CX – or ‘customer experience’ – is the sum of experiences that a individual has in their interactions with a brand, from the time that they become aware of the brand right down to the lifetime of ownership of that brand’s products or services. CX is the roadmap which encompasses that customer journey.
CX, in addition to the customer journey, consist of two distinct sections:
- Buyer’s journey, and
- Owner’s journey.
The buyer’s journey is an outline which acknowledges a buyer’s movement through a research and decision process which ultimately culminates in a purchase. The owner’s journey consists of all the touchpoints post-purchase.
How does PR integrate into CX?
Public relations integrates into CX in two significant ways: mitigation as well as amplification.
Mitigation
One of the most common reasons for crisis communications in the public relations cycle is a poor customer experience. If a business delivers a poor experience, a customer will document it thoroughly online. This will cause a firestorm.
The part that public relations has to play, in cases like this, is mitigation of the crisis by using prompt responses. The faster as well as more skilful that the response is, the less impactful the crisis turns out to be. The very best organisations catch crises before they ever reach a critical stage and put out the sparks before these become a fire.
The key to successful mitigation is that public relations as well as customer service must be thoroughly integrated. Both of these teams must share monitoring responsibilities and these two teams should coordinate on responses to customer challenges. Effective CX for public relations necessitates the demolition of silos as well as the belief that either support or PR is only accountable for communication to the customer.
Amplification
The converse scenario is if a company delivers phenomenal CX. When a customer experience is fabulous, customers inform the world about it. In this instance, the role that public relations has to play in amplifying the positive in a quick and forceful manner.
To accomplish this, public relations needs to have robust, near-real-time monitoring abilities which precisely detect only activity as well as but also sentiment. PR must also be thoroughly integrated into digital marketing as well as sales teams in order to make the most of customer interactions which are positive.
As stories of customer success evolve, PR should communicate those stories to digital marketing and sales to reinforce to prospective customers what a positive experience they could have with the company’s brand.
PR must also be able to access or share control of advertising abilities. So much of social media in the public eye today needs paid amplification. When something phenomenal takes place, public relations teams need to have one-click access to boost a story beyond what organic reach alone delivers.
Customer experience as a discipline developed from three distinct trends:
- As the world became increasingly more digital, we put more emphasis on the user experience of our products as well as We made our sites, our apps, our devices, our screens and our stores easier to use in addition to more intuitive.
- The discipline which is called voice of the customer, or customer-centric thinking, developed to ensure that the customer had a champion in our organisational decision-making.
- As the world developed into becoming more digitally savvy, we got new measurement capabilities. Data warehousing, Big Data, real-time analytics, machine learning as well as artificial intelligence offer us data, analysis as well as insights in order to make more informed decisions.
As we’ve said in this article, PR plays a crucial role in making sure that positive customer experience stories are amplified and that negative ones are dealt with in the best possible way.
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