Cyrill, you once said, “without communication, there is no interaction”. In order to get a reaction, an order, a download, a newsletter subscription, an engagement from the customer, we have to communicate with them. What role does Content Marketing play in the customer journey?
The communication content is an important success factor on the customer journey. It must be simple, clear and intuitive. No customer proactively informs himself about the services of a company. Too much implicit knowledge is assumed in aftersales or customer service from an internal perspective. But the reality of customers is quite different. They want to solve their problem situationally in an everyday situations and not first find out about self-service offers on countless websites and portals.
To illustrate this with the example of a shipment redirection: perhaps a customer would like to use the service. But if he/she first has to create a profile for it, and this has to be done between two meetings or during a short tram ride, this topic is over. Here, small content that fits the situation is useful so that the customer can estimate the effort and see the progress.
This leads us to a special discipline in content marketing: transactional content. What importance do you attach to it?
The best way to describe the importance is a flight journey that is experienced by customers across several touchpoints and devices. Customers want to enter their data only once and then be digitally forwarded to the next touchpoint and accompanied along the way. Accompanying interaction meets an urgent customer need. That is why transactional content is one of the most important topics in CX. Even more, it determines economic success. Companies can influence how they design their transactional content. Those that cleanly design the most important core processes and proactively communicate them to their customers have a clear advantage. The others lose money on every transaction by generating expensive returns and customer service calls and giving away annoyed customers to the competition.
«Those companies that consciously design their transactional content, cleanly implement the core processes and proactively communicate with their customers have a clear advantage. The others lose money with every transaction by generating expensive returns and customer service calls and giving away annoyed customers to the competition.» Cyrill Luchsinger
What does it take to pick up customers at the right time, in the right place, with the right information and the right content?
It takes a solid technological foundation and communication to inspire! Communication is possible in person, but also with automated, transactional and impersonal services. Conversely, this means that the CX process must be filled with adequate content. Content does not write itself. It has to be conceived and produced in an interdisciplinary way. Communication experts and UX writers, in transversal cooperation with experts from CRM, customer service, UX, brand management and CX, are challenged to understand the expectations of customers and to design content, i.e. to design many small, positive micro-experiences. The awareness that this discipline is a very integral process is not yet present in many companies. Often, product owners or computer scientists write the transactional texts for the websites or apps. It is therefore not surprising that there is a lack of consistent language, which leads to misunderstandings and high costs.
How can companies escape this trap?
CX is an art of communicating with people, of aligning with customer opinions, of researching about them. In recent years, the technical side has upgraded massively. The challenge today is not in the technology, but in the people and their collaborative design. Amazon’s simple payment process is a good example of cooperation. Today it is the standard and is also expected from other portals. Expectation management is about taking the outside-in perspective, putting oneself in the customer’s shoes in order to model customer expectations. At the corresponding touchpoint – and this is the challenging part – a technical or organisational piece of content must be stored so that the customer’s expectation is fulfilled.
In your experience, how do content creators and CX experts best work together?
Expectation management and modelling of the customer journey don’t just happen on the side in day-to-day business. Ideally, the decisive competences and skills are integrated into projects from the very beginning. My wish is that communication should also be involved at a very early stage. With communication, you can differentiate which type is in demand, for example content people or technically oriented UX functions. I am enthusiastic about UX writing. It’s one of the most important skills when it comes to providing customers with many automated moments of happiness in everyday life and at the same time avoiding non-value-adding contacts.
In line with the motto “The Best Service Is No Service”?
Absolutely! Customers do not always expect communication, and the company does not always want communication (cf. Value Irritant Matrix, Nils Hafner). For low-margin products or services, the aim is to make dialogue superfluous and to automate processes and content. It must be clear from the beginning which strategy and which concept you want to follow. It makes a big difference to model a dialogue process or an automated process. Often the strategic-conceptual classification is missing and one aims directly at the solution. In addition, brand perception must also be implemented. Basically, customers communicate with brands.
