In my earlier book, The Agile Brand, I talked about how brands can create deeper connections with consumers by “letting go” of some control of their brands and involving their customers to help shape some of their decisions, products, and even how they position themselves, while staying true to their values. These deeper connections come from understanding that modern consumers have derived value from experience, not the sheer act of consumption. 

As I was creating my latest book, The Agile Consumer, I’ve defined four rules that apply to the agile consumer. Understanding these will help you navigate and succeed in this agile world. Let’s explore each in more depth.

We can all agree that companies and their marketing have evolved, including an evolution from a more sequential “waterfall” process into a more agile one. Now let’s explore some of the developments that have transformed the customer experience and consumer behavior.

As data has become more readily available, and the platforms that companies use to store information about prospective and current customers have become more sophisticated, there has been an increased focus on creating, measuring and optimizing the customer experience using the best available tools.

We’re living in an era in which consumers have agency and control that they never had before. We’ll explore several facets of this, but this evolution of the brand-consumer relationship is built on the idea that people want to play an active part in the solutions they choose to solve their own challenges. And technology is allowing brands to individualize solutions to consumers’ problems.

The agile approach can be applied to many things other than software development, including marketing, branding, and even strategy. In this article we examine the agile brand – what it means and how it functions, along with the transformative effect agile marketing has on the practice of finding and keeping customers.

While many organizations still use outdated methods like annual employee reviews or engagement surveys, more forward-thinking organizations are tapping into tools that provide more frequent and more valuable information. Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping more and more of these organizations every day.

Successful companies have always understood that happy customers buy more and that they buy more often. They also understand the happy employees stay longer (which costs a company less money over time) and contribute to happier customers. This means that customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) have a lot to do with one another. Let’s explore three ways that customer experience and employee experience intersect and can work together.

A stellar customer experience can require a lot of pieces to be in place that span the internal-facing and external-facing parts of your organization. Customer journey orchestration allows marketers to integrate different marketing technology systems and platforms together. For instance, you can tie together your social media advertising, your website, your email marketing and your customer relationship management system  or customer database. This means you can share information between them that helps each platform take the best actions based on the specific customer or their last actions.

While we live in an increasingly digital world, to truly measure CX, we have to be able to measure both online and offline interactions. While we may use digital tools to do so, we can’t ever forget that customer experience is wherever the customer is, and whatever interaction they may be having. This would be an in-store conversation, a phone call to customer services, or, yes, a website or social media interaction.

Measuring your customer experience takes careful planning, a solid infrastructure, and clearly articulated metrics for success. These metrics are often created by looking at what the business needs, not at how the customer perceives success. We can sometimes get so focused on achieving our business key performance indicators (KPIs) that we lose sight of the central part of CX in the first place: the customer.

While your organization's leadership may all be in agreement that investing in customer experience is important, they may not always understand the far-reaching implications of an optimization effort. After all, unlike other more siloed efforts such as marketing campaigns or IT infrastructure enhancements, customer experience touches nearly everyone in your organization.

In a busy organization with many competing priorities, it can often be difficult to stay focused on even the most important aspects of keeping a business performing exceptionally. Customer experience (CX) platforms often involve many different teams across an organization, and thus it’s critical to ensure a big-picture view is kept. Too often, teams can get too concerned with measurements and performance in their silo within the organization, but truly successful CX platforms are built, measured and optimized holistically.

I’m proud to announce the launch of my new podcast entitled The Agile World. It will provide marketers, branding professionals, digital strategists, and customer experience experts a fresh perspective on the continually evolving dynamic between brands and consumers.

Using both existing and new data strategically and effectively is key to any bank’s success. In this article, we’re going to discuss a few ways that you can do this for your organization.

It’s not enough to simply make a great product, or offer an amazing service. It’s also not enough to simply engage with our audiences on a regular basis. There needs to be something more, and truly successful brands have tapped into this.

Interested in learning more about providing better customer experience, tying marketing technology with great strategy and creative through agile practices? Then this is the event for you.

Join AAFB and Greg Khilstrom, SVP of Digital at Yes& and author of The Agile Brand and The Agile Web for an introduction to all things agile followed by a panel discussion featuring local Baltimore advertising and marketing luminaries on February 21!

We live in a world of big data, where endless amounts of information can be stored in the cloud at an ever-decreasing cost per byte of storage. While this may sound great to data-driven marketers, the blessing of cheap storage and increasingly simple application programming interface (API) connections between data sources can quickly enough turn into a curse of too much information and not enough time to sort through it all.

While there are a lot of great sources of information for the absolute latest and greatest insights on Google’s latest algorithms, there are a few concepts that aren’t changing anytime soon and thus can make this a more evergreen look at search engine optimization. I refer to this as “timeless SEO” because they are concepts that are not going anywhere soon, and fundamentals of a strong search engine marketing strategy.

The value of optimizing your customer experience is clear to most brands and marketers. Increasing loyalty, reducing customer service costs and increasing revenue growth from retained customers are three big reasons, in addition to many others.