Lucidpress Guide
How to avoid CX failure
And empower your team to become your greatest CX asset
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People power your customer experience. The concept is pretty straight-forward when you think about it. Your employees power the customer experience. They’re the driving force behind sales calls, customer support and various brick-and-mortar experiences. Your customers interface with them day in and day out — which in turn elevates or dampens the customer experience. However, that’s not the only way your employees touch the customer experience — they impact the content experience, too. The continuity between the two are deeply interconnected as your employees are both the human power and the voice behind all content creation whether that entails design, copy, website development and more. And furthermore, a customer’s experience with sales can wind up impacting their content experience and vice versa. So, as a result, it’s safe to say that your employees wind up impacting CX in two ways: Failure Success Okay. That probably sounds a little dramatic and finite, so allow us to elaborate a little. As much as your employees have the capacity to power and elevate your customer and content experience, they can negatively impact it as well. And oftentimes, a CX failure is indicative of a team-wide, internal problem — because CX isn’t just one person’s job: it’s everyone’s job. For example, when CX suffers it’s because: Many employees don’t understand why the customer experience matters or how they influence it. Many employees are so siloed in their role that they don’t understand what the customer experience is like in reality, leading to inconsistencies between teams. Many employees don’t have enough resources, training or processes to prevent off-brand materials being sent to customers. Employees are disengaged, overwhelmed or disconnected from the brand creating a negative or casual attitude that is passed on to the customer. These four examples directly create a disconnected CX experience. Your employees aren’t empowered, therefore the customer experience suffers. So, rather than viewing your CX strategy strictly from a customer-centric perspective, you must approach it from the bottom — starting with your employees — and empower your teams with solutions and resources. Because, by balancing the scales and improving your employee experience, you can boost and improve your CX experience. How? Two things: Empower your team — Their voices need to be heard. Communication is key to closing the gaps in your CX strategy as it ensures that everyone is on the same page, is aware of the same information and understands the common CX goals they’re working toward. Bridge the gaps between departments — CX failure frequently occurs when there’s a disconnect between the touch points, which is often endemic to a lack of cross-functional collaboration and working relationships between different teams or departments.
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CX is human powered
CX is more fragile than you think
CX isn’t just one team member’s job. Every employee impacts your CX experience, lending a great deal of variability and inconsistency between content, touchpoints and more — which makes your CX experience more fragile than you might think. So, what’s a brand to do? While employees can impact the customer experience in a myriad of ways, content experience and employee experience encompass the majority of the impact. Content experience: How and what your customer feels, encounters and observes when they interact with branded content. This can include social media campaigns, blog posts, FAQs, your website copy and more. Can be also referred to as the content journey. Employee experience: How and what your employee feels, encounters and observe throughout their employment. This includes employee engagement, personal relationships, career pathing, resources and more. Can be also referred to as the employee journey. In this ebook, you’ll uncover critical principles and strategies designed to help transform your team into an efficient and effective CX machine. We’ll start with five principles to help you transform your current content creation program into a powerful tool for a cohesive and powerful content experience. We’ll then dive into how the employee experience impacts CX and how to leverage it to boost your overall customer experience score. Let’s get started.
Every interaction counts when creating memorable content experiences. Ideally, you want your customers to view all interactions as your brand’s way of saying, “Hey, customer, we see and hear you. We’re here to help.” But, unfortunately, that’s not always how your content comes across. To create a successful content experience, marketers must move away from creating content reactively and working within siloed roles, strategies and approaches. Most marketing teams wind up creating content in a wind tunnel and, as such, requires teams to shift their thinking from: Marketer’s experience - > Customer experience Volume-driven marketing - > Value-driven marketing Limited distribution and transactional strategies - > Integration and collaboration While we’ve boiled it down to three critical bullet points, the reality of the situation isn’t so simple. So, to help you overcome this obstacle and rethink the way your employees create content relative to the customer experience, we’ve outlined five principles that, when implemented, propel your content experience. Principle #1: Consistency Taking the extra 1% consistently has a more significant impact than taking the extra 99% occasionally. Consistently presented brands are three to four times more likely to experience brand visibility. Day-to-day interactions go a long way in the customer experience. And while it might be tempting to relegate those interactions as inconsequential, low hanging fruit, it’s a reliable means of capitalizing on existing relationships and nurturing new ones at the same time. Plus, science supports the notion that the more exposure your customers have to something, the more likely they are to remember it and prefer it to other options that only pop up every once and awhile. Social psychologists call this the “familiarity principle” or “mere-exposure effect.” For example….. Say your company has an extensive product failure. For most marketers, product failures are a big do-or-die situation because you immediately assume the worst. You think, “This is it. This is the end! We’re toast.” But it’s not. Keep in