you happen to be in. If you're in multiple channels (which most brands are), the website experience should be consistent with the in-person experience should be consistent with the contact center experience, and so on.

Your advertising and marketing should be consistent with that.

Consistency is key

When we say that customer experience is all about consistency across every channel, that includes marketing and advertising. Don't let your marketing team or advertising agency position you in a way that you can't realistically deliver. Customers will not be happy, they won't come back, and you won't get the ROI from your Voice of Customer program.

More #CXSecrets

Thanks for joining us for another edition of #CXSecrets, a video series capturing bonus material from my book Listen or Die! The 40 Lessons That Turn Customer Feedback into Gold. 

Visit our YouTube channel to see all of the videos in the series, or click the links below to see other videos in the series:

Sean McDade founded PeopleMetrics in 2001 and he is the architect of the company’s customer experience management (CEM) software platform. As CEO, he guides the company’s vision and strategy. Sean has over 20 years of experience helping companies measure and improve the customer experience. Earlier in his career, he spent five years at the Gallup Organization, where he was the practice leader of their consulting division. His company offers CEM software with advanced machine learning solutions and hands-on analytical support to help companies make sense of their CX data. Sean holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration with a specialization in marketing science from Temple University in Philadelphia. He has published eight articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and has taught over 25 marketing classes. Sean was named a 40 under 40 award recipient of the Philadelphia region. He is an active Angel Investor, including investments in Tender Greens, CloudMine and Sidecar.

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