I was recently in a round table at a marketing event, with an engaging title: “Selling and caring in the age of omni-channel”. My giveaways are two direct questions I got from customers:

1. Is social presence really a must and is it worth the effort?
2. How can we improve our customer experience to get the best out of the consumers’ value?

The first answer was very easy: in my opinion you have to be out there. Yes, it’s a jungle, it’s hard, and kind of things will go bad at some point because people are always complaining and unsatisfied, and yes you will have to dedicate people answering social posts, but in the end….if you are not out there, your competitors are. And consumers will define your ability and innovation strive based on your presence_or worst, based on your absence.

The second question I still find tricky to answer: even if you are out there and even if you are giving a great customer experience and your product is gold and your customers love you…you still have a need for optimization and improvement that will drive you to the next step of your customer journey map.

And the only way of moving forward is innovation: try new things, ask your customers what would make them even happier, build a community to get them more connected (and let’s be honest, to build your own knowledge base around theirs), offer collateral services that might help them in their daily struggle, think out of the box. They will remember that, and love your company even more for taking the time to understand them. and in the end, they will keep buying from you. Because this is no longer the era of “business as usual”.