How to create an epic customer experience and get a higher conversion rate

Jamie Anderson from Marketo and David Wise from Magento were flown in, to both give a presentation about how you can create the ultimate customer experience. Both Marketo and Magento are acquired by Adobe and are now part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. So, as you can imagine, these guys know everything about experiences. 

So, how do you create an epic customer experience and get a higher conversion rate? Jamie and David will tell you. 

Customer Experiences

First, there are different types of experiences. Jamie explains: “We have personal experiences. These are experiences in somebody’s life such as childbirth. It is a moment that you never forget. But also, in your work life, you can have experiences. When you work in B2B on a huge deal and it is completed, that is an experience as well. And if you look at B2C you can also create experiences. A great example is Johnny Walker. Their campaign and slogan ‘keep walking’ was used as a symbol for freedom and it became a revolution to the people. That is an experience!

But how do you create this as a B2B company? Marketo did research about how B2B businesses could improve their customer experiences because a study showed that 48% of businesses lost business because they failed to engage with their customers. The outcome of what B2B buyers are looking for is:

• 85% Wants to be treated fairly as a customer;
• 78% Wants a brand that is transparent;
• 84% Is serious about how the company is protecting their organizations’ data;
• 83% Is serious about how the company is using personal data.

One of the most important things is brand purpose. Your buyers wanted to be treated fairly and you have to be transparent as a company. Nowadays, your buyers will also be researching a company before they do business with you. So, they will check if your purpose is clear, how your employees are treated, and if your purpose and values are true. Because of this, you need to be personal with your customers. Be transparent and communicate with your customers. If you do this, you know who you are working with and know their needs. When you know somebody’s needs you can create an experience that fills those needs.”

The key takeaways from Jamie are:

1. Purpose matters most at the beginning of the buying process and is critical to making it into the consideration set. Once in the consideration set, you need to focus on your product or service capabilities.
2. Create epic experiences. In a B2E world delivering a consistent personalized experience to your customers and prospect is the solution to winning more business.
3. Clear communications. Avoid jargon, aim for authenticity and clarity in your communications.
4. Don’t stop with customer experiences when someone is a customer, but always keep going. Customers want to be rewarded for their loyalty. So, you have to nurture your customers.

After Jamie, David Wise went on stage and also added: “The experience is extremely important, but times have changed. Customers want easy experiences and ease of commerce. You already see this happening at Amazon with Amazon pay and by 1 touch checkouts. If we look at the checkout, for example, the checkout as we know it now is dying, it is not going to disappear, but it is definitely changing. A consumer doesn’t like to pay, so if you make this as simple as possible the consumer would likely pay sooner. If you look at Uber, a customer doesn’t notice the payment immediately and is unconscious and because of this, the service is very easy. Also, the mindset of the customer has changed. There is a shift happening from mobile first to just mobile. Nowadays, downloading an app is already too much effort. You have to search for it, download it and update it. These are too many steps. To solve this problem a new ‘app’ has been developed: PWA (Progressive Web App). A PWA has an app like structure, with the best features of an app and a mobile site together. It is real-time and because of that is a lot faster and more up-to-date than a normal app.

Another thing to think about is, delivery and to update your customers all the time. If we look at Uber again, they are constantly updating their customers about where they are. You have to think about how to get your product to the customer and to communicate this because this is also an experience. As a company, you have to invest in experience-driven commerce. Most companies now are spending a lot of time to get the customer to their products, but they forget to spend time investing how your customers can buy the products, the transaction, and after that, they don’t think about the communication and actions after the sale. This is why you have to make every moment personal and every experience shoppable.”

It is clear that we live in an experience-driven world. Customers want to have an experience before and after the sale. The most important thing is to communicate clearly and to make the experience as impactful and easy as possible.