How should companies proceed?
This brings us to the crux of the matter: the ideal is to see the connection, but to tackle things step by step and gain experience. At the end of the day, even the largest company is dealing with a manageable number of five to seven core processes and their accompanying processes. It’s not witchcraft, but working together seems to be a challenge. Companies focus on the product. But if you don’t communicate, you don’t inspire.
What do you think the communication sub-discipline UX Writing can achieve?
UX writing can work wonders! It is the art of creating texts that are clear, understandable and purposeful for users. These small pieces of transactional content have the power to reduce contacts and complaints, save time, money and unpleasant experiences, and enrich the customer experience. UX writing can also accompany customers step by step in storytelling with a consistent, neatly coordinated context of content. The prerequisite is that there are no media or workflow breaks that throw customers off track. The hybrid stuff is crap. It may be OK in transition to interrupt the process for a passport copy. But in this day and age, it’s really not acceptable. There are systems that can do that. The better one wins.
Which touchpoints are underestimated and which are overestimated as content suppliers on the customer journey?
I notice that the search functions are often really bad and the help functions are generally very neglected. If you are lucky and find an email address, the answer is “Do not reply” – a nightmare from a CX perspective. Error messages are also neglected, as is unfortunately often the checkout process. This is fatal, because if a company wants to continue to exist, it must generate sales – apps and web shops are not free, after all. And then the time comes: the customer wants to pay, and it doesn’t work. That is tragic. Communication and cooperation in companies are also underestimated. What happens internally results in the product. This is felt by the customers. Communication makes an essential contribution to design. It acts like a mirror to the outside world.
And which touchpoints are overrated?
All the communication blah-blah on websites, in PDFs, on folders, etc. It is at least as important as glossy brochures that the individual touchpoints are characterised by a high degree of intuition and that consistent storytelling builds up and grows with the customers. The customer experience is successful when customers are navigated step by step through their journey. A progress check shows where you are and prevents customers from breaking off in the middle of the process and never returning.
How does content have to be to make “transactions desirable again and again”?»
The secret lies in clarity; clarity about what the next step is and reliability about what happens afterwards. When there is clarity, you can wait a few days. It doesn’t always have to be the big surprise package. A closed communication process can fulfil customer expectations by picking up customers again and again and leading them further. There are very good examples of this in e-commerce.
In addition to the customer experience, it is also often about recommendations. Can content trigger customer recommendations?
The next level of customer satisfaction is loyalty. The right piece of content can contribute to customers being able to use the services and products better and ensure that their enthusiasm leads to recommendations. Enthusiasm turns customers into ambassadors. Or when a complaint has been handled excellently. Dealing with complaints is a great communication opportunity – and also completely underestimated. If you listen to your customers, take their concerns seriously and offer them a solution that is practical and useful, you’ve won!
Three tips from you for content to boost CX?
Content must be clear, appreciative and reliable. It’s about understanding context. In practice, I often observe that all experience disciplines act in isolation from each other. A good experience, on the other hand, is integral. It is the result of cooperation. It’s not the customer or the competition that is throwing a spanner in the works, but the silos that have been built internally. The next challenge will be to dismantle these silos.
Practically best friends: content and CX. Where can you learn more?
Want to learn more about the topic? The CAS Content Marketing and the CAS Corporate Communications at the ZHAW are all about content and CX. Find out more and register now.
About Cyrill Luchsinger
No one can fool him into thinking he’s a “U” for an “X”: Cyrill Luchsinger knows how to distinguish between what goes under X like experience and what is actually customer/user experience: with nearly 20,000 followers, the former CX Lead at Swiss Post is one of the most influential CX topic leaders in the German-speaking world. He regularly shares his integrated expertise in interviews, at congresses and on LinkedIn. As a former head of communications, he knows the importance of content and UX writing – and how important it is to integrate them with other CX disciplines. Interested in sharing? https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyrill-luchsinger/
