Customer Experience, Customer Service And The Perfect Midfielder

The striker in a soccer team has a simple job: to put the ball in the opponent’s net. For most of the game, he also has a simple problem: someone else has the ball. The role of the attacking midfielder is to deliver the ball to those strikers. But if you watch the great players of recent years—David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, Andres Iniesta—you’ll notice that they all do something remarkable. They’ll stop running, look up to see where their strikers are, and instead of landing the ball on their teammate’s toes, they’ll drop it five or ten meters ahead of him.

Whenever they make those passes into space, midfielders aren’t solving the problem that their teammate has now. They’re anticipating. They’re solving the problem their teammate will have in a couple of seconds, after he’s sprinted past the defender.

A good midfielder can solve a problem that he can see before it happens. But he does something else too: by choosing the nature of the pass, he also determines the direction of the game and opens a way to the goal.

Content marketers do the same thing when they’re developing a content strategy to enhance customer experience. They both anticipate problems and they set the play.

A Content Marketing Strategy Is A Game Plan For A Winning Customer Experience

For many businesses, customer experience is about little more than solving customer issues. They’ll train their staff to smile and be polite. They’ll build a good customer service team to deal with any complaints promptly and efficiently.  They’ll create scripts that tell those teams how to provide answers. They might even pick up the phone.

Smart companies do more than that. They look at the questions their customers ask. They analyze the stages in the customer journey at which they ask those questions. And they put in place measures to solve those problems before they occur.

Companies that understand the power of content marketing and its effect on customer experience go even further. They don’t just solve problems; they enact a content strategy that determines the nature of the questions their customers might encounter. In the same way that a midfielder will deliver a ball and drive the center forward to a particular spot on the pitch from which they can shoot, so they’ll create videos and articles and guides that generate exactly the questions and concerns that the company is positioned to solve.

It’s that content strategy aimed at customers that determines the subject of the newsletters members of HMOs see in their inboxes and the topic of the health messages delivered in the videos on the website.  It’s how banks decide which savings plans to promote and explain to general visitors, and which to promote to savers with larger funds.  Customer service solves customers’ problems as they arise but a content strategy for customer experience can use data to predict issues before they arise, solve problems before they occur and be constantly ready with advice and education throughout the journey.

It’s a strategy that builds a relationship with customers as close as the connection between teammates so that together both can sprint forward and win the game.

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