When you think of CX you think of the experience a person is having when buying a car, clothes or a new home. However, what if this person is buying a toy? Moreover what if this person is 5 and not 50? 

Today’s blog will shed a light on an area of Customer Experience that perhaps is not as prominent as others. Toy stores, children’s museums, candy, comic book or game shops all target children. While adults will make purchases in these stores, customer experience needs to take into account that children now are able to make their own purchasing decisions and choose between different brands as well as largely influencing their guardians. 

Children becoming consumers

Not long ago children were considered consumers of the future. Any advertising of products that would ultimately be used by children, was directed towards their parents or guardians. Children, even when they received money, were only considered as ‘savers’. 

Their parents gave them pocket money that was to be saved up for some bigger purchase later on or to teach them financial responsibility. This resulted in children buying 10 cent candy and as such, being disregarded as a valuable customer. 

However, with the baby boom, came the realisation that all these children, who spend 10 cents, add up. Marketers and business owners began understanding that children – even though they wouldn’t be making huge purchases, make a difference.

As well as this James U. McNeal states in his article that, “Kids are marching toward adulthood at a much brisker pace than they used to and are wanting more mature things to go with this accelerated growth.” Parents want their kids to become financially responsible and therefore are giving their children opportunities to become consumers from an early age. 

NRF (National Retail Federation) concluded in a study that 90% of parents admitted that children influence their purchase decisions. On top of that, the most important decision that children influence is the choice of the brand. 

Chances are, that even if children are not the direct target audience, they will influence your potential customers (ie. their parents or guardians).

Children as Target Audience – What to think about? 

If your target audience are children, ensure that you do the same amount of research into what they need as you would with a specific adult group. 

Shawn McCoy, VP of Business Development, from JRA, lists core design philosophies that he uses when designing the experience in children’s museums. 

Children’s Museum Design Philosophies

• Provide familiar, inviting, and fun physical context
• Let the child be the hero
• Assist the child in facing the world around them
• Introduce the child to the world beyond them
• Incorporate challenge and reward
• Accommodate various personalities, learning styles, and attention spans
• Provide experiences that children and caregivers can enjoy together

Many if not all of these points can be directly applied to customer experience strategies for any target audience. However, it’s immensely important to ensure they are thought of when designing for children. 

For example, “Let the child be the hero”, pretty obvious. One of the most important aspects of CX is to keep the customer at the centre of all decisions – this can be easily translated to – the customer is the most important. 

The customer is always supposed to be the main protagonist of the story, you as a business are merely there to help them achieve their goal. 

When you adapt this to a child, you give your business a chance to gain the best advocate ever known. Remember: If a child has a positive experience (no matter how small) they will tell everyone and they will have a stronger influence over their guardians/ parents decisions later on. 

A good example of a company who successfully perfected their CX strategy to their target market (kids) is Build-A-Bear. 

Their in store experience of creating a child’s own bear is based on the ideology that they ‘don’t sell products, they sell smiles’. Even if the parent doesn’t have enough money to purchase a bear, the company offers the children a sticker sheet or a pin. 

This is combined with their website Bearville.com where children can create virtual versions of themselves and their animals and interact with each other online. On top of this they introduced ‘Bear University’ where kids can learn how to manage money amongst other subjects. 

Build-A-Bear also brilliantly executes a point from the list, ‘Assist the child in facing the world around them’. 

Children can be distracted easily, they can forget things – let’s face it – they are not the most responsible beings. To combat this the company attached a unique barcode inside of each bear when it’s made. The bear is given a ‘birth certificate’ which can be used to contact the owner. Found bears can be returned to the store and through this system reunited with the child. “More than 6,000 lost animals have been reunited with their owners over 16 years.”

Children as Influencers – Don’t forget about them

Teens and young adults increasingly support companies that they trust. The decision of whether a teenager trusts your company will be based on what you promise, and what the teenager expects you then to deliver. More and more, trust is based on sustainability and looking after our planet. If profit is your only purpose in business you’re going to have a tough time with the Generation Z or post millennial generation!

It’s also very easy to forget about the customers that don’t actually make any purchase or spend any money. However, as a business owner you need to remember that they do in fact have the power to influence what their parents buy as well as the power to make purchases themselves. 

