Episode 14 Transcript

Customer Experience Is the New Advertising Or: Why Your Customers Have Become Your Marketing Department

Welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing,  the podcast for people who’ve spent months perfecting a marketing campaign, only to discover that Janet in Accounts accidentally generated more positive publicity by simply being nice to a customer.

I’m your host, Sean Makin, a man who has become convinced that the difference between a good business and a great one is often a five-minute conversation, a decent cup of coffee, and somebody answering the telephone before your will to live expires.

Before we begin, make yourself comfortable.

Ideally somewhere with a fancy drink that’s just expensive enough to make you question your financial priorities, but not so expensive that it arrives accompanied by a lecture about volcanic soil and the emotional wellbeing of the beans.

Right then…

Today we’re talking about something many businesses still underestimate.

Customer experience.

Or, as it’s increasingly becoming known…

Your most effective advertising campaign.

Part 1: The Advert Nobody Believes

Let’s begin with something that would have sounded almost ridiculous twenty years ago.

Your biggest marketing budget may not actually be your marketing budget.

It might be your customer service team.

Or your receptionist.

Or the engineer who turns up on time.

Or the person who answers the telephone after three rings instead of treating it like an unexploded bomb that everyone is hoping someone else will deal with.

Because somewhere along the way, something rather important changed.

Advertising stopped being the final word.

It became the opening statement.

There was a time when advertising was wonderfully straightforward.

You bought space in a newspaper. You produced a television advert featuring somebody smiling at inappropriate moments. You wrote a catchy slogan.

Then you announced to the world how brilliant your company was.

And, by and large people accepted it.

Not because every advert was true, but because there weren’t many alternative ways to verify the claims.

If a company said it offered exceptional customer service…

well, you generally had to take its word for it.

Today?

Not so much.

Before you’ve even visited a business, you can read hundreds of reviews. Watch videos. Browse photographs. Read comments from complete strangers. Compare prices. Compare experiences.

You can even discover whether Dave from Doncaster thought the cappuccino was “a bit disappointing.”

Which means businesses have lost something they once took for granted:

Control of the narrative.

Imagine opening a restaurant called: Probably The Best Restaurant In Britain.

You invest thousands in branding.

You hire photographers.

You create elegant menus.

You commission adverts showing smiling couples laughing over artisan bread that nobody ever actually eats.

Everything looks magnificent.

Then someone leaves a review that simply says:

“The chips were cold.”

That’s it.

No essay.

No dramatic language.

Just four words.

Suddenly your beautifully crafted marketing campaign finds itself in an argument with a sentence shorter than most text messages.

And, rather awkwardly…

the chips usually win.

This is modern marketing.

Consumers don’t distrust advertising because advertising is inherently dishonest.

They distrust it because they know it represents one side of the conversation.

It’s rather like asking someone to describe themselves on a first date.

“I’m funny.”

“I’m reliable.”

“I’m a great listener.”

Perhaps.

But we’d quite like to hear from somebody who’s actually met you.

And that’s precisely what’s changed.

Customers have become that somebody.

Every review.

Every recommendation.

Every conversation.

Every photograph.

Every LinkedIn post.

Every casual comment beginning with:

“You know who were surprisingly good?”

All of these carry extraordinary weight.

Advertising creates expectations.

Customer experience confirms whether those expectations were justified.

People don’t just buy products any more.

They buy confidence.

Confidence that what they’ve been promised is actually what they’ll receive.

There is an interesting phenomenon where businesses spend £50,000 producing a glossy promotional video explaining how customer-focused they are before placing callers into a telephone queue long enough to complete a university degree.

“Your call is important to us…”

If that’s true why am I celebrating my birthday while listening to this piano music?

Eventually someone answers.

“Thank you for your patience.”

I wasn’t patient.

I was trapped.

There’s a subtle but important difference.

And this illustrates the central point beautifully.

Marketing is no longer just what you say. It’s what people experience.

Every advert is, in effect, a promise.

Customer experience is where that promise is tested.

And today, reality has become remarkably good at writing reviews.

Perhaps the most persuasive advert you could ever create isn’t an advert at all.

It’s giving people an experience so good…

they can’t wait to tell somebody else about it.

Part 2: Every Customer Has a Microphone

One of the biggest changes in marketing over the last twenty years has absolutely nothing to do with artificial intelligence, social media, search engine optimisation or whichever acronym the marketing industry is particularly excited about this week.

The biggest change is much simpler.

Every customer now has a microphone.

There was a time when a customer had a bad experience and told their spouse.

A friend.

Possibly the neighbours.

If they were particularly upset, they might mention it to someone in the queue at the post office.

The damage was relatively contained.

Annoying…

but geographically limited.

Today?

They can tell Google. Facebook. LinkedIn. Instagram. TikTok. Reddit. Trustpilot. Tripadvisor. WhatsApp groups. Local community forums.

And approximately three hundred people they’ve never met who somehow still care deeply about whether your coffee arrived lukewarm.

We’ve successfully turned everyone into a broadcaster.

