Customer Communications Blog

The customer experience is multifaceted and takes into account every interaction that a customer has with a brand and organization. How customers engage and interact with various organizations on the market is also a part of the customer experience. The customer experience is an extremely important aspect in running any business. The ways in which brands deliver a high-quality customer experience, though, have had to evolve alongside the rest of the marketplace over the years. This is because the things that motivate and drive consumer behavior are constantly changing and fluctuating. Similarly, the way that brands and organizations interact and engage with their audience groups has to ebb and flow as well to meet the demands and needs of modern consumers.

The marketplace is one of constant change and flux. The economy today is wildly different than it was even 30 years ago. There is a wide range of factors that have played part in shaping the modern market into its current form. One of the most significant of these factors that has molded the modern economy is technology. This may seem like a bit of a no-brainer, but technology drastically changed the way that businesses and organizations operate all around the globe. The introduction of the internet over 20 years ago was certainly a generational break-through, and may even prove to be one of the most important technological advances in all of human history. The reason the internet has proven so impactful is due to its widespread capability and the many innovations that it has stemmed. In other words, the internet was a building block and things like smart-phones and mobile-apps are various tools the internet has made possible. Understanding the current marketplace takes some knowledge of how it’s evolved to this state, which informs how and why many consumer segments think and act the way they do. The customer experience has never been weightless, however, in recent years, the emphasis on customer experience has increased rapidly. In turn, this means that organizations and businesses are dedicating more energy, resources, and more time to cultivating a positive customer experience they can deliver time and time again. In other words, organizations are putting more into developing customer experience strategy than ever before.

The modern day economy is vastly different from what it used to be. There are a number of factors that have led to an evolving marketplace and what we have today is the cumulative result of generations and generations of these evolutions. One of the most recent evolutions the economy saw was in the swift acceleration into the digital era. The world has been transitioning to more virtual-focused operations for a number of years, but the past three years specifically, changed the workplace entirely. This drastic change came about in the wake of the global pandemic. Forcing organizations to close their doors, or transition to remote and virtual operations entirely, brought with it a new wave of business that emphasizes technical integration and remote operations. With more and more employers and employees pushing for work-from-home situations and the seemingly infinite realm of the internet, this accelerated transition into the digital age also created a perfect breeding ground for innumerous niche market segments to develop all across the spectrum of the internet. Scaling businesses operating on a global level need the tools to reach their audience in even the most niche of markets. This is one of the reasons that establishing a multichannel communication strategy is vital to a modern day organization.

Over the past couple of years there has been a massive acceleration into the digital era. With it, this acceleration brought about an immersive and comprehensive virtual economy. The transition into this digital era and largely virtual marketplace was long-coming, but initially it was on a slow trajectory. The global pandemic, however, created an unprecedented push into the digital marketplace as remote operations and remote services became a necessity. Many modern consumers are considered digital natives and in turn, operate with what’s referred to as a digital mindset. Digital native simply connotes any individual who was born and raised after the birth of the internet. This is a consumer-group that understands and embraces the world of technology. In social lives, professional lives, dating lives, and everything in between. This immersion into the technological world also creates the digital mindset. This is a mindset that is composed of various thought patterns and tendencies that are typical or at least relatively common amongst digital natives. The digital mindset isn’t exclusive to digital natives, though, which is an important distinction. Anyone who embraces technology with open arms likely operates with a digital mindset. Understanding this is important in modern business as this knowledge helps in building a powerful customer journey strategy that caters to a growing group of modern consumers.

The best and most successful leaders have proven an ability to create advantages where, historically, there aren’t any. Customer touchpoints are neither a disadvantage or advantage by their simple nature; it really depends on the approach of the individual organization or facilitator of that specific point of contact. In other words, turning customer touchpoints into an advantage is more than feasible. Customer touchpoints exist in almost every organization. That’s because a touch point is any phase or step in which the organization actively engages with a consumer or customer. This could be anything from an introduction letter, to an additional sales call, or even a happy birthday email. While every organization has a series of customer touchpoints across their respective customer journeys, not every customer touchpoint in every organization is going to look or feel the same.

The customer experience is one of the most important aspects of an organization. In some cases, the customer experience is even more important than the products being offered. This is especially the case in any service industry in which the customer experience essentially is the product. The sweeping acceleration into the digital era also plays a hand in this, bringing more levels of access to more people all across the nation and the globe. This, in turn, created an economic landscape in which customers not only had instant access to a library of information on organizations, it also spurred an uptick in market-saturation. In other words, there were more options for customers to explore in the instance they were dissatisfied with any of the organizations they patronized regularly. Between these factors and a consumer population that was already raising their expectations for what constituted responsible business operations and practices, the customer experience became a dense point of emphasis for organizations of all kinds.