What is “Customer Experience”?
Customer Experience can mean many things to many people, often it’s misconstrued as a first impression. While first impressions are important, they don’t encompass the full customer experience. Here at Brickwork, we focus on a facet of customer experience intended to facilitate and fulfill a consumer’s wants and needs – from search, through discovery, and beyond. And over time Brickwork’s Store Pages solution has evolved into part of a brand’s local experience, especially when facilitating a transaction – a transformation of necessity for many thanks to the pandemic.
Customer Experience Challenges
The pandemic has highlighted the importance of an online-first attitude for brands and retailers in response to consumer behavior. Traditional customer experiences have been disrupted, and brands have responded to this shift in consumer behavior. Here’s what’s new:
- 74% of consumers report their experience with brands digitally (web / mobile) has changed
- 84% of consumers have used digital / web/ mobile channels more in 2020
- Globally, 40% of consumers report buying more online than they did before
For multi location brands with a strong technology foundation and without, the challenges they face when it comes to online customer experience at the local level are very similar, the key challenges being:
- Leveraging customer data for better local specific experiences
- Implementation and time-to-market of new technology
- Scaling personalization efforts
Why Local Customer Experience is Critical
78% of consumers are loyal to brands that understand them and what they want to achieve during brand interactions.
Brands and retailers understand this, that’s why brand marketers are devoting so much time and effort to digital ‘local’ experiences. When surveyed, brand marketers revealed insights that can constitute a trend. Marketers are focused on winning online local experiences by:
- Personalizing customer service (62%)
- Personalizing communications (49%)
- Creating more content for customer engagement (48%)
- Leveraging existing content in new ways (40%)
Interestingly enough, integrating existing technology with other solutions was a struggle for 40% of the marketers surveyed.
Store Pages as the digital front door for Local Experience
The data reinforces our own experience here at Brickwork, and the standout takeaway from our continuing work has been the ease of integrating our solution across a smorgasbord of technology environments, as well as types of retailers, and service providers. The one thing they have in common is the need for personalization that scales across the country, and across the globe.
Brickwork’s Store Pages platform has helped brands
1. Establish a strong technology foundation on our platform that meshes with their own.
2. Integrate customer data for personalized online experiences across markets and locations.
3. Leverage existing content in new ways so that it delivers value – not just content for content’s sake.
4. Automate personalized communications and customer service for accuracy and efficiency.
5. Sync multiple data sources to consolidate the number of platforms used.
6. Create a true omni-channel approach for brand locations beginning with store pages for online discovery tied to an call to action i.e. scheduling and /or events.
Personalization can help brands adapt, yet it must be done properly, with a strong purpose-built foundation, clear data policy, and consistent touchpoint application. Every brand and business is different - what might work for one may not be as effective for others. We leverage the right mix of our platform’s products and key features to strengthen the local customer experience and bring your marketing department’s vision to life.
Features & Capabilities of Brickwork Store Pages
Personalization is a great concept, but where most marketers struggle is execution. What exactly is personalization? How’s it done accurately and at scale? How is it managed? It really boils down to: Controlling an individual physical location’s basic information should be easy for multi-location businesses and brands -- but it’s not. It’s hard to maintain the different hours, services, and unique offers for each location from one central place, and to manage that effectively.
Brickwork Software’s Local SEO Store Landing Pages solution solves those challenges by making it easy to manage all of your unique store pages from a central dashboard – with robust user permissions so that the burden doesn’t have to fall on some poor marketer alone in your central HQ. Our Store Pages solution delivers on the promise of personalizing the online experience for each one of a brand’s physical locations – establishing the online portal for customer experience
Take a look at what’s possible
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Explore the possibilities and leverage our expertise to develop the branded path between online browsing and in-store purchasing which seamlessly facilitates your customer’s natural shopping behavior.