Ready. Set. Grow.

I recently spent a weekend in Paris. It was my first time there so naturally I did a lot of things typical of a tourist. The weekend was full of tours, museums, shops and restaurants. All of these have one thing in common; they provide customers with an experience. However, for some reason this doesn’t seem to be apparent to them.

I work in aviation and, without going into too much detail, my company creates software applications for pilots, cabin crew, ground ops and passengers. Some are operational apps, some are customer experience apps. The operational apps still need to provide a solid experience for the user, but the customer experience apps have a human to human (H2H) interaction involved. You see, our Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) wireless in-flight entertainment (W-IFE) application requires passengers to purchase premium content vouchers from cabin crew onboard an aircraft. Therefore, when we sell this application, we are not just selling software, we are selling an experience.

If I don’t have access to every touchpoint on the customer journey, I can’t willingly sell my app into this journey, with the risk of it being associated with a bad experience. I need to know that my product will integrate into a seamless experience and that the product and the journey it sits on have synergistic qualities. Without careful and meticulous planning and preparation, selling your product into a bad customer experience journey is like putting shiny new rims on a broken car. You just don’t do it.

Back to Paris; on the tours, the journey is the product, but the tour guide (or built in audio) provides the experience. In the museums, history and a number of curators have provided the product, but once again, it is the tour guide who provides the experience. In the shops, the many high-fashion labels of Paris provide the product, but the sales assistant provides the experience, and finally, in the restaurant, the chefs provide the product, but the floor staff provide the experience.

Notice a pattern here? In the retail and services industries, providing a product or a service is simply not enough. Loyalty is earned, not bought. If you want customers to take more tours (or review and recommend them to others), if you want them to buy your labels clothes again, if you want them to frequent your restaurant again and bring their friends, family and colleagues, you have to provide a great and memorable experience.

I said in my introduction that this wasn’t apparent to certain establishments I came across in Paris and here’s why. On my second last day in Paris, I visited a small to medium sized cafe / restaurant which was located in an extremely busy little corner of Montmartre, serving hundreds of tourists every hour. I had been wandering the cobbled streets for a while and having passed it a couple of times and seen the constant crowds, I figured it was worth a go. I also felt I needed some caffeine to make it up to Sacre Coeur, the next thing on my Paris to-do list, although when my bill came to €10 (for coffee and water) I thought I probably could have done without it. Anyway, I sucked it up and told myself it was my own fault for choosing an establishment full of tourists in such a built-up area. With that, I took out my debit card and approached the counter, where I was told by one of the waiters that the minimum spend for card payments was €15. I was puzzled. I’ve come across small, quiet corner shops in the rural parts of Ireland that have card payment limits, but here? This place had probably turned over a thousand euro in the ten minutes I’d been there. Why on earth would they put a limit on the most popular form of payment in the modern era?

Enter touchpoint design. Until now, I had been greeted in an acceptable fashion, seated at an acceptable table, served an acceptable (albeit overpriced) coffee, which I was happy to put down to the location, and now, when I am ready to complete my experience, at the moment where I am considering whether I will visit this establishment again, this happens.

I’m keen to get up to Sacre Coeur, so I don’t really want to spend too much time questioning or lecturing this waiter, so I suggest to him - “how about you charge me a small fee for using my card, considering you have a limit and I don’t have any cash? Whatever it costs you to process my card, charge it to me.” He refuses. He tells me there is an ATM down the street. He doesn’t realise I’ve already left 10% of a tip on the table, which has since been picked up (the only actual currency I had in my pocket). If I hadn’t done that, I might have suggested he just charge me €15 and consider the extra €5 a tip. But let’s be realistic here, I am absolutely not paying €15 for a cup of coffee and some water. Paris or no Paris. That’s just insane.

So left with no other option, I leave the establishment. I walk maybe 3 minutes down the busy street, until I find two other gentlemen queueing for a little ATM outside a small, closed bank. It is probably 12 minutes before I get back to the restaurant and hand the same waiter a €10 note and finally pay my bill. He thanks me, nods, smiles and acts like his job is done. What he doesn’t realise is that he has failed. He has failed at the final hurdle. He has failed at providing a great and memorable experience. He has inconvenienced and delayed me. My ten minute coffee break has now taken me 25 minutes and darkness is fast approaching, threatening my photographs on top of Sacre Coeur.

