Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence (or CX) isn’t just the lat­est mar­ket­ing buzz­word — great CX is fast becom­ing a defin­ing qual­i­ty for any dig­i­tal brand. Dig­i­tal has increased the amount and fre­quen­cy of inter­ac­tions that con­sumers have with brands, and in a world where every bank, super­mar­ket, and air­line has a ded­i­cat­ed app, man­ag­ing con­sumer’s over­all expe­ri­ences, across all the touch­points they have, is increas­ing­ly impor­tant.

On the 18th March, Linkdex host­ed an SEONow Think Tank on the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, with a line up of guest speak­ers includ­ing Simon Nor­ris of Nomen­sa, Alan Colville from True Dig­i­tal, Han­nah Thor­pe of White.net, Dis­tilled’s Will Critchlow, and Kirsty Hulse from Linkdex.

Simon Nor­ris kicked of pro­ceed­ings with a fan­tas­tic premise to get the dis­cus­sions going: “Expe­ri­ence is every­thing, every­thing is expe­ri­ence”. Food for thought, cer­tain­ly, and his talk cov­ered the the intri­ca­cies of cross-chan­nel ini­tia­tives, the ‘Hier­achy of Expe­ri­ence’ and how mean­ing impacts user and cus­tomer expe­ri­ences. Nor­ris’ talk dis­cussed how expe­ri­ence should be coher­ent across all chan­nels when cater­ing for con­sumer inter­ac­tions, and ulti­mate­ly how brands should focus on mean­ing over func­tion in their pur­suit of excel­lent CX.

Great open­ing talk from @Simon_Norris can’t wait to hear what’s next at #SEONow pic.twitter.com/hKmLcj0qFW

— Gen­er­ate UK (@GenerateUK) March 18, 2016

Simon also shared his key take­aways, and there was some great dis­cus­sion on the rela­tion­ship between how we shape expe­ri­ences and there­after how our expe­ri­ences shape us!

Alan Colville, Head of CX at True Dig­i­tal, gave the next talk on ‘Bridg­ing the Human Dig­i­tal Divide, which focused on how cus­tomer jour­neys are becom­ing more errat­ic, and how it’s increas­ing­ly impor­tant to look for human insight and how these can inform ideas.

Brands are after all ‘human’ too, and have relat­able qual­i­ties that con­form to cer­tain arche­types:

Human inten­tions becomes the most valu­able cur­rent­ly when atten­tion becomes expen­sive, but this is just part of the chal­lenge. As Alan shared, for two-thirds of com­pa­nies the biggest chal­lenge to improv­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is still organ­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture. In this respect build­ing cul­ture is close­ly linked to the chal­lenges of cre­at­ing great cus­tomer expe­ri­ences.

Han­nah Thor­pe’s, Head of SEO at White.net, talk cen­tered around how all too often, mar­keters approach CX with an under­ly­ing expec­ta­tion of ‘per­fect’ CX, which is unat­tain­able. Instead mar­keters should focus on find­ing their pare­to opti­mal, or the “con­di­tions under which the state of eco­nom­ic effi­cien­cy (where no one can be made bet­ter of by mak­ing some­one worse off)” occurs. What we should be look­ing for is a more prag­mat­ic approach to the ide­al­is­tic view of the dream cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Her talk also explored work­ing frame­works and solu­tions for mar­keters to approach CX in more prac­ti­cal and prag­mat­ic ways (Make sure you check out the slides for some great insights.)

Kirsty Hulse’s pre­sen­ta­tion explored the rela­tion­ship between con­tent and cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. In her words: “could our affair with con­tent mean we are cheat­ing on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence?” A case in point: today, retail­ers are becom­ing pub­lish­ers now and pub­lish­ers are becom­ing retail­ers, and in some indus­tries, such as fash­ion for exam­ple, this can result in high qual­i­ty edi­to­r­i­al con­tent rank­ing for trans­ac­tion­al key­words — this isn’t the best CX.

Long­form edi­to­r­i­al con­tent may be per­fect for infor­ma­tion­al search queries, dri­ving brand aware­ness and influ­enc­ing pur­chase deci­sions, but clear­ly is not the best con­tent for peo­ple to land on when they are look­ing to buy. Brands then should look to opti­mise their edi­to­r­i­al con­tent for con­ver­sions. Con­tent per­son­al­i­sa­tion is a great way to do this, allow­ing us to align our con­tent with user intent.

Will Critchlow of Dis­tilled gave the last pre­sen­ta­tion of the day, with an insight-packed talk on the rise of per­son­al assis­tant apps, and the impli­ca­tions this will have on cus­tomer expe­ri­ences. Will’s talk chal­lenged our con­ven­tion­al under­stand­ing of search, explor­ing how intel­li­gent per­son­al assis­tants (IPAs) are redefin­ing the land­scape. With con­sumers more and more depen­dent on their smart­phones, and where we con­duct dozens of queries every­day, it’s much more rel­e­vant for brands to focus on intent.

It was a tru­ly fas­ci­nat­ing talk (that can­not be done jus­tice in a blog post) that explored the future of search and per­son­al assis­tant tech­nol­o­gy, that raised lots of ques­tions from the floor.

All in all a great inau­gur­al SEONow Think Tank. Do check out the slides below from each of the day’s speak­ers, and stay tuned on Linkdex for the next SEONow event.

Slides:

Simon Nor­ris, Nomen­sa — Expe­ri­ence is Every­thing, Every­thing is Expe­ri­ence

Alan Colville, True Dig­i­tal — Bridg­ing the Human Dig­i­tal Divide

Han­nah Thor­pe, White.net — Find­ing Your Ver­sion of the Per­fect Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence

Kirsty Hulse, Linkdex — When Our Affair With Con­tent Means we Cheat on Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence

Will Critchlow, Dis­tilled: A Post-PageR­ank World: The Rise of Per­son­al Assis­tant Apps