Toucan Talks

Why Customer Experience IS Marketing

• Kickstart Collective

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What if the most effective marketing you’ll run this quarter isn’t an ad at all? We make the case that customer experience is your strongest growth channel, and we break down exactly how to design it so referrals, reviews, and repeat purchases happen on purpose.

In this episode, we start by defining customer experience as every interaction across your website, social, chat, store, and support. Then we connect the dots: fast replies, a clear return policy, and an easy booking or checkout flow communicate brand value more loudly than a tagline ever could. 

You’ll hear why great experiences generate more word of mouth than advertising, how reviews boost SEO and discovery, and where small inconsistencies (like a cold confirmation email after a warm ad) quietly kill trust and conversion.

We walk through practical steps you can start this week. Map your customer journey from first click to follow‑up. Remove friction from navigation and forms. Create a clean bot‑to‑human handoff with response time expectations. Train your team to recover gracefully from mistakes. Design post‑purchase emails that set expectations and ask for reviews at the right moment. Add low‑cost delights: on‑brand packaging, welcome kits, stickers, or handwritten notes that people actually notice. 

As ad costs rise into the holidays, CX becomes a strong marketing channel.  The brands that win are the ones that keep promises, reduce friction, and make success feel effortless at every touchpoint. 

If you’re ready to turn customers into advocates, press play and grab a notepad. Subscribe, share this episode with a teammate, and leave a quick review to tell us which touchpoint you’ll improve first.

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Meet your hosts and learn more about Kickstart Collective at kickstartcollective.co

Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome back to Kickstart Your Week. This week we are going to be talking about customer experience and how that is actually a part of your marketing. Whether you believe it or not, we're going to hopefully in the next, you know, eight to ten minutes convince you that customer experience is marketing. And you know what? Even if they don't believe it, you're still gonna get some good customer experience info. Um so I think we can jump right in. Yeah. Cool. You want to start definition? Love to. Um, so customer experience is really the experience your customer has when they interact with your business or your brand, whether that's online um in a store, in a restaurant. Um, and online I mean like your website, also online through like chat, whether that's a real human support person or a bot. And at what point does that bot once you talk to a real person? Um, so it's a very all-encompassing topic. Um, so we'll start out with a little fun stat because that's always fun on a Monday morning. Um, so the stats are that a person, oh, it is fun. Um, a person is five times more likely to refer or have a word of mouth um referral, if you will, from a positive experience or their customer experience versus just straight up advertising. Um, so um if you want word of mouth, which at the end of the day ends up being free relatively, depending, you know, for the most part, um, then providing a good customer experience is going to be important. So yeah. Um what does this all mean for marketing?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it means every single touch point you have with a customer is going to communicate your brand value, like even small things that you might not think of, like how quick you are to respond to emails or DMs. Um your return process, your booking process, like you said, your website, just like navigating the website itself is part of that experience. Um so yeah, if someone has a bad experience, then that can kind of counteract or negate other marketing that you might be doing for yourself for like ads you might be running, because if you have a good product or a good service but a bad experience for the customer, then the less likely they are to rebook or repurchase. Yeah. And they might tell other people that it was not a good experience.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Um, yeah, people are slightly more likely to talk about a bad experience than a good experience, which is why having an exceptional customer experience is important. Yeah. Um, you are a calm major at UNCW. I don't know if this was from that class at some point, or some that class, that major, some class during that. Uh-huh. I don't know where I heard this. Um, but basically, good marketing is just going to reveal like a good product or a bad product. Like you're gonna get people there and then it's gonna speak for itself. But I think we're taking this a step further and saying, like, that customer experience, like you said, is a part of your actual marketing. Um and even when we're working with newer brands or companies and doing branding guides, talking about like the voice and the tone and the brand values, that's all a part of that.

SPEAKER_01:

Um establishing those and making sure it's like consistent on everything that you do, even if it's not necessarily what you would consider marketing, if it's just like signage in the store, maybe then it needs to have consistent voice and tone.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Cool. Um, so um diving in a little bit more. Um I think we talked a little bit about like what those touch points are. Um, but website digital that includes social media, um, is it easy to use? A lot of times that's gonna be people's first impressions, whether you are e-commerce or a service-based business. If they're looking for something, hopefully they're gonna land on your website because of all of your good marketing. Yeah. Um, but if they get frustrated or can't find what they need, then that's not gonna be a positive experience and they might not even take the next step to actually converting, much less, you know, the customer experience once you have them. Yeah. Um, so that's kind of step one. Um, and then step two is gonna be that customer service, whether they're, you know, doing something online, chatting, coming in, is your staff friendly? Um are they in obviously like different service-based businesses? You know, there's not necessarily uniform, but yeah, is it like you said, is it consistent? Are they getting what they're expecting? Um walking in.

