Page 83 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 201583the same day and nearly half, 43%, expect it in the next hour (Tarkoff, R., 2014).As in the case of digital technological competence, the need to generate memorable experiences has entailed the need to defineand bring in a new professional in companies, known as the Chief Experience Officer, who is responsible for the customer experience of the brand. One of the main responsibilities of this post is to coordinate and give meaning to the action of various departments, such as R&D&I, Marketing, Operations and Customer or Sales Services. In addition, as customer experienceis multichannel, this experience must also be unified across a series of different media. Owing to the novelty and complexity of this new work, movements have already emerged in the market aimed at exploring and disseminating these new concepts, such as the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)in the United States, or the Asociación para el Desarrollo de la Experiencia de Cliente (DEC, Association for the development of customer experience) in Spain. The first of them already has a certification of its own, which involves mastering a number of competencies that are considered essential for professionals of this kind (CXPA, 2014).Communication and dialogue skillsCustomers seek products or services to incorpo- rate into their life stories and, accordingly, their identity, to the extent that they give meaning to their lives (Alcoba, J., 2014). This meaning is created above all by integrating the value propo-sition into the customer story, and therefore the ability to communicate is absolutely essential. The ability to generate clear, suggestive, motiv- ing messages that are, above all, aligned and identified with the activity and the brand upheld by the organisation is therefore essential – espe- cially bearing in mind that communication isno longer one-way, but that organisations and customers live in a constant dialogue in which organisations must not only speak but also know how to answer, ask and, above all, listen.Multidirectional communication means that the organisation must not only speak but answer, ask and, above all, listen.A computer graphic by OneSpot (2014) shows that American citizens consume more than 100,000 words every day and that 92% want brands to produce their advertising in the form of stories. Storytelling, branded content, content marketing and snackable content are new concepts that define the trends that are emerging in the world of communication (Azanza, M. et al., 2013). Classic advertisements have evolved towards a complex and multichannel narrative universe in which it is not a product but a story that reaches customers and with which theyare encouraged to identify and be part of. This communication is primarily one-way, becauseit goes from the brand to its customers, but the latter then return messages through the social media, at which point it becomes evident that communication is a genuine act of dialogue that involves two collective partners, an organisation and its customers.Jesús Alcoba