This short, simple anecdote might seem excessively critical to some, but there is a lesson to be learned here. I do not aim to know the financial situation of this particular establishment, I can only assume it is successful due to its bustling, mainly tourist crowd chugging down €5 coffees and €25 snacks every ten minutes. I do not aim to know exactly what they are paying to use credit card machines, but I guarantee it is not enough for them to become greedy and demand cash payments for amounts less than €15. We live in a world where people carry smartphones instead of wallets and smartwatches instead of travel cards. We live in a world where convenience is a commodity. The lesson here is that if you don’t understand your customers, you cannot fully serve them. If you do not understand the landscape you are operating your business in, you will be left behind. If you do not realise that the retail and service industries are about providing a great and memorable experience, then I’m sorry to tell you, you are setting yourself up to fail.

Touchpoint design is about analysing and optimising every single touchpoint across the customer experience journey. Improve one touchpoint, improve the overall experience. Improve another one and the experience is greater again. Only through constant and thorough analysis, testing and optimisation can you ever truly grow.

I’ve been using HubSpot for almost a year now. For those of you who don’t know, HubSpot is one of the most popular automated marketing suites available, with over 20,000 customers in over 90 countries worldwide. I’ve been using it for CRM, sales pipeline management, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, blogging, landing page creation and more. It has a lot going for it. But for some reason, I still feel like there’s something missing.

The thing is, I’m a perfectionist. I like to have a lot of control over what I’m doing and I like the idea of having infinite customisation options available. I also like the idea of trying new platforms as they become available, experimenting with the latest apps and platforms that Silicon Valley coughs up on a daily basis.

Before HubSpot, I was using a combination of Gmail, MailChimp, Excel, Google Docs, HootSuite, Pipeliner, PipeDrive, Salesforce (on a side note, I’ve tried about 30 CRMs and still haven’t found one I like), WordPress and many more. Does it take up more time using multiple platforms? Absolutely. Do you get more customisation and control than an automated solution like HubSpot? Absolutely.

The two biggest factors in deciding whether to go modular or automated are cost and time. Do you have enough money to go automated? Probably not. Do you have enough time to go modular? Maybe. If it was up to me, I’d take the modular approach, especially when you’re at startup or growth stage. It gives you the flexibility to try and test a multitude of modern apps and platforms for all elements of the sales and marketing spectrum, in order to find the features and functions that suit your individual needs.

If you commit to something like HubSpot (or Marketo, or Pardot, another two fan favourites these days), you’re getting a fantastic platform, no question about it, but you’re also boxing yourself in slightly. With platforms of this scale, although the support is of high quality, you usually end up spending more time and money every time you want or need a new feature. If you find something you want to use outside of your automated platform, there’s no guarantee it will integrate seamlessly, or at all.

I’ve heard some consultants say “automated marketing is the future”, but the future is, I hope, an open, modular platform where I can take all the features and functions from various apps and platforms and combine them to suit my own business needs. Ideally, a plugin-type solution (as on WordPress or similar) for every app or platform I need. Personalisation and customisation are high customer expectations, especially for Generation Y. If we keep boxing people in, we’ll never be able to meet their needs fully.

What marketing processes is your company using? Have you noticed any particular benefits or constraints with automated marketing platforms? Let me know and thanks for tuning in.

I’m an ideas man. A creative. If I had 40 hours a week to spend doing the things I wanted to do, my company would have an amazing brand, an award-winning website, stellar collateral, top-notch PPC and advertising, awesome customer support and so much more. Unfortunately, the majority of mine and my colleagues time is spent reacting to what is going on around us, instead.

New customer, need to update website and collateral quickly, REACT. New product, same deal, REACT. New partner, same thing again, REACT. Upcoming event, decided to promote a different product, REACT. Financial restraints, REACT. New staff, training required, REACT. Week over. Anything productive done? Not a bit.

Now, picture this: if we had, for example, two team members working on all the new, creative, exciting things we wanted to do, and two other team members working on all the everyday, on-the-fly, no-notice, reactive stuff, wouldn’t we be better off? At the end of each week we could say ‘hey, we managed all those issues we were having, but we also made real progress in that new project’, instead of saying ‘hey, I quit’.

It’s not exactly a new concept. In Sales, you might have an on-boarding team, a customer success team and then a key account management team. Each team has a different role and neither team has to deal with the others problems. They each have a function and that function doesn’t change. The customer is passed through the funnel with ease.

In Marketing, I don’t want to pull someone from events, or PPC, or SEO, or web updates, or design, or anywhere else, just because we have an unexpected issue. I want those team members to do what they are best at, all the time.

How would you implement a system like this in your company? Could you imagine any benefits or problems with it? Let me know. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about and really believe in.