mind; you’ve also been consistently interacting with your customers on a day-to-day basis. And remember the “mere-exposure effect?” Of course, you do. Unless your product failure pops up a lot on your customer’s radar (re: the news, social media, etc.), they probably won’t remember it happening. They’re more inclined to remember those (so to speak) menial, customer-centric interactions you’ve been putting time, effort and money into. So, as terrifying and alarming as your product failure might be, it probably won’t detract from your overall brand experience (and their customer experience). How does consistency apply to the content experience? The answer is simple. But you have to start by asking yourself and your marketing team, “is our content consistent?” As in: Are you showing up regularly? Are you showing up in the right places? Is your brand image consistent? Are your tone and voice consistent? Are you practicing what you preach? Is your online experience consistent with the in-person? (Do they mirror each other?) When you show up consistently, you stay front-and-center. So should a customer be tempted to detract or change brand allegiance, you’re there to remind them at a critical turning point or life decision. Keep in mind that content isn’t strictly digital. It’s physical collateral, too. Principle #1 takeaways: So what? Consistent content makes you memorable. And consistency is an easy way of achieving the extra 1% for your customers. So, after reading this section, take a minute to ask yourself: Am I showing up consistently? Am I consistent with messaging, branding and images Am I creating memorable, consistent moments in my customer’s journey? Principle #2: Scalability You ask a lot from your brand because your customers ask a lot from your brand, which (in turn) puts a good deal of pressure on your content and your teams. As a result, this trickle down scenario presents three issues: Blind faith in sometimes uncertain or baseless strategy Creative teams are overloaded with production requests Sales teams waste time looking for content However, scaling content production with the help of brand and social media monitoring tools, content creation software and a brand assets hub, you easily create memorable content experiences. And in turn you: Get more done as a team Create the right content at the right time Send content to the right places and people Boost employee morale How to create informed content Okay, so, for a moment, think of customer touchpoints like little pieces of memorabilia. You own a store that sells memorabilia. You like selling memorabilia because it mostly sells itself, likely because it’s a physical accessory that conjures up a visceral experience and memory related to a place, space or time. But as time goes on, you notice fluctuations in customer behavior. Opportunities to sell become a little bit harder. Customers are more discerning. They don’t immediately grab the “ugly-but-cute” souvenir mug for friends and family waiting back home. They want authentic souvenirs — you know, tchotchkes that emotionally appeal to them. So, what are you supposed to do? How do you know who-buys-what? And to that end, how do you know if your memorabilia hits home? How do you scale memorabilia purchase tracking, production and implementation? Now, swap out the word “memorabilia” for “content” and “touchpoints.” Attaining these details can be daunting; however, keep in mind that informed content leads to an effective content experience. Data such as NPS scores, conversion metrics, opinion-gathering tools and more, offer deep insight into whether or not your content is useful or customer-centric. For example: The spectrum of engagement Relevance of engagement Impact on revenue Loyalty — customer churn or conversion You need to know what informs these touchpoints as they inform your content creation. Furthermore, you need to know how to scale your touchpoints, and therefore, content creation. How to scale experiential content production Start by asking yourself this question: “Are we scaling our content for production and speed or quality and impact?” Remember, you can achieve all four components, but there are a few things you need to keep in mind when creating content of this caliber. Ultimately from your customer’s perspective, the content they’re consuming should offer value at every stage of their customer journey. To ascertain whether or not your content experience is scalable, employ the following three steps: Step one — conduct an audit Unless you have zero content, you likely won’t have to start from scratch. However, you and your teams (e.g., sales and marketing) should conduct a content audit to assess the overall scalability from a production and quality standpoint. Unsure how to start your audit? That’s okay. We’ve compiled a brief checklist to serve as your audit guardrails. 1. Define your current production process. What is it? ____________________________________ How many people does it impact? ____________________ What is their feedback about it? _____________________ Do they think it could be better utilized? _______________ ____________________________________________ Do your employees collaborate? _____________________ 2. Check for potential speed bumps in your production process. What headwinds do your employees experience? ____________________________________________ Do you frequently encounter the same production issues? ____________________________________________ What stands in the way of successful content? ___________ ____________________________________________ Does your content production negatively impact delivery to your customers? ________________________________ 3. Identify software, products or services that would empower you to produce successful content. What existing services do you use? ___________________ ____________________________________________ How frequently do you or your employees use them? ______ ____________________________________________ Do you find that these software, products or services slow you down or speed up your production? __________________ What products or services would empower you to overcome frequently experienced obstacles? ____________________ ____________________________________________ 4. Assess whether or not content reflects customer experience. How are you sourcing your content? __________________ ____________________________________________ What do customers say about your brand? ______________ ____________________________________________ What do customers say about your content experience? ____ ____________________________________________ Do customers feel as though your content reflects their experience?) ___________________________________ Is your content consistent throughout the customer journey? ____________________________________________ Does your content show up in the right places at the right time? ________________________________________ Keep a sharp eye out for potential soft spots. Soft spots can manifest themselves as answers such as, “Our process is super slow” or, “Our customers don’t use our content” and even, “Our employees feel stressed out and unhappy.” These are all indicators that your content and your production process aren’t totally to scale. And to be frank, most companies encounter any variety of soft spots that are related to fast-paced growth, old models (that your brand has outgrown) or a lack of employee buy-in. So, keep reading onward to steps two and three as they illustrate ways in which you can scale your content and your production. Step two — scale content effectiveness relative to customer experience Evaluating your new and existing content through this lens will help you move forward with thoughtful, provocative and relevant content production — and in turn, create a memorable content experience. So, when push comes to shove, and it’s time to create content for the quarter, be sure to compare the strategy or content ideas against this checklist. So, is your content: Timely Has the right context Suitable and relevant for the individual Dynamic and changes to reflect user data, behavior and context Is evergreen — or inflexible Requires collaboration from your team or the customer Accessible for multiple parties, demographics or groups Features data-driven anecdotes and strategy Is device-agnostic Boasts personalized components Is an omnichannel piece of content Try not to look at this checklist and get immediately overwhelmed. Instead, keep in mind that each of the bullet points serves as a small stepping stone in the larger, interconnected journey toward a comprehensive content experience. Step three — scale for production This might be a Captain Obvious statement, but technology and tools can aid production efforts, help teams delegate tasks, and streamline strategy impact — so you have a better grasp on the numbers and not just what’s-getting-produced-when. For example: Project management software — A project management software gets you the granularity and tracking that a robust content experience requires. Plus, it gives you the customizable transparency you need in order to create large and small projects alike — from the first kick-off meeting, all the way to the email nurture campaign specific to a particular subset of audiences. Content creation software — Not everyone is a designer, wordsmith or content strategist. And they shouldn’t have to be in order to create compelling content experiences. Content creation software or platforms level the playing field through the power of branded templates and enables your teams or individuals to scale content production — without having to outsource production to external agencies or rely on internal creative teams, giving you the strongest speed to market available. Brand assets hub — Give folks a one-stop-shop. A brand assets hub provides employees with a dependable landing pad, so things don’t go awry in the production process. Think of it this way: no one likes going to an unfamiliar grocery store. It’s easy to get lost, you can’t find the ingredients you need to cook, and you usually wind up walking out with a wild laundry list of foods. And not only that, but your customers don’t get the consistency they deserve and want from a brand they trust. Democratizing access to content production solutions and brand assets, along with a project management software, will set your teams up for success, reduce reliance on external resources, and empower you to create content that genuinely fits the bill. Principle #2 takeaways Scale content production and personalization for maximum effectiveness and efficiency. So, after reading this section, take a minute to ask yourself: Is my CX data informing my content and design production? Am I creating informed, relevant content? Is my content production scalable? Principle #3: Continuity Humans are predictable. And while we do enjoy bouts of spontaneity, we prefer dependability and consistency over chaos. We want a controlled, organized environment that offers continuity and easily flows from one step to the next — or one functionality to the next — which lends success instead of failure. Plus, it’s just plain-jane easier that way. That’s why continuity is a crucial component when delivering the extra 1% and creating a memorable content experience. Your customers, and employees, need a tangible, easy way to connect the dots throughout production, all the way to the actual customer interaction. What do silos do? Silos can stealthily hide within departments, teams or organizations at-large. So, rather than thinking about what a silo is, take a moment to consider what a silo does. For example, silos: Prevent the sharing of information and collaboration. Diminish trust and hurts cross-functional employee relationships. Negatively impact your brand’s ability to connect with customers. Dampen content and strategy effectiveness. Discourage employee engagement. Hurt your brand. How to eliminate silos Silos make your life harder. They make your customers’ lives harder, too. So to put it succinctly, you need to eliminate silos to create a cohesive content experience for your customers. Unfortunately, silos lurk in the most unsuspecting of places. And they can sneak up on you, too. You’ll want to start your efforts by identifying silos (visible and sleuths) — and then eliminate them as best you can. What is your brand’s defining common ground? Can your team communicate cross-functionally and internally? Can teams or individuals share information easily? Do your teams have shared goals? Do you communicate shared goals? Are they measurable? Do you have educational opportunities that enable people to collaborate and grow as individuals and as a team? Do you have software or platforms that empower you to get more done as a team? Do you utilize collaboration tools? Are your employees engaged? Answering these questions should shed light on current or potential blind spots and allow you to address them accordingly. Silo solutions To help you get out from underneath the silo mentality, we’ve compiled a shortlist of resources that might help you. An internal