Customer expectations aren’t limited to product or service performance. A strong customer experience—positive or negative—is reinforced by contact with people throughout the organization and by effectively navigating change. The keys include:

• Using the right technology solutions. What is the experience of a customer who has to contact a member of the staff about a billing error? Fulfillment status? The whereabouts of a package that your system says was delivered but never arrived? Is your organization tracking sales to identify additional opportunities to do business with each client, or are you keeping data in silos that prevent the company from taking action that could increase each customer’s revenue potential? CRM (customer relationship management) solutions can help your company to answer those questions profitably, and many analytics packages (Google’s and Adobe’s among them) also support that goal with customizable features that are underutilized.
• Navigating marketing through change. It’s one thing to establish and communicate a strong brand message—and another thing entirely to preserve the essentials of that message in times of change. But when your company is moving to a new operating model, expanding to new vertical or geographic markets, or undertaking a merger that signals major changes in its mission, communications play a critical role in preserving customer relationships.
• Using tools and resources to manage customer expectations and optimize their experience. To transform prospect and customer engagement into a long-term, revenue generating strategy, you need to understand how to connect with your targets, build relationships, and nurture loyalty. This list of tools and resources from The Harvard Business Review, IBM, Wharton, and others can help you do just that.

In the end, the customer experience depends on human connections that give the customer a sense of receiving value and being valued. But today, our capacity for personal service is augmented by access to data. By optimizing the right tools and technology, you can create the optimal conditions for achieving long-term profitability and growth.

Read the Connections to Growth: Turning Outreach into Revenue guide to learn more about the technology and tools that can make your marketing work harder.