Immersive Customer Experiences Aren’t Just for Customers

Customer-relationship managers speak of training almost exclusively in the context of front-line employees. Yet your creative team, whether agency or in-house, is on the front lines as well. Their words, designs and images are often the first and most regular form of contact a customer has with your company.

Your creative team’s impact on customer relationships is heightened by the nature of loyalty marketing—marketing based on dialogue.

A successful loyalty strategy therefore requires that you immerse your creative team in every aspect of its design and implementation. To engage customers in relevant and continuing conversation, creatives must continually better their customer knowledge.

At the beginning of any loyalty marketing initiative, establish the program’s foundations and goals. Make sure everyone intimately understands not only the value proposition, but also how customers are expected to respond to it. Then, take the process a step further by submitting your creative team to customer “immersion therapy.” Here’s how:

Put creatives on the front lines—literally.
Require your creatives to sit in on call-center conversations once a month. Make them read e-mail and snail-mail correspondence. Induce this therapy at regular intervals so that the team can respond to evolving customer needs. Make the creative team accountable for this task and seek support for this customer-service therapy from senior management. It’s that important.

Plug creatives into the data feed. Customer data is the lifeblood of your loyalty-marketing strategy—and so it should be for the creative team. Transaction data, sales statistics, surveys, customer interviews—whatever data helps build a holistic portrait of your best customers is red meat for your creatives. Designers and copywriters look at the world a little differently than statisticians, and they just might derive insight from your customer file that the propeller-heads don’t immediately consider important. Though the translation from the statistical model to the art board can be painful, it’s important to share everything.

Perform a brand assessment.
In loyalty marketing, communications must be true to the customer while remaining true to the brand. You acquire customers in part because of your brand’s image, its market presence, its implicit promise and its equity. To abandon the brand in pursuit of offer relevance can cause a disconnect. Imagine Harley-Davidson sending emails about diapers and breastfeeding to the new parents in their customer files, and you’ll get the idea. Veering from the brand can erode relevance. Because brand assessment is critical to loyalty-marketing design, include the creative team in that assessment. By understanding brand expectations from the viewpoint of both the company and its customers, creatives can build brand relevance in copy, images and materials design.

Stabilize the team.
Building an experienced, dedicated creative team ensures that you don’t jar your customers with inconsistent messages delivered in incongruent voices. Try not to jostle the team with an ebb and flow of new faces and changing directives. By all means, challenge them with new blood and fresh approaches. But just as customer communications should sing in harmony at each customer touch point, so should your creative team members all sing the same tune.

At its essence, immersion therapy simply requires your creative team to understand and deliver on the customer experience. A strong, engaged creative team raised on a steady diet of training and customer data will be poised to help build profitable, sustainable customer relationships.

Meghan LaBonge is executive creative director of Direct Antidote.