communications tool. Project management software. Brand management and content creation platform. CRM resource or tool. Brand style guide and asset hub. Implement OKRs or other objectives. Create educational opportunities. Periodically check-in with cross-functional teams. Keep in mind, it’s easy to fall into a silo mentality (so don’t beat yourself up if you answered “no” to any of these questions). But at the end of the day, silos prevent your employees from collaborating and sharing information that empowers them to give your customers the extra 1% they’re entitled to. Principle #3 takeaways: Ensure continuity between customer journey touchpoints. The content experience will be much more natural and memorable as a result. So, after reading this section, take a minute to ask yourself: Where am I siloed? How can I eliminate these silos? How can I implement structural changes to ensure full organizational success? Principle #4: Personalization and localization Personalized content brings in more customers, who bring in more revenue. From a statistical standpoint, personalized content can help drive anywhere between a five and 15 percent increase in overall revenue. Ultimately, four components inform personalization and localization: Data aggregation — The devil is in the details. Or rather, the customer details are in the data. Data decisioning — Machine learning and data decisioning analytics connect the dots between touchpoints. These data insights empower you with valuable customer “indicators,” allowing you to step in and highlight your brand applicably. Content creation and design — Timing is everything. Have you ever received a promotional email from a company, only to think, “Could’ve used this email three days ago.” So, content creation needs to be timely, efficient and effective too. Brand templating empowers your teams to achieve timeliness, consistency and ease of personalized content creation. Delivery — You don’t just need to create content and distribute it across all channels, but you need to track and analyze the distribution data accordingly. Now, personalized content doesn’t merely mean adding in someone’s name and calling it good. Personalized content includes all the various touch points from the customer journey — from initial searches to support queries, all the way to purchase and brand advocacy. Personalization resources — how-to and toolkit recommendations Brand templating is a simple, straightforward solution to an otherwise large problem. If you’re unfamiliar with the term — brand templating can be best defined as a software or service that empowers your teams to create personalized content that accurately reflects customer experience without going off-brand. That said, there are a few other brainstorm-worthy components that can help you create and implement a personalization strategy that best reflects your audiences and customers. Reduce friction — Friction is not your friend. The customer journey and content experience need to feel friction-free. Remove all obstacles and make the journey as seamless and interconnected as possible. Follow-up — Dead-ends are fun for no one. Especially your customers. Keep in mind any content you create will require a follow-up of some kind. Whether you lean on product recommendations or helpful tidbits of information, you need to bring the content experience full circle. Connect the online and offline experiences — The in-person experience isn’t dead. That said, to leverage your in-person experience, you need to provide a seamless transition between the digital space and the non-digital one. For example, say you have a customer who started their journey online but came in-store — try connecting their online search queries to a database in the store. Doing so helps an associate get them the products or services they need faster than having to ask a myriad of questions all over again. Build trust through empathy and inclusive narratives. Your customers demand authenticity — empathic interactions, both in-person and online, foster trust with existing and new clients. Use AI, data, and research to inform strategies — Take all three sources and put them in a mixing bowl! Check for overlap, trends, or anything that stands out in particular. Be wary of solely leaning on one resource — AI is not the most genuine, and data tends to come off as informal and stiff, whereas personal experience and human opinion also lend room for error and bias. Nurture a content and customer ecosystem — Every touchpoint contributes to the customer ecosystem, which winds up being a reflection of the total content experience. But instead of treating each touchpoint as though it functions independently, you must nurture a holistic customer ecosystem where each touchpoint informs the next — or in the very least, is trackable. Templatize and streamline — As we mentioned early on in this ebook, consistency is key to creating customer-centric content. So, to make consistency easy for internal teams, you’ll want to templatize branded assets whenever you can. Brand templating enables you to lock down specific aspects of the content — while permitting personalization based on the content creator’s needs. Stay agile — Humans are predictable — predictably unpredictable, that is. This alone forces you to stay agile and pivot when needed. We’ll talk more about agility in just a moment. Protect your brand —Keeping your brand consistent in its presentation, whether that’s a logo or voice, is critical. Brand templating platforms offer quite a bit of agility combined with safeguards to prevent rogue content. Still, you’ll want to make sure brand guidelines are available to all employees for review. And while you’re at it, be sure to enforce brand standards. A consistent presentation makes you a more memorable one. Level the playing field — Not everyone in your company has the same background, experiences or skillsets. Level the playing field with appropriate software, platforms and training opportunities. Give them guardrails, of course, but you want to empower individual contributors and teams alike with the ability to create content. Hundreds of touchpoints define and illustrate the customer experience. And every touchpoint (consistent or inconsistent) is filtered through the lens of their expectations, those being relative to their previous customer experiences. Being able to connect the dots and offer a personalized, localized experience builds trust and boosts your ability to promise and deliver on the extra 1% that sets you apart from the rest. Principle #4 takeaways: No matter the type of content, personalize it to provide your customers with a memorable experience. So, after reading this section, take a minute to ask yourself: Am I best-leveraging data and AI for personalization? How can I streamline content and design production through easy-to-use platforms? Are my platforms or resources compatible with seamless personalization? Principle #5: Design thinking Your customers expect great design. However, great design entails a lot more than just aesthetically pleasing graphics and personalized tidbits. Great design requires a research-based strategy and analytical evidence. Unfortunately, most companies fail to connect the dots between production and design creation. Specific reasons why vary from company-to-company; however, most brands fall victim to: A lack of design data — Simply put, your personal experience as a CMO (or even a designer) does not represent the entirety of your customer base. You must leverage AI and cross-analyze data sources to ensure your gut checks (to support or not support a design initiative) has a foundation of user-backed, credible strategies — not personal opinion. Failing to represent the end-user — You may think you know your customers, but you very well might not. Very few brands bother to press pause and check-in with end-users about their customer experience. Courtesy of social media and other comparable interaction platforms, your customers can be quickly accessed for real-time feedback and opinions. Hard-to-measure processes— Putting a premium on creative design work can be complicated. Not only that, it can be tough to directly connect or attribute design efforts to your company’s bottom line. To be frank, succumbing to some, if not all, of these pitfalls is very easy. Most companies will. The key difference in overcoming these obstacles surrounds an innovative design-thinking approach. What is design thinking? Design thinking is a user-centric, creative process that seeks to democratize design and the way designers think across an entire organization. The goal of the design thinking process is to identify innovative ideas at the intersection of desirability, viability, brand identity and feasibility. Desires — e.g., What are your customer’s wants and needs? And are we able to represent a wide variety of them? Viability — e.g., Are you accounting for future customers, and how will you make money with this strategy? Feasibility — e.g., What will it take to make the experience a reality? Brand and identity — e.g., Does this content experience fit within our brand and furthermore, does it empower or enhance it? Design thinking best practices Design thinking is the final piece of the puzzle to creating a memorable content experience for your customers. Effective design thinking must be treated as a business leadership priority. Failing to do so means failing to represent your customers and, thus, begins the inadvertent process and creation of disjointed content experiences. That sounds pretty rough, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Disjointed content experiences happen because of siloed business efforts. But with design thinking, each strategy is highly interconnected with the others. They function best when grouped as an ecosystem. So, without further ado, your design thinking best practices: Data — Think broadly and analytically. The customer journey is kind of akin to those Choose Your Own Adventure books from back in the day. Your customers are no longer predictable in the ways they once were. The customer journey is non-linear and vast at best, no longer featuring the dependable sequence of a customer journey from years prior. So as such, you must conduct your research broadly and thoroughly, and you must champion the reality of your customer experience at every opportunity. Metrics and data insights bridge the gap between theory and actuality. After all, data is not the enemy. Data can easily coexist with the inherently creative nature of design, informing design decisions and helping them transform into customer-centric, data-driven campaigns instead of dictating stringent terms to them. As such, you must measure how design impacts your bottom line relative to a customer’s overall value experience. You can easily obtain this information through satisfaction or usability surveys. Capabilities — Leverage cross-functionality. Silos must go. To cast a wide net and create compelling content experiences, you need a diversity of thought, role capabilities, and technical skills that can (ideally) reflect your various customer profiles. And while all employees contribute to this in some way, shape and form, it’s critical that you further nurture cross-functional collaboration and depth of understanding beyond an employee’s limited scope of expertise and/or experience. Successful businesses must transform every employee no matter their role into a content creator with an understanding of design principles. Not only that, you need to incentivize your employees. Someone’s sheer enthusiasm for a product or process is not enough to serve as the foundation for their career. Avoiding burnout through proper care of your employees, via technology, apps or rewards enables individuals and teams alike to forge ahead and find innovative solutions that best fit your customers’ needs. Tools — Iterate user-centric versions. There is no “one and done.” Iterations must mature in correlation with the customer experience, and to do that, you must blend quantitative and qualitative research findings. Refining content, products or services through a customer-centric lens enables you to reflect your customers, break down barriers or opposition, and connect the dots between service experiences. So, it goes without saying, but you must give your teams the right tools and resources to do the job — and do the job well. Doing so not only empowers them to represent customers through research and testing accurately, but it enables the content experience to continuously evolve and maintain agility regardless of where an individual is in the customer journey. Principle #5 takeaways: Design thinking needs to be informed by data, cross-functional collaboration, diverse thought, and be iterated upon — multiple times. So, after reading this section, take a minute to ask yourself: How can I measure my design and connect it to my brands’ bottom line? How can I cultivate diversity in thought in my design? How can I better iterate my design versions? How can I scale design across my organization? How will I maintain the brand’s identity throughout the design thinking process? All in all Your customers are watching. And they’re waiting for you to answer their questions and give them the details they need to make an informed decision. The catch? They may or may not be vocalizing this to you. Regardless, an effective content experience requires you to anticipate these questions, wants, and needs well ahead of your customers putting pen to paper. By using these five different content experience principles, your customers get the memorable experience they’ve come to expect — and you get loyal customers in return.
