Delivering the highest standard of customer experience (CX) is a proven means to enhance customer loyalty, brand status, and market share. While most businesses aspire to these outcomes universally, not enough are able to translate their intentions into capable and effective initiatives. Subsequently, their CX enhancement programs tend to lack the clear methodologies needed to succeed. However, with a little planning and careful considerations, any business can achieve customer experience excellence and deliver what their customers desire.
Organizations Continue to Recognize the Importance of CX
According to a recent Forrester survey, 32% of B2C and 23% of B2B CMOs identified delivering an enhanced customer experience as one of their top three business objectives. Perhaps the most definitive way to underscore just why there continues to be a heightened concern around CX is to bring some even more categorical statistics into the discussion.
A recent Gartner study found that 89% of B2B businesses expected to compete mostly in the realm of customer experience. Moreover, it’s not just businesses identifying the central role of CX and organisational success. According to the 2016 Kapost Customer Experience Benchmark Report, businesses with an enhanced CX experienced an increase in consumer purchases of more than five times their normal sales.
Given the competitive nature of the global marketplace, ignoring the vital role of CX can prove to be detrimental to a business’s bottom line.
Leveraging the Power of CX
When it comes to CX, one size does not fit all. For CX initiatives to be a true game changer, they must be custom-tailored to your specific organizational needs. And while having an established focus on CX is non-negotiable, it’s also important to realize that an unimaginative or generic CX strategy would probably prove inadequate.
The most successful enterprises differentiate themselves within their industry by developing a unique and impressive customer experience that attracts, impresses, and retains consumers. However, that’s not to say that you can’t learn from the success of other organisations. Market leaders across various industries have learned a great deal about successful customer experiences based on the first generation of CX programs.
Having established a precedent, these successful strategies have raised the bar for customer expectations. As such, future CX initiatives need to be more thoughtful, targeted, and in sync with the evolving needs of a customer base. Now more than ever, businesses need to anticipate emerging trends and align their customer experience initiatives accordingly. Not only will this attract customers, but it also allows businesses to create proactive engagement and true differentiation from their competitors.
Interpreting Trends and Leading Innovation in CX
When it boils down to it, customer experience is a matter of perception. In order to design a CX program that truly sets an organization apart from competitors, a business must place itself in the shoes of their target audience.
Every demographic of customers and every market segment, within each industry, has very specific and distinct needs. By addressing these specific requirements successfully, an enterprise can identify itself as being innovative, customer-focused, and in-tune with the future of its industry. This, of course, can prove to be a complex exercise. Consistently delivering a definitive customer experience that meets the needs of the customer goes far beyond strategy, and is the result of adopting a customer-centric business culture.
So how exactly can you determine if your CX strategies are on the right path? Market share and brand value are both great indicators of the success of a CX program. However, a business can become over-reliant on these parameters, causing them to second guess the implementation of their CX Strategy. A truly effective and transformative CX program needs to be based on a refined intuition about the customer base that a business is addressing. This requires subject matter expertise, insightful empathy for customers, and a sincere and driven commitment to excellence.
Kanari for Customer Experience Excellence
The modern consumer is highly empowered, acutely aware, and very vocal when it comes to their needs. What’s more, thanks to evolving technologies, more flexible engagement strategies and greater diversity in solutions, consumer needs, and requirements are in a constant state of change. By definition, implementing a successful CX program requires an agile, flexible and dynamic implementation that’s always cognizant of the fluid market forces and changing customer opinion.
A successful customer experience is focused on strategy and is often the direct result of a deserving company culture. Identifying, targeting, and bench-marking relevant performance metrics is a key factor to an effective customer experience enhancement program. Businesses that seek to truly optimize the returns on their CX strategy have to be dedicated to engaging their customers more insightfully than their competitors.
At Kanari, we are all about your customer and their experience. Our innovative customer experience management solutions provide a reliable, flexible, and scalable platform to help your company create better customer relationships. Contact a member of our team to schedule your customer experience management consultation.
