Beyond marketing: Content Strategy for improving customer experience
Search results for Content Strategist roles on various job portals reveal a disconcerting truth. It is this: Content Strategy is widely understood to be Content Marketing Strategy. This perspective undermines the scope and power of content by limiting it to marketing. Who looks after the content needs of the lead-turned-customer? Who figures out the role of content in the customer journey? Where are the jobs for content strategy with respect to Customer Experience?
There's enough evidence to prove that something is amiss in the current state of affairs:
As per a 2018 PwC study, 54% of respondents in the US state that customer experience needs improvement in most companies.
The report adds that one in three consumers will walk away from a brand they love, after just one bad experience.
The same report further states that consumers are willing to pay up to a 16% price premium on products and services in exchange for great customer experience.
Content is a business asset. Content Strategy is the plan to generate, govern, and distribute this business asset while meeting the needs of the users. As User Experience is to Product, so Content Strategy is to an organization. In other words, Content Strategy drives your organization's User Experience. If organizations limit the content efforts to just marketing, the post-purchase experience is bound to be less than ideal. Here are some examples that I recently came across.
Amazon customer care
Amazon Prime customers are treated well. But a great experience with third party sellers isn't always assured – not necessarily because of compliance issues – but because of broken customer experience. This interaction, for instance, seems to be looped. The user can neither contact the seller, nor call an Amazon representative easily.
This case comes under the purview of User Experience Design. However, Content Strategy is part of User Experience even at the product level through its subset – Content Design. Check out Sarah Winters’ blog post about the same to know more. I admit that I do not have a view into the complexities of the product. However, a Content Strategist could have facilitated conversations across Sales and Product to see if such occurrences could be avoided. Moreover, they could have made a case for Content Design to address such instances in service and communication.
Zoomcar customer experience
Zoomcar's marketing and PR messages do not seem to be aligned with their service. Evidently, customers are turning to Twitter to air their grievances. With dysfunctional in-app customer support and no call-centres to reach out to, Zoomcar is putting its brand image at risk. A Content Strategist could have understood the business challenges, the PR strategy, figured out what to say to disgruntled customers, and then pre-empted their rage by proactively reaching out through email and in-app notifications.
PVR cinemas
I love PVR. But hey, if you really want your viewers to book, make it easy for them to do so. For example, I received an SMS prompting me to book tickets for 'Tenet' using a bonus voucher. Clicking on the link takes one to the PVR home page where a number of movies, including 'Tenet', are listed. To make use of the voucher code, one would either need to switch back and forth between applications to copy and paste, or memorize the darn string.
Why create such friction in the booking process? Why can't the link open a landing page for booking tickets for 'Tenet', with the voucher code pre-filled in the relevant field? This didn't happen because there was nobody connecting the dots across Marketing, Sales, and UX. Bring in the Content Strategist now!
Someone is doing it right – Myntra!
This is my personal experience, but I'm sure others would agree, that Myntra is a delight. Intuitive website navigation, on-point communication, relevant updates, and minimal friction in processes make it a great B2C organization. Clearly there's a 'content person’ (probably more than one considering the scale of operations!) in the mix of UX, email marketing, and customer engagement teams, who has got the pulse of the customer and is utilizing technology well to meet both business and user needs.
Disclaimer: This isn't a sponsored post! Just sharing my observations as a consumer and a practitioner of content strategy :) There must be many other organizations that grasp and employ the power of content for improving customer experience. Would love to cover them in another post sometime in the future.
Content isn't about words – it's building & maintaining relationships
The examples shared above are all about B2C experiences. I do not have access to B2B material to be able to showcase it :) That said, B2B communication is a lot more complex. A 2018 McKinsey study clearly states that "simplified interaction”– which means a better Content Strategy – has huge ramifications on customer experience and business benefits.
"We’ve seen companies substantially raise customer-satisfaction scores through significant improvements in operational performance (primarily by speeding up and simplifying interactions). These improvements can lower customer churn by 10 to 15 percent, increase the win rate of offers by 20 to 40 percent, and lower costs to serve by up to 50 percent."
- McKinsey: ‘To improve B2B customer experience, get the digital-analog balance right', 2018
Some of the benefits of viewing an organization's communication requirements through the lens of Content Strategy include:
Addressing the informational requirements of all users in a manner and time of their choice
Higher efficiency and productivity by employing technological solutions to make the content modular, and hence findable and reusable
Greater collaboration across disparate teams working towards a common goal leading to deeper insights for product or service development
Consistency in offerings and an unbroken Customer Experience across Marketing, Sales, Customer Care, Learning & Development, etc.
I often feel that the title 'Content Strategy', while apt, is not the best choice to describe this discipline. That's because 'content' is popularly understood to be a cluster of cheerful and promising words, which in turn are associated with Marketing. Content is how a business is articulated AND conducted. Hence, there needs to be greater focus on the role of Content beyond Marketing, to enable sustained business benefits and enduring customer satisfaction.