• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 10, 2017

Wow. You’ve got another successful email campaign on your hands — a 20% open rate and an even higher click-through rate.

You’re a hero until the revenue and ROI are toted up. Then you learn that the effort tanked. People clicked through, but they didn’t convert. And the few that did buy complained about the product or returned it.

What happened? The experience failed to live up to the expectation you set. And the customers fled.

You can’t be faulted — the creative was spot on. But somebody’s got to take the blame, so if you’re the type, point your finger at the people who control the customer experience. Feel free to throw ‘em right under the bus, in fact.   

The problem begins there — and in the C suite, judging by current opinion on this subject. It starts with a disconnect between sales and marketing. That’s the view of Tiffani Bova, global customer growth and innovation for Salesforce.

There are four issues: Metrics, Silos, People and Products.

Metrics

Bova told Forbes that brands should consider “measures gleaned from social listening and indices of brand strength and trust. These metrics serve as early indicators of CX performance and can be used to diagnose problems and provide learning. The best approach is to first leave current metrics in place, no matter how silo-ed they might be, and add new ones. Then over time, eliminate some of the older ones and rely more on the new.

Silos

“Organizational structure continue to hinder marketers’ ability to improve the customer experience, the UK’s Marketing Week reports, based on a new study. “The study by Brand Learning finds most companies still fail to collaborate across business functions when implementing customer-facing strategies, Jonathan Bacon writes in Marketing Week. (By the way, these findings are valid in the U.S. too).

“Indeed, less than one in four IT functions are involved in customer experience strategy and planning, while a similarly low number of HR teams are involved.

’Everyone talks about cross-functional ways of working — lots of businesses claim to do it — but we found that a lot of silos still exist,” said Rich Bryson, group client and propositions director at Brand Learning.

People

Many firms hire the wrong employees, or too few. And they tie them up for weeks with meetings and training. Jeanne Bliss argues on Customer Think that they should be thrown right into dealing with customers. “By the midpoint of Day 1, the employee should be taking on projects that will have legitimate customer-facing impact,” Bliss writes. “That’s why you hired them, right? Because you trusted them to do just that? Let’s see what they can do.”

Products

Whatever it is, the product or service must be reliable, based on findings released this week from MarketingSherpa’s Customer Satisfaction Research study. MarketingSherpa split 2,400 consumers into two groups, and asked one to rate a company that satisfied them, and the other 1,200 to rate a firm that dissatisfied them.

Among the first group, 43% said their company’s products or services were very reliable, and 39% that they were reliable. Of the dissatisfied folks, only 5% called the products very reliable, and 5% said they were reliable. 

What does that denote? “To satisfy customers, you need a five out of five reliability,” says Daniel Burstein, senior direct of content, MarketingSherpa, in a video. “You’ll start losing customers at three out of five.”

But you can avoid that falloff. Burstein advises brands to put a minimum viable product, or MVP, “into the marketplace and see if it works.” However, an MVP is usually thought of in terms of features. ”If you want to get a product out to the market and have the minimum amount of features because you don’t want to invest more, don’t shirk on reliability or you’re going to lose customers.”

That sums it up. But here’s one more point: Don’t do any finger-pointing — we were just kidding when we said that. Indeed, one has to break down the silo walls and have collegial relations with colleagues.