We all feel like we’ve lost control. How can marketers help?

We’ve all had times in our lives when we felt nervous; worried that events might overtake our ability to manage them. This can create feelings of tension, anxiousness, and pessimism. For a great many people, this is a shared feeling right now – helped along by politics and economics, finding us throughout our careers and into our later years. When we feel like this, it can be like sitting on a ship with too-small sails and a damaged rudder. You want to feel like you’re the captain, but in fact, you’re at the mercy of the elements.

This feeling isn’t as significant in our interaction with brands, but we’re not in complete control there either. And in tough times, wouldn’t it be a quick and easy win for brands to be part of a solution, rather than a frustrating set of deaf ears?

We have endless ways to engage with our chosen brands. Increasingly, these are digital and automated. While the intention might be to save time and cost in customer interactions, the way we experience them doesn’t feel that way. It feels like another hurdle; more unnecessary steps between me and what I want to achieve.

What could go wrong?

Customer journey mapping should take account of what could go wrong more than what we hope will go right.

Here are two examples, both real, from my own recent dealings with customer service brands. The first is a well-known airline. Its loyalty program gives the opportunity to earn flights, including a special kind of voucher that permits a second passenger, completely free of charge, in the same type of seat as me. Exciting, right? It should be. But the process of finding ‘qualifying’ flights to be able to redeem the voucher is as dispiriting as the potential was energizing. It leans almost entirely into an online process, and IT IS HARD.

The second example is a well-known insurer, whose USP is to have done away with people to keep costs lower. The case in question: a stress-tester, involving multiple organizations and a written-off then not-written-off car. As the insurer’s customer-interaction system had been designed, it was not capable of dealing with this, and in that scenario chose to fall back, exhausted. In other words, it had no safety valve, no ‘pull the red toggle’ solution.

In neither situation did I have control, on my terms. And in both cases, the relationship has been damaged – with the insurer, literally beyond repair.

Loyalty, beyond the point(s)

“You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose” – Dr Seuss

Increasingly, the chatter among us marketing people is of how AI can help us, and how being more customer-focused isn’t a choice, but an imperative.

Both assertions are true. But perhaps the real supercharger for our customer strategies isn’t in how they can be deployed to chase new dollars, so much as how they can help keep existing ones. Using the power of AI with the intention of anticipating and solving issues before they happen – from a customer-driven mindset – would be a sensationally powerful step forward.

'Walking in our customers’ shoes’ is a well-worn CX trope. Using the startling advances in technology to help us imagine what might not go right in those experiences might well prove to be a more powerful customer strategy and loyalty tool than those damn points I’m finding it so hard to use.