How to Transform a Customer Experience into a Marketing Strategy

Here’s to a second “sawadee ka” from paradise, Loyalty Loopers!

We are kicking this week’s episode off in the sunny resort town of Phuket, Thailand, a place where relaxation, action, and intrigue go hand in hand. Bring your spy kit and take a boat ride with me to the (not so) secret lair of Scaramanga on James Bond Island in Phang Nga Bay. It’s one of my favorite places in the entire world, and not just because I’m a huge fan of The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).

But that’s enough movie geekery. Let’s cut to the real chase.

Last week, I showed you the difference a big, amazing Loyalty Loop experience can make when acquiring new customers. But as the words left my mouth, I could literally feel a buzz of objections in the air:

“But Drew, I’m not on the customer service team! My job is to acquire new customers.”
“I want to design big ideas for the front of the funnel, not the back.”

Believe me, I hear you! But like the good host I am, this week I’ll answer your question with a delicious drink. Prepare yourselves for my signature shaken- not stirred- marketing martini of truth: we are all marketers and every person in your company is in the Customer Experience Business™.

The reality is that it’s everyone’s job to be a marketer. Few companies and people can afford to say it’s not. Knowing this, your biggest challenge is to turn the customers you have into the customers you want. But how do you do that? Simple. By answering last week’s big question and fundamentally transforming your customer experience.

Let me introduce you to my friend Richard Yoo, one of the founders of a company called Rackspace. To fully immerse ourselves in his experience, we’ll have to go back several decades to the 19990’s. This was a time when most web hosting companies were staying competitive by increasing servers to keep up their “feeds and speeds”. But pretty soon, every player in the industry was offering the same thing and prices inevitably took a nosedive.

Richard was faced with a tough question: how could he keep reducing his prices while maintaining a profitable business? Well, he couldn’t. So Richard took a *fanatically* different approach.

While everyone else was worrying about feeds and speeds, he would focus on delivering great support. You see, back then good technical support was far from the norm. In fact, most office workers felt in over their heads when trying to fix even the smallest technical issue.

So what does Richard do? He trained the employees at Rackspace to ensure that every customer got what they wanted, no matter how long it took. Clients loved the concept and flocked to them for their top-shelf customer support. The idea eventually grew to encompass the central mantra for the entire company. Insane!

“But Drew, what does this have to do with marketing?” you ask. Well, just about everything!

You see, Richard didn’t just provide good support. He provided FANATICAL SUPPORT (echo, echo…) and that made his company stand out more than any price cut could.

So if your audacious, customer-centric post-purchase idea can provide a truly differentiated experience, then it will become the marketing driver that brings people in on the front-end. This is why every marketer should start with their service first when crafting their big idea. It’s always better to transform an experience so it becomes amazing marketing than to have “amazing marketing” that falls flat on its promise.

Do you feel up to the task, my international men and women of mystery? Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to think about the one big thing you can do to change your customer experience. Just remember to build on the experience first, then scale the message when it works.

Stay tuned for the next exciting edition of the Loyalty Loop, where I’ll show you a hotel in Phuket that gives a Loyalty Loop experience so fantastic that I would gladly brave the 27+ hour flight to go back.

#Marketing #Strategy #Business