In the battle to gain a competitive advantage, customer experience has become a primary focus among enterprises.
Focusing on customer experience (CX) is widely accepted as a critical component of gaining and maintaining market share. Additionally, enhanced customer experience ensures optimal business performance and increased profitability. Over the past few years, a wide range of metrics has emerged to process feedback and measure the extent to which businesses are addressing the needs of their customers. Nevertheless, it can sometimes be difficult for businesses to make the leap from exaggerated strategic emphasis to specific actionable initiatives and measures designed to help deliver an enhanced customer experience.
Key changes in customer behavior are adding to the benefits of delivering enhanced customer experience. A 2017 Salesforce study found that 50% of contemporary customers are likely to take their business to a market competitor if they perceive a business will not anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations. Future projections for customer experiences are even more dramatic. A recent PWC study predicts that by 2020 89% of customers will shift to companies providing better customer experience and engagement.
Omni Channels and Online Forums
Advances in technology and the internet make it easier for your customers to engage with one another in real-time. This can work for or against your company. The rise of online forums and social media customer reviews also amplifies the downside of failing to provide satisfactory customer experience. As Jeff Bezos once prophetically noted in the early days of the internet, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
When you provide an enhanced CX, you can leverage the power of positive exposure to your advantage. Omnichannel engagements and orientation make it easy for customers to define and use their preferred points of connections and access to engage with their service providers. In fact, 57% customers prefer companies who can be reached via mail, chat, video chat, and social media platforms compared to businesses using traditional means of voice-based customer support. In order to attract and retain your customers, you need to provide them with the enhanced CX they demand.
Customer Intelligence is Key to Delivering a Great Customer Experience
In order for your organization to deliver the personalized experiences your customers demand, it’s crucial to have an effective methodology to transform raw data into tangible and actionable insights. Understanding and defining your customer’s expectations within each demographic is the most effective way to use your data to create a truly enhanced customer experience. Targeted and appropriate actions can only be mapped onto highly distinct segmentation. Furthermore, discrete partitioning of raw data allows you to process data in a methodical way, which allows for the identification of useful and usable trends.
Whether at a segment level or in the case of individuals, blind spots in customer understanding can make it difficult for your organization to identify, let alone address, your customer needs. On one hand, any business that caters to a broad range of demographics, a generalized, non-specific initiative to attempt to raise standards in customer experience would attract significant investments. Furthermore, such a measure would likely prove highly ineffective, even running the risk of not actually addressing the specific needs of any demographic at all.
The Importance of Humanizing Data to Enhance CX
Customer experience includes every interaction your customer has with your brand and organisation. Across every stage of their journey, these interactions will shape their overall perception of your company. When your company creates a positive customer experience, they will be more likely to use your products and services.
By definition for such an outcome to be optimal, it needs to be addressed through interactive and proactive engagement. Ultimately, providing CX is essentially about caring. Rather than simply streamlining processes and enabling transactions, enhanced customer experience is the result of creating an emotional connection. While such fundamental aspects of delivering quality services are crucial to ensuring great CX, businesses require a more concrete understanding of their customer to deliver enhanced experiences based on their insights.
Therein lies the conundrum. Emotional connections are slightly imperfect and can be hard to quantify and understand. This emotional connection can sometimes prove intimidating for an organization to achieve. However, with a few simple steps, a business can orient its customer experience enhancement initiatives.
- Start by developing appropriate demographic segments to understand and anticipate the needs of your customers. Collating and rationalizing your customer interactions data and smart touchpoints is a critical component to delivering an enhanced CX.
- To better understand your customer, you must effectively process and integrate quality voice-of-the-customer (VoC) data. VoC is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. VoC programs have gained traction over the years and are fast-growing segments of a core business strategy for organizations. A recent Aberdeen Group study found that best-in-class VoC programs generate a 10x increase in revenue year on year compared to other programs.
- Ensure that the structure and hierarchy of your organization reflect the priorities of your customers. To one extent or another, most businesses are modular. It’s crucial that the functions, teams, and organizational elements of your enterprise are optimized according to the customer experience it needs to deliver.
Achieve Organizational Success with Enhanced CX
Despite the overarching attention that customer experience is attracting, organizations often fall short of the goals CX management initiatives are seeking to achieve. As an intuitive function, mere budgets and data collection often fall short of their ultimate goals. Gaining an understanding of how your organization is perceived by your customer is crucial to the success and growth of your organization. This process requires listening well and empowering empathetic intuition by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.
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.
