Customer Experience (CX) is often seen as one of the most important ways of tracking how well a brand is presenting itself to the customer. This covers everything, from offline touchpoints to the vital digital touchpoints provided through your marketing. If the customer has you in mind - they are developing their personal experience of your brand. However - we've been through a lot as a global marketing community in the past five years, and a lot has changed. Let's go through a quick sense-check.
Great Expectations
In 2020 and 2021, consumers - including parents, children, and grandparents, were forcibly exposed to companies with advanced digital ecosystems. Even businesses that started "on the back foot" in the pandemic were still catching up by 2021. Hubspot's Annual State of Service reported that customer expectations had already shot up 90% and that 52% of companies were finding this hard to keep up with. Put simply; two years ago customers became more advanced.
It makes sense if you think about the services we were all locked in our houses with. Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and Zoom - these were some of the world's most digitally advanced experiences and they immediately became rooted in our everyday lives. Uber, DoorDash, Deliveroo and their competitors have also come to provide intensely advanced e-commerce experiences, and even our social media apps, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, WeChat and Whatsapp continue to make their earlier iterations look like pale shadows of a distant past. Even though your school isn't providing the same services as these brands - your customers, i.e. your parents have come to expect great accessibility, usability, and interaction.
Personalisation & the Power of Data
The good news is that so much can be achieved through the personalisation of web experiences. 90% of marketers say personalisation makes businesses more profitable, and according to Statista, 97% of their surveyed companies deliver some form of personalisation in their marketing. By understanding what content users visit and interact with, we can build out dynamic and customised content to drive engagement and help you meet their needs.
The bad news is Segment found that around half of consumers don't trust brands to be responsible for their data. The other bad news is that reportedly 89% of businesses are investing in personalisation in 2024, so this is only going to become a more challenging, and complex space.
AI and the CX Rocket
Let’s not forget the other huge development in the marketing space - AI is having a dramatic impact in this area too.
One of the key areas this is taking place is in the gathering of data, and predictive analytics, and the high-value recommendations that come from this. By utilising the behavioural data we can gather through websites, we are reaching new conclusions on the best way to approach people as humans, with more immersive conversations and experiences.
This will have a huge impact on the way people make emotional choices - such as what school they want their children to go to, and ties directly into the new global research by KANTAR, which proves a link between positive touchpoint experiences over time and strong brand equity.
The irony should not be lost on us, that AI is helping us to deliver more human approaches to each other than without - but therein lies an important truth too, along with the increased availability of AI, is the increase in availability of our people.
The Need for Specialism
As vital marketing tools become more sophisticated, the rising desire for one tool to cover all bases becomes particularly attractive to Schools (or other businesses) looking to reduce their overheads. Unfortunately, these tools will never be specialised for schools, nor will they be designed to drive admissions in the same way. We know for instance, that deciding on a school is a highly emotional choice - which requires a detailed, and in-depth admissions experience to give the parent every chance to connect to your school's brand.
This is precisely why UBIQ is dedicated to providing Schools with websites that are not just visually stunning but also with the technology to understand parents in their own unique contexts. As your website grows, so does your knowledge of your audience, and so does your ability to tailor admissions contact approaches, touchpoints and that all-important CX journey.
