What's a 'peak-end rule'? Neil Patel explains the secret recipe to enhancing CX

In the customer-centric world, elevating experience is key to retaining consumers and enhancing brand loyalty. In price-sensitive markets such as Hong Kong, customer experience matters even more than ever as 75% of consumers are willing to overlook the prices to purchase from brands with good experience, according to Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report. 

Speaking at the opening keynote session of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Digital Marketing Asia Hong Kong, Neil Patel, a digital marketing expert and co-founder of Neil Patel Digital, said when it comes to customer-centric marketing, brands should consider leveraging the “Peak-end rule”.  

By definition, the “Peak-end rule” is about how customers remember the brand, the company and its marketing, said Patel. 

“It's how loyal they'll be. And the way the ‘Peak-end rule’ works is typically consumers remember a brand at the first touch point they have with the company and the last. So you want to make sure that your first touch point is amazing, where you delight them, and your last touch point is amazing as well.” 

Applying it to the role of marketing, the “Peak-end rule” is about identifying customers, satisfying them, and retaining them.  

“Because if you're not targeting the right people, you're wasting money. If you're not satisfying them, well, you're going to get bad words about marketing. And if you don't retain them, you're not going to generate the highest largest contentful paint (LCP),” added Patel.  

To better understand the consumers, marketers need to look into the diversified customer journeys, which are no longer linear. Consumers are using multiple channels such as social media to search and buy a product. 

According to Sprout Social, the average person uses 6.7 different social platforms each month. Meanwhile, the average consumer spends two hours and 27 minutes a day on social media. 70% of social users research brands on it, and 64% of Gen Z and 49% of millennials search for things that they need or want on these social platforms.  

“It used to be someone just searches and goes on Google and they buy a product, but now someone may find something on Instagram, then go on Google and perform a search, find a few websites[...]That's much change, and the way consumers are becoming aware of brands is also changing from consumer review sites to social media, but the big ones are word-of-mouth marketing and search engines,” said Patel. 

How AI will impact customer journeys 

From chatbots that provide instant and personalised assistance to predictive analytics capable of anticipating customer needs, AI is playing an important role in transforming how businesses engage with customers. By 2025 AI is expected to state customer needs and preferences even before they ever rise, said Patel.  

The 2024 Global Customer Engagement Report by Vonage confirms that AI within CX is well-liked by consumers. Positive sentiment correlates strongly with consumer experiences using AI, from China’s 90% to North India’s 94%.   

“In essence, when you're leveraging AI, the cornerstone to AI, and even marketing is content. Your content needs to be deeper and more meaningful and provide better connections. This way, you can use content and AI through the different stages of inbound marketing to better connect with people,” added Patel.  

To deliver a seamless customer experience with AI, Patel suggested brands should leverage four stages - attract, convert, close and delay. 

Attracting is about getting the right type of audience brands want to convert. Patel suggested brands should give content suggestions based on behavioural targeting, perform content structuring and optimisation, dynamic creative optimisation and schedule AI-driven social media to engage with target audiences. 

The average consumer needs six touchpoints before they make a purchase, said Patel. “Brands have to leverage omnichannel marketing from social media such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, search engines such as Google, and even AI platforms such as chatGPT, automated emails, and touch-based marketing. They all help.” 

Lastly, brands need to reward the people who are continually doing well on their platforms by delighting them. “You got to make them happy. You have to keep upselling them. The big thing that people don't realise when it comes to delighting is people always expect more and more,” Patel added. 

Patel said brands should use AI for hyper personalisation such as personalised email campaigns, AI-driven customer support, and AI-powered loyalty programmes, amongst others. “It's not just about personalising. It's about personalising the experience for each individual user, and you can do that with AI. It's about inputting data and outputting what they see.” 

Furthermore, brands in Hong Kong should also run more experiments with AI. “You want to leverage email marketing and use AI to enhance it, from send times to open rates, to segmentation, you want to do a lot more AB testing, and you can do it on the fly with AI, and it can run tests for you automatically. And you've got to encourage experiments within your team. This is one area we don't see enough of in APAC, especially Hong Kong, a lot of businesses aren't running enough experiments,” he added. 

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