Customer experience playbook

Follow the RACE Planning Framework to plan, manage, and implement customer experience improvements across the entire lifecycle

How will this customer experience playbook help me and my business?

Consumers have more choice than ever about where, when and how they connect with brands and make purchases. A successful customer experience strategy can be the difference between business growth or being pushed out of market by competitors.

The Smart Insights customer lifecycle visual (shown below) structured around our RACE Planning Framework, shows some of the many paid, owned, and earned media omnichannel options to communicate with prospects and customers today, which need to be better orchestrated as part of effective customer experience.

As we can see from the various ways customers can interact with us, ideas and opinions will be formed about our brand in many different places. If we want to keep up with customers’ ever-changing wants and needs, we need to continually assess the customer experience we offer across the customer lifecycle, to make sure we are offering the best service possible at all digital  touchpoints.

This playbook will help you break down the key customer experience activities to work on as part of your strategy across the RACE Framework, with helpful guidance and links to useful resources shared throughout.

What is a marketing playbook?

Who is this playbook for?

This playbook provides a comprehensive structure to follow that will help you plan and prioritize activities across different marketing communications in the customer lifecycle. It is designed to help you prioritize where you need to focus your efforts, with quick links to relevant resources to help you in each area.

This guide is aimed at managers or digital marketing executives who are responsible for customer experience. These include:

• Managers accountable for digital marketing results for a business including Digital Director and Digital Marketing Manager

• Digital marketing executives / customer experience managers who are responsible for managing the digital customer experience for your business

How is the playbook structured?

To provide a comprehensive coverage of all marketing activities, this guide is based on the Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. For this playbook, the framework is broken down into detailed activities for you to review in a checklist format. For each of these targeted activities, we recommend specific actions to take, deliverables to create plus resources and tools giving more details.

The five parts of our multichannel RACE Planning Framework will help you:

• Plan – Review your key objectives, measurement criteria and responsibilities.
• Reach – Build online awareness for your brand(s) by tapping into search intent for your products and using advertising and PR to generate demand
• Act – Encourage digital interactions with online prospects and customers via improving customer journeys and sign-posting relevant lead-generation content
• Convert – Increase conversion rates through multichannel approach to turn subscribers into customers through online and offline conversion optimization
• Engage – Improve customer loyalty and advocacy using digital customer communications including email marketing, marketing automation and social media, and engagement programme techniques

Resource Details

• Author: Amelia Cooper, Head of Content
• Format: Adobe PDF playbook with actionable checklists and tables

About the author

Amelia Cooper

Amelia Cooper is Head of Content at Smart Insights. She is responsible for managing the paid member content library and e-learning resources, as well as strategic planning to ensure customers get the most from their memberships. She is a University of Southampton and the Chartered Institute of Marketing graduate with over 8 years’ experience in digital marketing, specializing in content marketing.