A good example of this is in the tourism industry. If you’ve ever been on a plane, you know how difficult it is for the mothers and their babies to travel. Children are famous for being very impatient. So what if an airline adjusted their service to accommodate for this? CathayPacific provides a ‘children’s fun-pack’ to 3-6 year olds to entertain them during the flight. It’s something very simple but does make a difference. 

“Children not only influence the purchase of products that are directly consumed only by them, but a much wider range of products for use by the entire family” Children are increasingly becoming major influencers of parents’ decisions, including purchasing choices. 

Therefore, as a brand owner you should always have in mind your target audience. If they include parents, guardians or children you need to take the above into consideration, at every stage of designing your CX Strategy. 

If you would like to learn more about Customer Experience and how to achieve CX Excellence enrol in our Professional Diploma or Certificate today.

CX for B2B is very similar as for B2C relationships. In B2B, although you might be selling to another company rather than an individual consumer, you need to apply the same emotional drivers and fundamentals for both.  All the key CX principles apply; customer loyalty, retention and advocacy.

What Is Business-to-Business (B2B)?

Business-to-business (B2B) is a form of transaction between businesses, such as one involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer. Business-to- business refers to business that is conducted between companies, rather than between a company and individual consumer. It is extremely important to understand this in particular in the B2B business model, where purchasers may not be the users of the products and services sold to them.

Key characteristics of Business-to-Business include:

B2B transactions tend to happen in the supply chain.

No single person is responsible for everything. In B2B, you typically deal with more people than a B2C relationship. The more people that are involved create a bigger opportunity to delight or a bigger risk of disappointing more stakeholders. Everyone you disappoint could influence a key decision maker (if they are not one themselves) increasing your risk of churn or customer leakage from a negative customer experience.  So think of all your contacts as potential advocates!

B2B buyer journeys involve longer sales cycles and multiple decision makers.

Buyer journeys entail a broader range of activities and customer touch-points that stretch across different departments between and within the businesses involved. This makes the process of mapping the customer journey as well as understanding the experiences customers have along that journey far more complex and difficult to grasp.

Differences in customers.

In most B2B situations, you have customers who matter more to you than others. There are two main reasons for this. The obvious one is revenue. A typical Pareto curve means that 20% of your customers may bring 80% of your revenue. The 20% need to be treated differently from the 80%. 

The second reason is that they are the pilot customer for a new product or service. You need them to be particularly happy with you, so they are willing to recommend the new product or service to others

Relationships with both positions and individuals matter and also require constant attention.

Large customer organisations are dynamic. Their structures can change, and people move from one position to another as they develop their careers. In B2B, experiences between customers and businesses can last for significant periods of time. The customer lifetime value is often greater, meaning there is more at stake. It takes time to know whether you are improving things. When selling to businesses, it takes much more time to know whether customer experience improvements are helping or hurting. 

Your success matters to your customers.

Most of your customers want you to be successful. Think about the procurement people, for example. In their ideal world, they want as many companies as possible – including yours – to compete to offer products and services at the lowest possible price. Others want to see as many different innovations as possible, believing that your innovation will be to their competitive advantage. If you have already sold them something, your continued financial survival is important to their belief that you will be able to support and improve your product or service. 

In B2B angry customers may stay with you. 

Customer satisfaction is harder to understand when selling to companies. If the jet engine supplied by a company to be attached to the airframe manufactured by a different company suffers a failure, then the consequences are felt by the airline who has to deal with dissatisfied passengers. There is a great deal of inertia in some B2B relationships that prevents walking away from purchasing again, and so large amounts of resources are devoted to fixing the issue, and the relationship, so it never happens again. 

Discerning buying patterns is more difficult in B2B. 

For example, a company may purchase in large quantities to satisfy an expanding business, and that may fulfil the need for several years. Then, however, rather than simply expanding the volume with its current provider, the company starts shopping around, reconsidering other vendors to see what has changed in the marketplace since the last time the company was in the market for this type of product.

B2B buyers are behaving like consumers more than ever before. For B2B CX to be successful, the effort must be organisation wide. Sales, marketing, customer support, product management, quality assurance, and so on, must come together. Organisations need to understand the value that CX Excellence can deliver across the entire customer journey and identify specific areas where effort will drive business value.

