There are certain moments of truth in any retail purchasing experience that heavily influence customer engagement. Strategy gurus recommend mapping out every touch point where customers interact with a company in order to understand the customer experience throughout the purchase cycle. A Voice of the Customer program can help you understand how engagement ebbs and flows during the three phases of a customer’s life-cycle described below.
Posts Tagged ‘Consumer behaviour’
Customer Engagement in Retail: 3 Phases of a Customer’s Life-Cycle
Monday, October 17th, 2011Who Your Customers Trust, and How to Advertise to Them
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
It’s every CEO’s nightmare: you’ve spent bundles of money and time on an advertising campaign, only to discover that your target audience isn’t buying it—or at least isn’t buying more of your product. Measuring the effectiveness of advertising is a Sisyphean task, and all too often companies see little tangible results from advertising efforts. Author James B. Twitchell goes so far as to say, “The simple fact is that you cannot put a meter on the relationship between increased advertising and increased sales. If you could, agencies would charge clients by how much they have increased sales, not by how much media space they have purchased.”
How To Make Your Customers Happy: Improve the Purchasing Experience
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010The only constant in this world is change, and the retail world is no exception. Consumers are moving away from the excessive buying of the 1990s, toward a simpler, yet more fulfilling life. They’re buying less, and focusing more on the purchasing experience. Businesses will need to change the way they think about the customer experience in order to survive this shift. That’s one message of a fascinating piece in last Saturday’s New York Times, titled “But Will It Make You Happy?” In it, writer Stephanie Rosenbloom reviews research from psychologists and market strategists showing that many consumers are moving from “conspicuous consumption—which is ‘buying without regard’—to calculated consumption.” Just how are consumers calculating what to buy? By evaluating their emotional experience during and after the purchasing process.
3 Techniques for Customizing Customer Service
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
We live in an individualistic era. A mere hundred years ago, when our grandparents were youths, most people didn’t have access to the perfect music to match their personality and mood. They couldn’t pull up any newspaper in the world within seconds, as we can online. In this way, the 20th century saw a tremendous shift toward individualization. Technological innovations have brought a world of information and entertainment to our fingertips. And yet, most firms’ marketing strategies have not kept pace with modern technological capabilities. A few online retailers, such as Amazon, are indeed altering product offerings, sales, and even website appearance according to the individual consumer’s preferences and purchasing history. But this sort of approach is hard to find offline.
Reward Programs: Are they Effective for Creating Engaged Customers?
Monday, August 31st, 2009Most Americans are members of at least one loyalty program, if not several. Whether they carry around a R.E.I. dividend, a key chain tab for their grocery store, or a card for their airline, Americans love to get a little something extra for their patronage—and loyalty programs claim to give it to them. The American love for loyalty programs is strong, even in the recession. As loyalty research firm COLLOQUY’s Rick Ferguson put it, “Despite the recession, more consumers across all demographic segments are participating in rewards programs than ever before.” In fact, COLLOQUY found a 25% increase in American loyalty program memberships since 2006. So, reward programs are popular, but are they effective from a business perspective?