The five principles of content experience
Viability
Outside
Feasibility
Desirability
Inside
Brand & identity
Improve employee morale and boost CX
With all that said, a key component to ensuring an effective content experience lay within a very obvious place — your employees. Because at the end of the day, your employees are the bedrock of your company. All their hard work, effort and due diligence are the reason your business strategies come to life. And to that end, it’s imperative that you provide your employees with the type of resources and time that empower them to not only do their job, but to do their job effectively and efficiently. The reason? Empowered employees are engaged employees — and resources are your means of engaging them. Organizations with an engaged employee base boast 2.5x more in revenue when compared against competitors with low employee engagement. In other words, empowering your employees leads to higher levels of engagement which in turn boosts your CX score. How to improve engagement There’s always room for improvement. Unfortunately, improving employee engagement doesn’t happen overnight. But there are a few measures you can take to facilitate change and better understand what your employees need in order to do their job well. Create an employee experience map Just as you create a customer experience map to better understand your customers’ habits, hurdles, preferences and more, you need to create an employee experience map. By doing this, you stand to gain a deeper understanding of your current employee experience and therefore have the opportunity to improve your CX score. And just like your customer experience map, you should take the following components into account when creating the employee experience journey: Employee segments Employee personas — and the journey per each persona Employee insights Stages of the employee experience Once you’ve created your employee map, you’ll need to identify potential soft spots and bottlenecks in production. We recommend using a simple survey — however, rather than focusing on overall employee satisfaction, you’ll need to ascertain the effectiveness of employee processes and resources. For example, include questions such as: What resources do you use on a regular basis? Do you find these resources helpful? Iterate your answer on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most helpful). Do you wish you had different or additional resources (e.g., software, team members and so forth)? What headwinds do you encounter the most (e.g., Too many custom requests, not enough time, stiff software, and so forth)? And so on. This level of detailed information can help you bridge the gap between non-engaged and engaged employees, which leads us to our next section. Empower your employees with brand templating Everyone in your organization is a content creator. From the sales team to channel partners, it’s the small, everyday pieces of content these teams rely on to acquire and retain customers. But traditional creative processes aren’t built for the small content updates necessary to personalize and localize content to a specific customer while maintaining brand consistency. So, what's a CMO to do? Lean on brand templating. Brand templating empowers your employees to create the type of content your customers expect — without encountering bottlenecks or having to download hard-to-use software. Brand templating platforms such as Lucidpress ensures that everyone across your organization creates professional on-brand content quickly based on customer experience insights. Not only that, but brand templating improves your creative team’s productivity and engagement by reducing errant content and editing requests. How to leverage CX technology Technology is your friend. And technology makes it easy to apply the five principles of content experience to your customer experience strategy — as well as your employee experience. There are a few specific reasons how and why you can optimize it to fit your company best: Eliminate silos The customer experience is extremely interconnected, which is why you need to eliminate silos within the content production process, as well as between teams and roles. This can look like a streamlined, methodical content production process. Or it can look like a brand asset or content hub. Leverage marketing automation for content delivery. There are a few ways you can achieve automation for delivery: personalization for delivery, delivery for delivery and timeliness for delivery. For personalization, you can easily auto-populate important pieces of information such as names, addresses and other details without having to retrace your steps or type out the same information time and time again. For delivery, you can automate where, how and to whom you send information. So unless you feel like clicking “send” on every interaction, you don’t have to. Marketing automation tools, such as Marketo, Hubspot, Salesforce, and more, automate your delivery needs — and your content gets sent to the right places and people at the right time. For timeliness, you can automate when you send personalized marketing collateral, empowering you to send out content that’s both timely and relevant to where a person is at in the customer journey. Use brand monitoring and analytics tools to inform content creation. Informed content is effective content. And effective content reflects the customer experience. To create informed, customer-centric content, leverage brand monitoring and analytical tools to your advantage. For example: Google Analytics Facebook Analytics Hootsuite or other social listening tools Google Alerts Quizzes Social response tools CRM Customer Support System Both veins offer deep insight into your brand health and help you bridge the gap between content that resonates and converts. Not only that, these tools empower you with timely content relative to where someone is at in the customer journey.