The information in this article was extracted from an article by Jeff Sheehan, Business Model Effect on Customer Experience Management.

If you would like to learn more about CX and how to achieve CX Excellence enrol in our Professional Diploma or Certificate courses today!

The CX Academy Framework helps organisations deliver CX Excellence. If you are trying to figure our how your company can improve the CX strategy, the template below can easily identify  where there is room for improvement. 

Below you will see key behaviours associated with each of the Six Emotional Drivers. For each behaviour think about your own company and rate how embedded they are – do they behave like this all the time, most of the time, occasionally or never. Based on your scores you can see where you need to focus and what you need to do. 

Score each of the behaviours:

3 = We behave like this with customers all of the time

2 = We behave like this with customers most of the time

1 = We behave like this with customers occasionally

0 = We never behave like this with customers

Being trustworthy in everything you do for customers

Treating customers as individuals, like human beings

Making it easy and effortless for customers to do business

Understanding customers circumstances and showing empathy

If you would like to get the full CX Framework Benchmarking Template Sheet along with actions to take depending on your score email kamila@thecxacademy.org

Investing in Customer Experience should seem like an obvious action to take, yet so many companies still don’t get it! The key challenges for the organisations are; wrong use of digital technologies, lack of human touch, inattentiveness to employee needs and a customers’ lower tolerance for failure. By investing in CX you will invest in all these aspects and many more. 

If you are wondering if you should take the leap, here are the 5 benefits of why you should invest in Customer Experience:

Increased retention

As the experience for your customers improve, while they’re using your product or service, they will become more inclined to stay with your business. By using The CX Framework you can build stronger emotional bonds with your customers. These bonds create deeper relationships between the customer and the company to deliver CX Excellence. Consequently the strong bond convinces customers to stay with your brand even if there are other cheaper alternatives.  

Research shows that 68% of customers who leave a company do so because they feel the company doesn’t care about them. At the heart of the relationship between a customer and a company is an emotional connection such as trust. If this emotional connection is lost then the relationship will break down.

Advocacy – new acquisition

Increased retention and the bond you build with your customers is ultimately leading to an outcome of customer advocacy. In today’s world it is harder and harder to get new customers through advertising. People either ignore ads because there are so many of them or refuse to believe them. 

When a company is recommended to someone by their relative, friend or work colleague, or they see a post on social media, people are generally more likely to consider interacting with the company themselves. Today your best marketing strategy is to create advocates for your brand – loyal customers who will recommend and often try to convince others that your brand is the best. 

Increased and repeated sales

This one has to convince you! In short: Loyal customers that stay with your service or product will be more likely to buy from you repeatedly and at a higher price. As Investopedia states, “Research shows that, over time, return customers tend to spend about 300% more than one-time buyers. Return customers would also likely trust your recommendations enough to buy your more expensive products or services.” 

By investing in CX you are directly investing in your business. The most important thing to remember is that your customers will literally pay for a good experience… and most of the time creating a good customer experience doesn’t take much effort. Once you truly start caring for your customers they will be more than happy to return the favour in the form of purchasing from you again and again. 

Improved Employee Experience

Happy customers = Happy staff, simple.

Staff who continuously deal with frustrated customers, can lose motivation and their mental health can easily deteriorate. This can cause them to want to leave the company faster than anticipated by you. Remember that every time an employee leaves, you have to employ another one to fill that gap, which takes time and effort and costs a lot more in the long run.

Mistakes will happen, but if you provide a general good experience for your customers, employee strain will reduce. Inevitably your staff will be more likely to stay with you for longer and will be more motivated to do their job well. As an employer you should always remember to recognise your staff for their achievements, and empower them to be able to solve customer queries efficiently. 

Increase Profitability

Ultimately, every business initiative should lead to increased profitability. CX is definitely one of these initiatives. By Investing in CX you allow your business to grow long term. Every positive experience your customers will have with your brand, will add to the factors above. They will be more likely to cross-buy, buy more often and at a higher price. They will recommend your company to others and as a result of having a positive experience they will help improve Employee Experience too. So naturally, if all these things happen your business will be growing and so will the shareholder value. 

The CX Academy Framework provides the means with which your business can succeed. 

If you want to learn more about how to utilise The CX Academy Framework enrol in our Professional Diploma or Certificate courses today!