If customer experience is important, it is time to take the online customer experience serious. While technologies enabling an increase of online customer interaction have been available for quite some time, now is the time for marketing managers to get their hands dirty

Marketing managers are faced with myriads of important challenges - most of which currently relate to increasing the customer experience. I am sure you agree that the customer experience is important in all channels. However as more and more customers take preference for the online channel and the resulting monetary value increases daily, now is the time to focus on tactics that will increase your customers’ online experience.

While it is obvious that marketing managers need to take the front seat when it comes to:

- Understanding  prospects’ (leads) behaviour and preferences;
- Understanding customer behaviour and preferences;
- Defining your online marketing metrics;
- Designing programs and tactical manoeuvres to increase the customer experience as well as continuously improving your critical few marketing objectives.

It is equally important for marketing managers to take charge when it comes to defining technology requirements and a phased implementation of same. If possible, do not leave this important task entirely to the IT department.

Defining the online experience
I am not going to go into the often told story about Amazon.com. In fact, I am sure you have heard it referenced quite often. But if you want to understand what the online experience can be all about - all you need to do is look to Amazon.com. Or other players who are relentlessly focusing on the individual customer experience, for example, utilizing powerful interaction and call to action attributes such as relevance, timing of offer, automated service and a strong recommendation system, along with ease of use come into mind. It is evident that you may not be able to use any or all of the principles behind the success of the Amazon.com’s of this world. But you do need to get into the thinking behind those successful principles. Namely;

- make it easy for the customer to buy products,
-don’t waste customers time by spamming the customer with irrelevant messages,
- learn from the individual customers behaviour, and use that knowledge to target relevant messages, offers and do your darnest to get the timing right.

Marketing technologies and marketing automation enables your success
As a customer lifecycle marketing automation specialist, it is of course obvious that I advocate for the utilization of marketing technologies to enable better customer experiences. And I am aware that in the past 5-7 years cost has been the primary obstacle for marketers not to effectively utilize marketing (automation) technologies.  In fact very few marketers have implemented tools for website optimization, inbound interaction management, web interaction optimization, campaign management, website visitor individualization, real-time and event based marketing etc.

But if you want to increase the online experience, that is going to have to change.

How you can utilize technology to increase the customer experience, and what you need to do in order to get to the next step, you can read about in the next issue of Return on Behavior Magazine.

This article was first published in Return on Behavior Magazine (TeleFaction)