Customer experience has been near the top of marketers’ to-do lists for some time – with many CMOs having anointed this the “age of experience.”
Interestingly, though, a global study conducted in 2020 shows that IT is twice as likely to lead CX than any other function. Why IT rather than marketing?
According to the study, two-thirds of respondents cited “enabling elegant, painless interactions” as their most important CX objective, along with
“providing speedy service” and “making relevant information easy to find.”
Worthy objectives all, but highly functional and reliant on enabling technology. They reveal much about the tilt to IT as CX’s “owner.”
Another recent report from Gartner states that “to succeed in the digital experience economy, organizations must intertwine strategies around four disciplines: multi-experience (MX), user experience (UX), customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).”
Lots of ‘Xs’ to wrap one’s head around – and again suggestive of an emphasis on technology.
But Gartner makes another point that is the real key to unlocking great CX. “In the experience economy,” Gartner writes, “the memories, emotions and feelings that customers take away are ultimately what matters most.”
Memories, emotions and feelings
MSQ B2B has industry-leading capabilities in data and digital transformation – CX prerequisites. Yet, as Gartner does, we believe that emotions and feelings are ultimately what matter most.
In fact, the only way to deliver great CX now and guarantee success in the long term is through forensic honesty about a brand and the world it inhabits.
Further to this point, a brand today has no choice but to put Emotional Intelligence – the emotional equivalent of IQ – at the heart of the customer experience by:
• Knowing your real strengths and facing up to your weaknesses
• Genuinely understanding your audience and how it feels about life, the world, your category and your brand
• Building relationships through consistent, coherent, engaging communication – interacting with real people in the real world rather than speaking at them from your ‘marketer bubble’
• Ultimately, developing consistency, integrity and coherence in all that your brand does – extending across an end-to-end CX
The High EQ Brand experience
At MSQ B2B, we’ve harnessed state-of-the-art learnings from data science, AI, behavioural economics and neuroscience to design B2B’s first High EQ Brand System.
Through it, we can draw upon new and powerful insights to truly understand customers’ values and expectations.
We can determine where and how to improve their experiences, what their pain points are and what creates real engagement.
We can help drive emotionally intelligent excellence into all the component parts of great customer experience: sharper differentiation through emotional as well as functional drivers; empathetic customer journey mapping; and cohesive communications from top-of-the-funnel through in-life.
Very importantly, we also can pull the CX thread through it all by intertwining agile digital marketing with agile digital infrastructure. Every brand is on a necessary journey to better CX. The brands that will break through to great will do so with Emotional Intelligence as their true north.
Kate Howe is the Executive Director of MSQ. Found out more about our new B2B model, MSQ B2B, here.