SPEAKER_01:

Employees trained to handle negative feedback or unhappy customers. How do you navigate that? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

Because it can be tricky. Yeah, always tricky. It's never not tricky. Um, but at least having some training and guidelines in place um is important. Um, and then okay, let's say all that goes well. Then what is like the post-purchase experience? Um, if it's online, are there follow-up emails? Are you asking for a review? Um, because again, that customer experience is gonna drive whether or not someone leaves a review, which then brings it full circle back to this is marketing. Um reviews are huge. They're huge. They're gonna help Google smile upon you and show you back in search results for new people to find you. Um, so it really is a full, full service thing. Um, and then there's also, you know, depending on the business again, like is there places where you can build loyalty programs or community things um that are just gonna continue to drive that customer experience? Um so yeah, I don't know. Do you want to give a few client examples of just where we've seen this go well?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we we have one client, um an RV resort. And so we have done a bunch of digital work with their like digital experience and also in person, um like once people actually get to the resort. So, you know, it's everything from their social media, um, their website, making sure it's easy to navigate and learn about the resort and then also to book. Yep. Um, because if people want to book, but then it's hard to book, then that I would be like, okay, forget it. I'm just finding somewhere else. So making sure all of that is seamless for them. Again, customer service. I mean, we didn't train the employees, but you know, making sure everyone's on the same page about how to handle bookings, how to handle feedback. Um, and then past going past the digital, you know, we've made resort maps and welcome kits, like print materials to give the the customers once they get there to help their stay go easier for them to navigate the resort, for them to find out like events that they might want to go to or or local things that they want to go see. Um so it it can be, depending on your business, it can be a mix of like digital and print items that are all part of the customer experience.

SPEAKER_00:

For sure. And making those print items on brand with the actual colors and fonts and branding. Um which you know you're great at. So it's easy peasy. Um, but yeah, all that definitely is is huge. Um, and then I think going back more towards like e-commerce clients, like is your packaging branding branded? Um, is there, you know, product information in there? Is that those are those documents branded, have the logo, the colors?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, and you can do like fun things with like the packaging, like the tape on the exterior of the box. Um, so just giving people, you know, an experience beyond just how they use your product or interact with your service. Um, but it can be really from discovery on to interacting and then post um post-purchase. Um cool. I think um just one of the other things I was gonna I thought about, we can talk about um is the kind of unexpected ways you can delight your customers, if you will, to just push the customer experience just to another level. Um and I don't think it has to be anything like crazy, and I was just I had thought of two things earlier, actually. One, you know, Amazon's easy to order off of. True, and it's great. And every now and again I do order from like a small business on Amazon because they're there. Yeah. And when you get the little like sweet little branded postcard from the company, that is true. When I ordered it off Amazon, I'm like, oh my gosh. Makes you feel like you ordered off of Etsy. I know exactly. Or like when you actually do order off of Etsy, yeah. Um, just those personal touches that like remind you of like, oh, there's a human. There's a human, yeah. Um, this didn't just get pulled off of a you know, giant warehouse on Amazon. Well, I mean, you know, yeah. Um, so just the little touches you can do like that, and then um like restaurant, food and bev, you know, well, we mess all we've created a bunch of stickers, or you've created a bunch of stickers um for them to go along with like different campaigns and things like that. Um, and so just like having a little something extra that is in line with your brand that you can give you know customers and again tying it back, they're excited to get a little something something, and then it is like actual marketing out in the world for you with that as well. So um, I think there's just a lot of ways that it does tie into marketing that you can think of, or well, we can think of it, but companies can think of, you can think of, um, to just increase that customer experience.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, yeah, any little, any way to like personalize it or offer even, I mean, I would consider a sticker an incentive of some sort, you know, even if it's really something small like that. Yeah. Something fun, just unexpected.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Um, so yeah, I think this, you know, Leslie had anything else you wanted to add?

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, I think it's just it's smart to kind of explore your customer journey to map it out from like, okay, how are people gonna find out about us? And then all the way to converting them, yeah, however that looks for you and your business, and then pass that to like keep them as a customer. It'd be smart to sit down and map it out and like fill in any holes and make sure it's a seamless process.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, customer journey is it is a task. So yeah, I think start by mapping it out and then yeah, start pick one thing of like, hey, where I mean, if there's a glaring, obvious issue, do that first. But other than that, think of like, hey, where's a way we can just improve this? Um, especially, you know, going into the holidays and the new year, um, it could be a good, good launch point for like, hey, you know, we're gonna power through these next this next month or two. And then starting in January, we're getting getting this as like a goal to improve that overall customer experience and customer journey.

SPEAKER_01:

So and you know, we've talked about this before in another Kickstart Your Week, but ad costs are gonna rise here at the end of the year. So someone having a good customer experience could be kind of a differentiator between a a customer or or not.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah, that referral business is is huge. So yeah, the more things you can do to make that happen, the better. Um not only is are people more likely to talk about a good experience, but people are more likely to convert. New customers are more likely to convert when it's coming from a trusted source and an actual human. So um yeah, humans are cool.

unknown:

Cool.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, so thanks for joining us this week. Um, if you aren't on our email list, you can head over to our website and join that way, and we'll send you these fun little Kickstart Your Week videos every Monday. Um, otherwise, y'all have a great week. Thanks.