Customer experience was a significant focus of marketers’ attention in 2018, and, according to WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2019, will continue to occupy their thinking for the year ahead. Here are some of WARC’s most popular pieces on the topic.

An effective customer experience strategy

In this Best Practice article, The Foundation’s John Sills explored the importance of CX in creating long-term sustainable success. “Long-term sustainable success can only come from earning customer decisions in your favour. It’s really that simple”, Sills writes. Among “all the other ‘Business As Usual’ activities and choices that happen on a daily basis, remember: the only thing that really matters is how companies make people feel.

“Customer’s lives are far more important to them than any business. And if a business starts to introduce unnecessary stress, anxiety, or effort into their lives, a better option is just a tap of a finger away. Those businesses that thrive in the modern economy understand this”.

Find out how they do it: How to develop an effective customer experience strategy.

Effective digital CX 

In this article, Adobe Experience Cloud EMEA’s Jamie Brighton explores how customer experiences are changing. According to Gartner data, it’s predicted that by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationships with enterprise without interacting with a human.

Core to the insights that Brighton surfaces are respect for the customer and that data should help the business to understand consumers’ preferred touchpoints. Beyond that, the brand should always speak in one voice and aim to “delight at every turn”.

Included are case studies from the Royal Bank of Scotland, Heathrow Airport, and DFS in the UK.

Read the article here: Delivering effective digital customer experiences.

The branded customer experience

Experience design (XD) is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omni-channel journeys and environments based on the consideration of an individual's or group's needs, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences and perceptions. In this article, Stuart Crawford-Browne of Phoenix MRC explores some of the key concepts required to start designing sophisticated experiences, as well as how these fit alongside the key basics of persuasion.

Read the story here: How to design a branded customer experience.

Customer experience marketing

This article introduces Admap’s April focus. “Though it is recognised as the most important aspect of what they do, it seems marketers have much to learn about keeping their customers happy.” What follows is a series of pieces designed to bring planners and strategists the key themes and best practices within the topic.

Read the full guide here: A guide to customer experience marketing.

Sourced from WARC