Every interaction now has the potential to become content.

That email your customer service team sends?

Content.

The way your receptionist answers the telephone?

Content.

The engineer who arrives twenty minutes early and puts on overshoes before walking into someone’s house?

Content.

The invoice that actually makes sense?

Believe it or not…

also content.

Not because you’re publishing it.

Because your customers might.

Think about the last time you had genuinely outstanding service.

There’s a reasonable chance you told someone.

Likewise, think about the last truly dreadful customer experience.

I suspect you can remember it in astonishing detail.

Human beings are remarkably good at remembering emotional experiences.

Especially negative ones.

It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism.

If your ancestors remembered where the dangerous tiger lived, they tended to live slightly longer.

Unfortunately, our brains now apply the same survival instincts to broadband providers.

Have you noticed how rarely people tell stories about things working exactly as expected?

Nobody rushes into work on Monday morning saying:

“You’ll never guess what happened… my internet connection functioned perfectly all weekend.”
Normal doesn’t create stories.

Remarkable does.

Every business is creating stories.

The only question is: Are they stories customers want to tell?

Extraordinary service travels.

So does dreadful service.

Average service simply disappears into history.

And this is where organisations make a subtle mistake.

They think marketing is the responsibility of the marketing department.

It isn’t.

Marketing creates awareness.

Marketing shapes messaging.

Marketing builds visibility.

But customer experience belongs to everybody.

The person answering the telephone.

The warehouse team.

The finance department.

The delivery driver.

The receptionist.

The engineer.

The salesperson.

Every interaction quietly teaches customers what your business is really like.

Marketing can only open the door.

Customer experience decides whether anyone walks through it again.

Part 3: The Little Things People Remember

Businesses often assume customers remember the big things.

The expensive things.

The things discussed in strategy meetings with names like:

Project Elevate.

Or…

Customer Experience Transformation Phase Two.

Which always sounds as though somebody has accidentally launched a space programme.

In reality, customers rarely remember any of that.

They remember moments.

Not the £200,000 website redevelopment.

The receptionist who greeted them by name.

Not the award-winning advertising campaign.

The engineer who took five extra minutes to explain something without making them feel foolish.

Not the expensive branding exercise.

The email that arrived exactly when they needed reassurance.

People remember moments.

Because moments become stories.

And stories travel.

Customers don’t recommend branding exercises.

They recommend experiences.

That’s not to say branding doesn’t matter.

It absolutely does.

Branding earns attention. Customer experience earns loyalty.

The smallest moments often carry the greatest emotional weight.

A returned phone call.

A prompt email.

A genuine apology.

Remembering someone’s name.

Following up after a project has finished.

Doing something helpful that nobody expected.

None of these cost very much.

Yet they generate extraordinary value.

Customers don’t expect perfection.

They understand mistakes happen.

Deliveries get delayed.

Systems fail.

People have bad days.

What customers remember is how businesses respond.

A mistake handled brilliantly can create more loyalty than a transaction where nothing went wrong at all.

Because recovering well demonstrates something advertising never can:

Character.

Ask someone to describe the best company they’ve ever dealt with and almost nobody starts with the product.

Instead, they’ll say:

“They really looked after us.”

“Nothing was too much trouble.”

“They remembered us.”

“They made everything easy.”

They’re describing feelings.

Not features.

Which is deeply inconvenient if you’ve just spent six months writing technical brochures.

Products become increasingly similar over time.

Technology catches up.

Features are copied.

Prices fluctuate.

Customer experience is much harder to imitate.

You can copy a website.

You can copy a pricing model.

You can even copy an advertising campaign.

It’s much harder to copy a culture where everybody genuinely cares about customers.

That’s not a campaign.

That’s a habit.

And habits become reputations.

Part 4: The Customer Journey Isn’t a Flowchart

If you’ve ever attended a marketing workshop, you’ll probably have encountered something called the customer journey.

It’s usually presented as a beautifully designed flowchart.

A work of geometric optimism.

Awareness.

Interest.

Consideration.

Decision.

Purchase.

Loyalty.

Advocacy.

Everyone smiles.

The arrows all point in the correct direction.

Nobody appears confused.

It’s magnificent.

The only slight problem is…

customers have never actually seen the flowchart.

And they seem remarkably reluctant to follow it.

Real customer journeys don’t look like railway timetables.

They look more like someone trying to assemble flat-pack furniture after misplacing the instructions and deciding confidence alone will see them through.

One customer discovers your business through Google.

Another hears about you from a colleague.

Someone else listens to your podcast for six months before visiting your website.

Another accidentally finds one of your blog posts while trying to answer an entirely different question.

Marketing people love drawing funnels.

Customers behave more like pinballs.

They bounce.

They disappear.

They come back six months later.

They read three blog posts, ignore your website completely, phone reception, ask an unrelated question, disappear again and eventually become your biggest client.

Try drawing that on a PowerPoint slide.

The truth is that buying decisions are messy.

People get distracted.

They forget.

They become busy.

Someone goes on holiday.

Someone changes jobs.

