This is the first part of a two-part article about best Customer Experience practices. Both the general part of the CX improvement and practices and individual cases by successful companies will be reviewed in this article.
The competition for customer retention and acquisition never stops between businesses. It is no longer sufficient to offer a quality product or a service and an affordable price to stand out in the bunch and prevent customer churn. Offering an exceptional Customer Experience (CX) is needed to stand out and be noticed among the competition.
By CX, it means the experience which is felt by the customer by buying a product off a certain brand or merely interacting with them. And offering an exceptional CX means to be focused on a customer, the product or service must offer a real value, and the product or service must be easy to find. Touchpoints are also important. They need to offer smooth and personalized communication between the brand and the customers.
A few ways of great CX examples will be presented in this and the next articles for you to learn from. In this article, we will present Coca-Cola's example of good CX practice.
The Coca Cola experience:
Coca-Cola launched its „Share a Coke“ campaign in 2011 in Australia with the phrase „Share a Coke with“, and added a random name on the wrapping. This prompted customers to find bottles with names they connected with and share the experiences online via social media along with #ShareaCoke hashtag attached to their photos.
The campaign turned out to be a huge success and it has expanded since then. A few years later, in 2018, Coca-Cola turned the name labels into removable stickers which could then be put on clothes, notebooks, mobile phones. Next in the line were „Share a Coke pop-up kiosks“ where customers could personalize their two free 250ml cans.
The result was an increase in sales for 4 consecutive months and a 2.5% boost in sales after a steady decline that has been going on for 10 years.
In this example, Coca-Cola offered a personalized and highly memorable experience for the customer which was until then just a simple activity of drinking a beverage. What also helped is that the people could share the experience which also added emotional connection.
So you can see that it is highly important to personalize the customer experience to make an emotional connection and make them feel like they are a part of something bigger and important.
This experience should always remind the customers when they interact with your brand and use your product or service how they feel. Customers who are emotionally engaged are much more likely to become loyal customers and will much more likely recommend your product or your service or your brand to their peers, friends, or family.
