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Customer Experience

Customer Experience and Word of Mouth Marketing: The Link

word of mouth marketing

What makes a customer experience remarkable, or literally, worthy of remark? After all, that’s what word-of-mouth marketing is, right? It’s getting your customers to talk about their experiences with their friends, family, and social media followers.

How does a company uncover experience opportunities across a vast array of communication channels, customer touch points, and corporate departments? Luckily, we don’t need to solve all of those all at once.

The key is getting some measurable customer experience wins that leave your customers — and your bosses — wanting more.

“Achieving customer experience ‘perfection’ is not an attainable goal — at least not in today’s environment,” says marketing research company eMarketer in its report, Customer Experience 2020: Advancing Core Marketing Practices and Case Studies of Success ($). “Companies must continue to chip away at complex efforts like obtaining a single customer view and an omni-channel one; they should also focus on some of the easier-to-execute aspects of customer experience like establishing core values, identifying the most commonly used channels and improving their email efforts.”

In other words, customer experience is a journey, not a destination.

I have developed a proprietary methodology for identifying and creating remarkable customer experiences. There are four components, aptly forming the acronym W.I.S.E. because when you execute them, your company will become “wise” to customer experience.

W.I.S.E. stands for: Witty, Immersive, Shareable, and Extraordinary.

Many companies are using these techniques to delight their customers. Their successes are meant to inspire you to do the same at your business — customized, of course, to your industry, company, and customer base.

Customer experience improvements should embody three characteristics: they are simple, practical, and inexpensive.

Why those three characteristics? Customers crave simplicity, and companies crave projects that don’t take months or years to execute. Practical suggests it solves some customer problem and is able to be implemented using existing company resources. And inexpensive — well, hopefully that one speaks for itself, but experience improvements that don’t require big budgets are much more likely to be approved.

Not every experience needs to have all four components of W.I.S.E., and in fact it is very difficult to achieve all four in a single experience. That said, the more components that are incorporated into an experience, the more remarkable that experience will become. Even a single component will separate an experience from the rest of the meh experiences out there.

“The modern customer doesn’t reward passable experiences — they want to be dazzled every time they interact with the brand,” according to Brandwatch in its report, The Best Brands and Industries for Customer Experience 2020. “When it comes down to it, we’re all in the business of wooing our customers with a stellar experience.”

Interested in learning more about the W.I.S.E. methodology? Contact me to discuss a speaking engagement or group coaching session. We’ll walk through each letter and share real-life examples of the methodology in action.

Word-of-mouth marketing doesn’t have to be difficult, and it doesn’t require a video or social media post that “goes viral.” When we create remarkable experiences for our customers, they do the marketing for us.

Dan Gingiss is a customer experience keynote speaker and author of The Experience Maker, available on Amazon. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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