February 8th 2025

The 4 Must-Have Elements of Exceptional Customer Experience

A customer's experience with a brand trumps everything in the age of the empowered consumer. Jim Dicso, CEO of SundaySky explains how the best brands, like Apple and Netflix, compete and win with personalized customer engagement.

JetBlue, Amazon, Netflix and Apple – what do these companies have in common? These four brands are recognized for their customer-centric approaches to business and superior customer experiences.

With customer experience leaders like these generating 5.7 times the revenue growth over five years compared to laggards, it’s no wonder marketers and customer engagement professionals want to know what it is these companies are doing right.

How customers experience your brand trumps everything in today’s age of the empowered consumer. Customers dictate all aspects of their relationship with your brand, thanks to the emergence of mobile, social and web technologies. They have high expectations for engaging, valuable and relevant communications. When it comes to competing on experience, how can you differentiate your brand? Through personalized customer engagement. This is how the best in the business get every customer touch point right:

1. Make it personal and relevant CX professionals use personalization to drive great customer experiences. As discussed during the Forrester Customer Experience Forum, more than three-quarters of consumers have chosen, recommended or paid more for brands that personalize services or experiences. Understanding the person on the other side of an interaction is the most important aspect to getting customer experience right, according to Forrester analyst Andrew Hogan. Customers want to feel known and valued by the brand, and when this expectation is met, customers have positive feelings that contribute to their brand loyalty. A lot of Amazon’s success ties back to its recommendation engine that leverages user data to recommend the right product to the right person at the right moment.

2. Make it valuable and entertaining: It’s not enough to personalize a customer message just because you can. It must be entertaining in order to make the engagement more memorable to a customer and heighten his or her perception of the brand. The personalization must also serve a purpose; it must be based on data to answer and address the following questions:

  1. What is the customer trying to accomplish?
  2. Why?
  3. What is she doing in this moment?
  4. What is her goal?
  5. What next action should she take?

This provides value to the customer instead of just driving the next sale for the business. Personalization without real value to a customer’s journey is a waste of time. For example, Facebook’s personalized videos for celebrating birthdays and anniversaries are personalized, relevant and potentially entertaining. However, they could be more impactful if used for more action-driven purposes, like welcoming users back to the site with recaps of what’s new with their friends and with pages they follow, in order to get that user to engage with or react to said updates.

3. Make it available digitally everywhere: Consumers have high expectations of their experiences with brands, thanks to digital-first and social leaders like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix, which have set a high standard. The experience brands create for their customers on digital needs to match the experience offline, as well, and brands need to use digital channels to create emotional connections. When brands use digital methods to satisfy customers and spark feelings of value and gratitude, it creates much deeper loyalty than just fleeting moments of happiness and delight. Hilton is taking a page out of the customer experience leaders’ book and using digital channels in a traditionally human-assisted process with its digital check-in process that lets guests check in and select their room from a digital floor plan directly from their own computer, mobile device or tablet.

4. Make it rooted in the most compelling storytelling medium: There are thousands of stats about video and its value for brands, ranging from how much video content is out there and how much video content is consumed to how video impacts brand awareness and how video can measurably drive sales or reduce churn. Why is there such an intense focus on video? Because it combines the power of sight, sound and motion to create a captivating experience for the viewer that can be personal, relevant and entertaining. For example, when Atlantis Paradise Island used video instead of the usual text email to communicate with guests about their upcoming travel itineraries, it sparked excitement for the trip and resulted in increased revenue from guests adding more activities and reservations during their stays.

Personalized customer engagement works – but its success is amplified when it’s done through video and combines the above four elements. Companies like Apple and Netflix prove that exceptional customer experiences deliver real ROI and marked improvements in KPIs like customer loyalty and revenue growth . All brands – traditional and digital – need to learn from customer experience leaders and focus on delivering great experiences that can trigger the desired customer behaviors, whether that be more sales, fewer calls to the call center or greater customer advocacy.

src: martechadvisor.com