Budgets get frozen.

Life happens.

Businesses often interpret this as a marketing failure.

Sometimes…

it’s simply Tuesday.

Your customer isn’t living inside your sales pipeline.

They’re living inside their own life.

And, rather inconsiderately, your business is only one very small part of it.

This is also why customer experience doesn’t begin after the sale.

It begins the moment someone first encounters your business.

Your website.

Your social media.

Your emails.

The way someone answers the telephone.

The speed of your reply.

Even your out-of-office message.

They’re all part of one continuous experience.

And customers won’t remember your funnel.

They won’t remember your CRM workflow.

They’ll remember:

“How did these people make me feel?”

If the answer is positive, they’ll probably come back.

More importantly…

they’ll probably bring someone else with them.

Part 5: Good Experiences Travel

Businesses spend extraordinary amounts of money trying to persuade people to talk about them.

Advertising.

PR.

Social media.

Influencers.

Events.

Competitions.

The occasional giant inflatable duck for reasons nobody has adequately explained.

And yet the most powerful conversations often begin without the marketing department knowing anything about them.

Because people tell stories, not statistics.

Try remembering the last ten advertisements you saw yesterday.

Difficult, isn’t it?

Now remember the last time somebody went above and beyond to help you.

Much easier.

One disappeared before you’d finished your morning coffee.

The other may stay with you for years.

Businesses often ask:

“How do we get people talking about us?”

The better question is:

“What are we doing that’s worth talking about?”

Customers rarely discuss businesses that simply meet expectations.

Nobody phones a friend and says:

“You won’t believe this… the supermarket had milk.”

That’s not remarkable.

That’s Tuesday.

Remarkable things are, rather helpfully, things people choose to remark upon.

Sometimes a local café owner notices that an elderly customer always sits alone on Thursday mornings.

One week they simply join him for ten minutes and have a chat.

No cameras.

No hashtags.

No campaign.

Another customer notices.

They tell somebody.

Someone posts about it.

Thousands of people read the story.

The café owner never intended to create marketing.

They simply behaved like a decent human being.

Marketing departments occasionally find this irritating.

Mostly because kindness has an astonishingly high return on investment and absolutely refuses to fit neatly into quarterly reporting software.

That’s why authenticity matters.

People have become remarkably good at recognising the difference between something designed to generate publicity and something that happened because somebody genuinely cared.

One gets applauded.

The other gets remembered.

Advertising can introduce you.

SEO can help people find you.

Social media can make people aware of you.

But a recommendation wrapped inside a genuine story from someone you trust is extraordinarily difficult to compete with.

Perhaps that’s why customer experience has become the new advertising.

Not because advertising has stopped working.

Far from it.

But because the most persuasive message your business can ever send…

isn’t the one you write.

It’s the one your customers tell on your behalf.

Part 6: Experience Is Your Brand

Ask someone to describe a brand and they’ll usually start talking about logos.

Colours.

Fonts.

Websites.

Advertising campaigns.

Maybe even the precise shade of blue used in the annual report.

Those are the things we can see.

But they aren’t your brand.

They’re your introduction.

Your brand is what people believe about your business after they’ve experienced it.

Logos introduce you.

Customer experience defines you.

Customers don’t separate marketing from operations.

Businesses do.

Customers simply experience…

the business.

Marketing might spend six months carefully crafting a message around simplicity.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the building, somebody designs a contact form requiring seventeen mandatory fields, two security questions, a CAPTCHA involving traffic lights and bicycles, and the approximate maiden name of your first goldfish.

The customer doesn’t know these departments have never met.

They simply conclude:

“These people said they were easy to deal with.”

“They’re not.”

And that’s your brand.

Not the campaign.

The contradiction.

You can no longer advertise your way around poor customer experience.

Eventually, the experience catches up with the message.

Competitors can copy your products.

Your prices.

Your website.

Your advertising.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to copy a business where every customer consistently walks away thinking:

“Those people genuinely cared.”

And in the long run, that may be the strongest brand advantage any business can ever build.

Part 7: The Future of Marketing Looks Remarkably Human

So…

is customer experience really the new advertising?

Perhaps it’s becoming something even more important.

It’s becoming the proof.

Marketing creates awareness.

Customer experience creates believers.

Customer experience answers the only question that really matters:

“Were they as good as they said they were?”
If the answer is yes, customers return.

They recommend you.

They defend you.

They become advocates.

And no advertising campaign in history has ever been more persuasive than one delighted customer saying:

“You should use these people. They’re brilliant.”

Perhaps that’s the real lesson.

Marketing doesn’t end when someone becomes a customer.

That’s where the most important part begins.

Outro

Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing.

Until next time…

Stay curious.

Keep questioning.

And remember:

Every advert you create lasts for a few seconds.

Every customer experience can last for years.

Because people rarely remember your slogan.

But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.

And if all else fails…

Be the business people enjoy talking about  for the right reasons.

The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible and most places where people go to think slightly more deeply while wondering whether they should probably reply to that customer email before designing another advertising campaign.