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Round 1 Design
Final Review
Off-brand content often has myriad repercussions. It affects your reputation, visibility and effectiveness — all of which dampen the overall content experience, incite customer churn and diminish your brand standing. Alternatively, user- and brand-centric resources, such as Lucidpress, can help you tangibly navigate the obstacles that off-brand, inconsistent content creates. In this section, you’ll find two case study examples that highlight two different brands’ need for consistent content creation and the impact brand templating had on the overall customer experience. Brand inconsistency is a frustrating experience. Because, what do you do when the very logo and colors that make up your brand are misused on a daily basis? Mary Cox, Marketing Director of Reinhart, turned to Lucidpress. Relieved she no longer had to play the role of brand police, Mary was amazed to find both brand management and consistent customer experience could be so easy. About Reinhart Real Estate is a 46-year-old real estate company headquartered in Ann Arbor, MI and a part of the Real Estate One Family of Companies — the 8th largest brokerage in the US. Features they love Lockable templates The ability to prevent agents and brokers from creating off-brand content, in turn creating a more consistent experience for their prospective clients. Brand assets All Reinhart brand files and colors, in one easy location. Collaboration The ease of working in the cloud instead of long email chains. Interactive documents Creating listing presentations and other documents with embedded videos and image slideshows. Challenge With dozens of agents and brokers dotting the greater Ann Arbor area, Mary Cox (Marketing Director) found it difficult to keep an eye on the Reinhart brand and thus maintain consistency between marketing touchpoints. The very logo, colors, and imagery that encapsulated the essence of Reinhart’s brand were being distorted and misrepresented, making it difficult to maintain a premium and dependable content experience for Reinhart customers. From Publisher to PowerPoint to InDesign, designs were all over the board, which meant the Reinhart brand was as well — in turn negatively impacting Reinhart’s reputation and customer’s opinion too. Solution It wasn’t until Mary signed up for a free Lucidpress account and started poking around the editor that she realized she may have found just the solution Reinhart needed for maximum brand consistency no matter where their customers were at in their journey. The simplicity of the drag-and-drop platform, accessibility for any and all team members, and speed at which she could create and share templates were enough reasons for Mary to implement the tool to the rest of her team. Results The end of a brand identity crisis Consistency is key — consistent brand presentation gave Reinhart the visibility and professional content experience their customers expect. And in the words of Mary, “Some agents didn’t feel it was necessary to include the Reinhart logo on their content. But now that we can lock down our brand assets on the templates, agents and brokers can’t accidentally mess things up somehow." 320 hours of work saved per week Admins and agents alike agreed that Lucidpress saves them about 2 hours of work per week. With 160 Reinhart admins and agents using Lucidpress, that’s 320 hours of work saved per week — or 16,640 hours saved per year! Streamlined communication Prior to Lucidpress, major template edits required either a series of emails back and forth, a conversation over the phone, or a physical visit. Now Mary can simply leave a comment or tweak a layout for agents and brokers in a matter of minutes. Happy agents, happy business. Reinhart is not only in the business of keeping their customers happy, but their agents too. When agents are provided the resources and tools they need, Reinhart is more likely to retain their best employees and have an advantage over the competition. D1 Training reaped both the benefits and struggles of a rapidly growing franchise. With 25+ locations around the country, scaling localized and personalized content was proving itself quite the obstacle. And to that end, it was even more difficult to keep content on-brand. See how Lucidpress helped them lock down their brand for a consistent content experience while still staying “hands-off” with their franchisees. About Previously playing fullback for Peyton Manning, Will Bartholomew founded D1 Training as a boutique fitness franchise focused on training athletes from the scholastic level all the way up to professional athletes. Features they love Locking variation Mike Abramson, President of D1, says “I love that you can lock a form or an image — whether you lock content, location, font size, etc. — so that franchisees still have the freedom to play without putting a dent in the content experience by straying outside the brand guidelines. Grab-and-go templates Franchisees simply get their login, all the templates are preloaded into the system. From there, they can select one, personalize