Customer Experience After the Sale: Going from Funnels to Flywheels
If you've worked in product marketing as long as I have, you've likely bumped into the phrase "customer experience" (often abbreviated to just CX) in a variety of industries. In some cases, entire businesses go all in on CX training and optimization, while in others, the CX torch is carried by a lone employee or consultant without much surrounding support.
Regardless of the size and makeup of the CX initiative, however, the most common mistake I see product marketers make is thinking that CX ends at the funnel conversion stage.
Just What is 'Customer Experience' Anyway?
'Customer Experience' isn't just a general term encompassing how your customers are feeling – for the purposes of this article, we're talking about CX as a formalized discipline that wraps around all aspects of a customer's interactions with a brand. This includes social media engagements, customer service touchpoints, point of purchase interactions, and more. Virtually any point on any platform is within the scope of CX.
To anyone who hasn't gone to a corporate CX training, this might just sound like good old common sense. After all, what businessperson in their right mind thinks that a customer having a great experience with their product isn't important?
This much is true – a lot of CX is rooted in simple-to-understand common sense. However, CX benchmarks can also serve as waypoints towards which organizations can align their priorities at all levels. When CEOs get too hyperfocused on financials or competitors, refocusing on CX can be an important grounding mechanism.
The Problem With Marketers and CX
All things being equal, it may seem like marketers would inherently understand CX. Between optimizing mobile experiences, listening to customer feedback, and modeling a buyer persona's interests, people in the marketing field are up to their eyeballs trying to optimize what the data tells them that their customers want.
The gap, however, comes from the fact that marketers are almost unanimously and unwaveringly optimizing for a funnel model where “conversion” – be that a purchase, a subscription, or an upgrade – is the end goal.
Once we realize this, the problem starts to become more clear. A sale is often the last leg in the marketer's funnel, whereas the consumer feels like the experience is just beginning at that point.
