Delivering Customer Experience in Media & Entertainment

According to a study by Temkin Group, a moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.

Customers are paying more attention to experience than ever, and the role of customer experience (CX) professionals is inevitable in the current scenario. They are required to deliver only the best defining customer experience. As technology evolves, it is rapidly pushing the bar higher for more cognitive user interactions and perfect usability. With the developments in the industry, achieving a CX that exceeds the customers’ expectations is becoming increasingly challenging. Ease, speed, and accuracy helps you keep your customers loyal for the long haul.

Before pondering why customer experience is mission critical, let’s start from the beginning and define what customer experience is.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is the combined engagements a customer has with your business. It looks at the lifecycle of the customer and mapping every touchpoint the customer has with you. It highlights where you’re delivering an exceptional experience, building loyalty and advocacy. And where you’re delivering a poor experience, driving your customers to competitors. Customer service is transactional, and it occurs at a specific moment in time and solves a particular problem.

Customer experience, meanwhile, is about showing up for the customer when and where they need you, with ease and consistency on their part. And it’s about making sure every interaction with the company is memorable and meaningful. It’s not transactional — it’s relational.

Who Oversees Customer Experience?

In the past, responsibility for the customer experience has typically been divvied up among customer support, product, and other departments. Rarely has the responsibility rested squarely on one department, which means the authority to ensure top-notch CX throughout every phase of the funnel has been spread too thin. The customers being targeted with improved CX—in the entire lifecycle of awareness, intention, desire, action, and advocacy—are all potential customers. CX must be optimized for the prospect, audience, and influencer, as Gartner emphasizes.

An overarching view on CX reveals that it best fits under the umbrella of your marketing department, which is why the marketing department heavily controls the majority of the customer experience budget.

Why is Customer Experience Important?

So, why is everyone focusing on customer experience suddenly? Offering great service has always been quintessential, but is that what is really going to make a difference for your brand? The answer is a “Yes”.

Your competition is working closely with your audience and are more accessible to your customers, learning where they hang out and how to ease their pain points. Meanwhile, there has been a customer-facing shift—they are now self-empowered, educating themselves thoroughly before each purchase decision, engaging your brand via whichever channel they deem fit and expecting excellent service. This has disarmed the product battlefield and opened a new ground for you to conquer to win and keep customers: the customer experience.

Branded, personalized moments at every point of customer engagement are what market leaders are seeking. The gap must be closed between customer demand and what brands are delivering.

Here are quick tips for improving your customer experience strategy in Media & Entertainment

The media and entertainment industry has been undergoing significant transformations. Total customer experience management investment in this sector is estimated to be between US$2.5-3 billion. Traditional players focused on live events and attendance have witnessed decreasing returns, leading to business model changes. 

Streaming content usage has seen incredible expansion due to the pandemic, likely becoming crucial to ongoing media and entertainment success. A PWC prediction indicates that streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) will show an impressive compound annual growth rate of 10.6% until 2025, turning into an $81.3 billion industry at that time. So, delivering customer experience in the media and entertainment industry is essential. Here are some customer experience tips that will help you to do better:

1. Sport a User-Centered Design

This is the first stage of your customer experience. You can erase the need for other fixes along the journey by ensuring that your website, product, or service is intuitively built to cater to your users’ expectations and needs.

You need to hire talent who can stay connected with the user behavior, and having a smart design is only one fraction of this equation. Perhaps even more importantly, you need to test rigorously, analyze, adapt, and then test again. A/B testing is a brilliant approach for configuring the best marketing strategies for your business and is also an incredibly intuitive method for testing your CX.

User-centered design is important for learning about your customers’ needs and wants. This kind of knowledge helps you better cater to the consumer through marketing strategies and, of course, provide optimal customer experience.

2. Offer Personalized Engagements

It’s true that sometimes, personalization isn’t crucial. Some engagements are general and don’t require the extra finesse of personalized content. However, when personalization matters, it really matters.

This is important throughout the entire funnel. If your top-funnel visitors have to dig to find relevant information on your website, you are creating more effort and driving a huge wedge between you and them, especially considering that your competition is likely investing in these top-funnel, personalized experiences.

By the same token, once your prospects have become paying customers, know that any query you answer must be personalized. Don’t neglect your valued customers by displaying information that is geographically and contextually irrelevant to their account, needs, or past experiences with you. Seek out an automated solution that easily enables you to create a personalized experience for your customers.

3. Provide Clear Paths to Resolution

Not every customer engagement with your brand will be cut ‘n dry. Sometimes technology cannot satisfy your customers, and a human touch is required for more urgent issues. When the path to resolution is anything but a seamless straight line, it adds effort to the customer journey and puts a damper on the customer experience.

Re-channeling should be intelligent and immediate. If the first engagement is with a dynamic contact center or other self-service platform, then escalation to phone, chat, or email should be easy and targeted to the right agent with the right skill set.

Having a clear picture of your customer’s needs is a positive side effect of knowing your target audience. Naturally, the course of your customer intel will evolve as your company tests and grows. However, your initial target audience will tell you a lot about the genre of queries you may receive, and it’s wise to cater the design and CX accordingly. This is a customer’s dream—but it unfortunately does not occur enough.