it based on location and marketing needs, and they’re done. All without having to go to the corporate design team for help. Challenge With 25+ locations around the country, D1 Training started to experience the same issue many growing franchises face: brand consistency. Lacking in design experience but eager to get marketing materials out, franchisees were creating flyers and posters all on their own. They’d even resort to hiring third party designers wholly unfamiliar with D1’s brand standards. Madelyn Reynolds, Communications Officer, said: “We were letting franchisees use whatever tool they wanted to create materials and we had no control over what they were pushing out.” With no design system set in place, D1’s fonts, colors, and even the logo itself weren’t staying consistent — which takes a toll on any brand. Solution Mike Abramson, President of D1 Training, was strolling the aisles of the International Franchise Association exhibit hall when he stumbled across the Lucidpress booth. The ability to implement a system-wide brand templating tool piqued his interest. “I saw that Lucidpress would allow us to design marketing materials, lock down the brand, make sure the brand standard is followed, then simply share it out for franchisees to update for their community. While some design tools we had been using were great for making ‘cool images’, Lucidpress was the best and the only platform we thought made sense to use system-wide.” Madelyn was on board too. She set up a webinar to showcase the new platform to all of D1’s franchisees, resulting in the highest attended webinar in D1 history. Feedback from the franchisees was positive. Madelyn said, “Our franchisees have been looking for something like this. When you’re a franchisee, you’re not necessarily a designer or marketer, so sometimes it’s intimidating for them to start this business. They’ve been waiting for a solution like Lucidpress.” Once Lucidpress was implemented, Madelyn started using the product for both external and internal purposes. Event flyers, email campaigns, Facebook headers, class schedules — the list goes on. Her team created a library of templates, locked down the D1 branded elements, and let franchisees use their own creativity to fill in the rest. Results Localized content at scale D1 franchisees can create and print marketing materials as soon as they need them. Instead of having to do emails back and forth with the corporate team, they can take care of their needs as they come up. Brand locked down From colors and logos to even the positioning of text, D1 was able to protect its brand image without taking away the creative freedom of its franchisees. Streamlined marketing “I can log in to Lucidpress, edit an image quickly, export it, and put it into an email. I don’t have to sit there and fiddle with it. It’s just easy to use.” — Madelyn Reynolds, Communications Officer
Case studies
Industry: Real Estate Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Industry: Fitness franchise Location: Franklin, TN
In the content experience, everything ladders up to something — each touchpoint impacts the other and vice versa. Design impacts content and content impacts design, while content and design together affect the entire customer experience, hence why consistency at every touchpoint (and therefore the collateral created) is critical to ensure and propel a successful customer experience. Brands seeking a fruitful content experience strategy must learn to rely on transactional and experiential metrics. Transactional and experiential metrics are unique data allies. Merging quantitative and qualitative data sets offers diverse, actionable insights for immediate implementation and usage. Transactional metrics Form fills Leads Demos scheduled Campaign insights (impact and ROI) Traffic (to site and/or desired outcome) Pageviews Bounce rate Experiential metrics Referrals Shares Engagement — volume, frequency, and depth Business outcomes Value of conversions Consumption — patterns, indicators, or intent All that said, you’re likely already leveraging transactional and experiential metrics; you simply need to add a few more and address some outstanding queries. So when assessing your current metrics’ effectiveness, keep in mind the following: What is your current and/or existing funnel? How do your customers currently consume content? What channels are your strongest — for intent, conversion, or engagement? What next steps do your customers take? What content experiences feel the most authentic and offer the most value to your customers? What content experiences bring the most value? Everything trickles down into something. In order to have memorable content experiences, the content must reflect the customer. And in order to create memorable content experiences for your customers, you need to have engaged, empowered and informed employees creating the content. To learn more about how Lucidpress can empower your teams to create a cohesive, personalized content experience, check out our business solutions page.
How to measure the impact of CX
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