Eighty percent of companies believe they offer a good customer experience. But just eight percent of customers agree. This is just one of the shocking facts which Alex Hamilton, head of innovation at Dentsu UK and Ruth Bucknell, VP of experience design at Merkle, hit their audience with.
The duo addressed the PMW FutureCommerce conference in London at the beginning of June on the subject of ‘Why E-Commerce Is The Most Exciting New Creative Canvas’. They spoke about how brands commonly misunderstood what experience means to consumers, and explained how to deliver the best possible experience.
Consumers remember the peaks and valleys
Consumers, Hamilton explained, don’t remember the average experience they have with a brand as much as they remember the peaks and the troughs. This customer behaviour has profound implications for how brands create experiences.
If your brand delivers a perfectly acceptable customer experience, but with occasional jarring lapses, the customer won’t remember that doing business with you is, on average, good. They’ll remember that you never do anything special and that sometimes, your brand displeased them.
The answer, explained Hamilton and Bucknell, is to think about experience in a different way. The Dentsu Experience Team saw experience as broken down into:
- Buying experience: which simply has to work with no ifs or buts
- Product experience: this offers the scope for more playfulness and creativity, particularly by adding digital post-sales elements
- Immersive experience: this is where brands really have the chance to surprise and delight
Connecting touch points along the funnel
Experience, said Hamilton, is every interaction you have with a brand. To ensure that your brand experience hits the highs, and avoids the lows, your various channels and touchpoints must work together seamlessly. The reward for doing this is an average 1.9% increase in brand retention rate and a 2% increase in customer lifetime value.
As an example of this kind of joined-up brand experience, the speakers introduced Satair, a B2B online retailer of aeroplane parts to airlines. Dentsu and Merkle interviewed 600 of the company’s corporate customers in 27 markets. Based on this work, several changes to the retailer’s go-to-market strategy were recommended.
These ranged from relatively simple changes to the website, through to creating a bespoke AI function that could create complex quotes with no human intervention. The customer simply drags a spreadsheet, listing all the parts they want to order, into the AI interface on the website. The site then auto-prepares a detailed price estimate for that customer.
The changes to the website and the way Satair operates increased conversion rates by 36%. Additionally, average revenue per visit increased by 6%, allowing the company to redeploy 50 staff to other, more rewarding and higher value-add work.
Another example of the Dentsu and Merkle philosophy in action was the companies' work with Volkswagen Group (VWG). The automaker needed a way to connect with families. Dentsu and Merkle surveyed parents and found that one of the top frustrations they experienced was the extent to which kids immersed themselves in their devices when in the car, ignoring the world around them.
The agencies then worked together to create Road Tales, a data-driven audio storytelling app for VWG. The app told children interactive stories, using location data to identify landmarks the car was passing, and then incorporating these as characters or features in the stories.
The app reached the number one spot in the app store, across 26 markets. And although final results aren’t in yet, it has driven a significant uptick in brand engagement and awareness among the target audience of families.
To learn more about how the Dentsu Experience Team and Merkle use data and creativity to elevate the customer experience across all touchpoints, see the Dentsu UK website https://www.dentsu.com/uk/en.