In a market where we increasingly expect consumers to pay for content and where content shifts and is curated seamlessly across devices, the experience economy will increasingly shape the fortunes of media companies.
Content is king, but experience is the castle, if it crumbles the king is dead. Like many other industries today, media companies need to focus on customer experience.
New channels of distribution via the web and smartphones, tablets and laptops is resulting in new consumer behaviour that is turbo-charging many industry sectors. Banks, retailers, health funds, airlines, you name it, are capitalising on the consumer data flow by creating utility through digital experiences. They’re all investing heavily in understanding the customer journey and measuring benchmarking the experience and often employing teams charged with understanding and improving the customer experience.
Today, customer experience has become part of the lexicon of bank and supermarket executives – but I don’t see many media executives talking about it.
It’s important for the media sector because of the value delivered by these new distribution channels and touchpoints – but also because social media is making it so much easier for consumers to vent. If you have a bad experience with an app, clicking to buy, in chat – it’s so easy to rage with tens, hundreds or thousands of people within seconds simply by thumbing Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone.
Flying to Melbourne now is just as much a digital experience as it is to actually travel. I get an alert directly to my phone’s home screen about check-in, I get an estimated travel time to the airport, I’m updated about the gate when I arrive at security and once on-board I open a connected entertainment app to kill the 90-minute wait until I land. I found myself talking about my digital experience when flying recently to a colleague, it has given me time and efficiencies, it has anticipated my needs it has dramatically improved the experience of a fairly mundane activity.
For media organisations, the role of editorial and programming is rapidly changing in the face of the on-demand expectations of audiences. It’s not about the timing of a breaking story or the latest period thriller but rather how this is managed across platforms to maximise impact, sharing, linking, driving trial and subscriptions. Aussie media brands will benefit from more systematic approaches to understanding and measuring customer experience. It’s a highly competitive market after all, and increasingly dominated by global brands with deep pockets, and in the digital world a sub-optimal experience will trump great content every time.
We talk a good engagement game, but who’s accountable when things don’t live up to expectations and how is it measured? Sure, there are people in media companies optimising the subscription funnel, A/B testing and checking on the app ratings received in iTunes, but is the overall customer experience with particular media brands understood and mapped out?
Part of the reason for this lack of focus will be the complex and expensive architecture of legacy systems, the other is the business model – high volume, low value transactions. But now technology is making the economics of understanding and responding to customer feedback much cheaper. Media company data partnerships now also provide rich customer data and learnings to help make a great customer experience.
Here are a couple of key things to think about if you’re a media company looking to champion the experience for your audience:
1. Don’t make your customers work too hard. The less effort customers have to put in during an interaction, the more likely they are to recommend and do business with you. This escalates when you’re dealing with a complaint.
2. Respond quickly and transparently to bad experiences. Employ a closed loop approach to experience breaches by giving your front line staff the capability to contact individual customers in real time and cap the likelihood they will communicate negative experiences to friends, colleagues and family.
3. Think about real-time customer feedback solutions to close the loop. Make sure you can be alerted to “critical incidents”, including their scale, their timing and their impact – moments of truth that can make or break the customer relationship.
We all need a vibrant local media sector – holding governments and business to account, telling unique Australian stories, showcasing and reflecting on Australian culture, jobs and our future. The quality of the experience consumers have with media brands now underpins these outcomes more than ever.
Simon Wake
CEO
Ipsos Australia and New Zealand