4. Don’t Forget to Remember Thy Customers

If you want to knock your customers’ socks off, then make them tell their story only once. Throughout the escalation process, each agent should have the full customer story from every previous customer engagement. They also must show a high regard for customers’ time by referencing this information to speed up resolution.

Remembering your customers is a process that harkens back to gathering and analyzing the details of your target audience through market research. Assuming that your company is not the first service they’ve used within your industry, learn the defaults of the previous companies they worked with and use these shortcomings to better your own service and hone your strengths in a highly saturated marketplace.

If a customer is engaging with you because of a problem, question, wrong service, or faulty product, they are probably not feeling much like a beam of sunshine. Having to revisit and explain the issue over and over will make their mood nosedive even more. Confidence in your brand will decrease, as it shows a lack of care and indicates antiquated technology where your CRM is concerned. Show up for your customers and know what they want before they have to ask… again.

5. Properly Sync Social

Mobile customer service is in the spotlight lately, and your customers often defer to social channels when seeking resolution via mobile devices. Americans spend an average of 37 minutes daily on social media, which is more time spent than on any other internet activity, including email, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s almost impossible to offer the kind of always-by-your-side support across all social media platforms that is necessary to pacify and even delight your customers.

If you have noticed unresolved questions, comments, and tweets on your social channels, or if your CRM is not syncing and recording these highly valuable customer engagements on social media, it’s time to invest in a real solution.

Social Customer Service platforms such as Conversocial will put your mind and customer experience at ease. It’s the era of the customer, and they’re calling the shots. When they pull the trigger on social media, you need to be there with the answers they need.

6. Connecting with customers in a new way

Recent behavior patterns suggest that consumers are looking for new sources of entertainment and information, spurred on by increased time spent at home. While some households find price tags attached to streaming subscriptions too high, others cancel their subscriptions as it is a surprisingly simple process. This has resulted in fierce competition among traditional media giants as they launch their streaming services to capture viewers' attention and money. The habits formed during the past year of restrictions will likely continue, with an additional desire for public gatherings and live events.

7. Media and Entertainment Needs Better Customer Experience to Retain Audiences

Media and entertainment providers must equip themselves with new skills and technologies that make it easy to deliver the highly curated, personalized client experiences consumers expect. There is growing competition among businesses for insights from consumer data to create these tailored experiences. AI and predictive modelling are increasingly essential for optimizing the customer experience, refining content, and maximizing products and services. According to a Salesforce/Harvard Business Review white paper, media companies must invest in this technology to stay competitive.

8. Providing Exceptional Customer Service At The Right Cost

In the rapidly evolving landscape of 5G and video-on-demand services, cost pressures are mounting for industry providers. Still, customers expect a superior experience. Balancing these factors is a top priority. Customer service operations already deal with numerous incoming calls, emails, and contacts regarding services, contract changes, and technical issues. As new products and services arise, so do more complex customer journeys that require comprehensive onboarding processes and thorough education. 

Automated IVR systems, chatbots, digital forms, and FAQs provide essential customer care solutions. However, as one Media & Entertainment executive pointed out in an interview, "pseudo AI" isn't very effective. Clearly, these self-service solutions need improvement if companies are to attain optimal customer satisfaction.

9. Keep Data Secure

Organizational and customer data security is essential to support the confidence of Media & Entertainment customers. According to McKinsey & Co., there is a lack of consumer trust in the ability of companies within this industry to protect private data, with telecommunications firms just barely ranking above them in terms of trustworthiness. Businesses in this sector must proactively secure their customers' data.

According to recent studies, 90% of consumers are unwilling to work with companies that do not protect their data effectively. With the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting increase in digitalization and cybercrime activity, privacy concerns have also grown exponentially. As a result, businesses now need to rely on cloud-based technologies and API-interconnected platforms to help them stay more agile and innovative. Unfortunately, this also means that our systems become progressively vulnerable as they come into contact with multiple devices, applications, and data sources beyond our official security perimeter. Accordingly, achieving a balance between sufficient identification verification and authentication while protecting against malicious activities is becoming increasingly difficult.

10. Services and Features

Being an industry player for more years than its competitors, AWS has evolved its offerings to include more services. And they are by far the most functionality-rich in the industry, thanks to the robust experience. Amazon provides robust and comprehensive AWS media services, software, and appliances to ensure seamless digital content creation, transformation, and delivery. Customers can create captivating and immersive client experiences featuring high-quality visuals while operating efficiently by utilising pay-as-you-go Media Services and advanced video processing appliances.

Start Improving Your Customer Experience Strategy Now

In customer service and in marketing, communicating with your customer means anticipating their wants, needs, and problems even before they arise. In 2019 and beyond, the battle will not be won on the price page or product features, but rather on the entirety of your customer experience.

Ready to start improving your customer experience strategy? Determine which areas of your business are key for your brand to make a positive impression on your customers. Talk to your customers and your employees. And get buy-in from leadership. Those actions will help guide you down the path to delivering a great customer experience.

And we can help you do just that. We work with brands to determine what your customers really want, where you’re exceeding those expectations, and where you may be falling short. We’ll evaluate your customer experience versus your key competitors and determine where you can create intersections that delight your customers and turn them into advocates on your behalf. We’ll investigate your offline and online customer journey and reputation on review sites and determine where you can improve where, how, and how fast. Ready to discuss about your customer experience strategy? Shoot your queries to marketing@agilisium.com.

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