Research conducted by American Express has revealed that 90% of customers are ready to spend more to have a better experience. Similarly, the Temkin Group has also published a report stating that companies earning $1 billion per year can make an additional $700 million in just 36 months after making appropriate investments in customer experience. Now, that’s a whopping 70% rise in revenue in 3 years.
90% of customers are ready to spend more to have a better experience.
In other words, organizations implementing a successful customer experience strategy achieve better customer satisfaction rates, lower churning, and enhanced earnings.
Sounds cool, right? Shockingly, less than half of companies plan to invest in customer experience in the coming year, and only 44% will take a step in the CX initiative.
So, how does this work? What is customer experience, and why is it so important for companies? Read on to find out:
Customer experience, or CX, includes the interactions and experiences your customer has while transacting with a company. It involves their journey from the first point of contact to becoming repeat customers. CX plays a significant role in customer relationship management. It holds significant importance because a customer with a positive experience with your company has a higher chance of becoming a repeat and loyal customer.
According to an Oracle study, 74% of senior executives agree that customer experience affects a customer’s will to be their dedicated advocate. So, companies should invest in their expertise to keep their customers loyal!
The happier customers are with your brand, the longer they stay. Hence, mistreating your customers or avoiding their service emails increases their chances of not transacting with you. Companies deliver a higher customer experience to outdo their competitors by focusing more on positive CX.
Why Positive Customer Experience? Why Now?
You’re on the right track if you see things from the same perspective. Today, the customer is king and works as a game changer for businesses. CX has become a significant concern for companies to become successful. Customers liking your service will continue with you and spread word of mouth, causing a positive brand image.
According to Gartner, 89% of companies wanted to compete on CX in 2016, compared to 36% five years earlier. 80-90% of consumers with poor experiences will never return.
Here are the best reasons stating the significance of a positive customer experience.
➡️ Enhanced customer reasons for satisfaction:
Companies focusing on enhancing customer satisfaction aim to work on the entire customer journey by ensuring a uniformly excellent and seamless customer experience at every touchpoint.
➡️ Better customer retention:
A positive customer experience is a blessing for companies and separates them from their competitors, resulting in better customer loyalty and higher retention.
➡️ Lower customer churn:
Price is not the primary reason for customer churn. Instead, poor customer service is.
➡️ Provides a competitive edge:
A higher customer experience gives you a significant competitive advantage. The major points of differentiation are low prices and a more pleasant customer experience.
➡️ Enhanced sales:
Customers are ready to transact more with companies that deliver a higher customer experience, which eventually enhances sales and earnings.
Why Is CX Paramount To Brand Image?
CX has a significant influence on your brand image. Here’s how.
As much as the branding experience leads to awareness, and your product quality converts prospects to customers, the customer experience retains them and avoids churn in this cut-throat competitive market.
CX demonstrates your brand value
A customer experience doesn’t just include offering the necessary support and resolving a query. The way you deliver customer experience describes the importance of your brands. Is the agent interested? Do they speak to you confidently? Are they efficient in resolving issues? These are all customer experiences that showcase your brand values.
Brands mandatorily work on their CX design to ensure complete uniformity. For instance, if Apple’s mission is to encourage simplicity and accessibility, it cannot be exhibited by its products only but also by support services. In addition to high-quality products, its support team communicates in simple language with potential clients and customers, offering the perfect balance between brand value and CX.
Virtual customer experience finds your branding content mix
Of course, brand building is also about the customer as much as it is about the company. You want to know the places where your customers visit and develop a brand-promoting campaign covering these areas.
If your customers are more on social media platforms, your support agents and branding should cover these spaces.
Branding is a promise; customer experience is the implementation
A negative CX will create a poor brand image, so you must carefully develop it through advertising and marketing. In the era of digitalization, one bad customer experience can cause immense damage. Thus, executing it right and living up to your brand’s promise is essential.
Role Of Customer Experience Management
Customer experience with a business includes customer perceptions and sales. It can be both positive and negative when some CMX elements are left unwelcome.
CMX is the exercise of enhancing the overall experience of a customer with your brand. It offers a bird’s eye view of the connection between the business and its customers. A positive CMX helps to make or break your business.
Check out its role:
Knowing and segmenting customers
You, as a brand, cannot enhance your CX until you know your customers well. It would help if you segmented them by age, purchase behavior, preferences, etc.
Segment your customers to acknowledge their customer journey and the problems they experience to prevent churning and enhance CX. Grouping customers by problem points will help improve your product and service.
An innovative CXM method will use these segmented profiles to segment better depending on their demographic data and help resolve their issues, making your product the best for every customer.
Customized experience and developing an emotional connection
Emotionally connected customers will become your brand’s advocates, but getting customers on board takes a personalized approach.
The idea is to get to know your customer to shape their journey by personalizing it. Customizing your customer service can help create an emotional link between your brand and the customer. Emotionally attached customers are loyal and will also promote your brand.
Increasing and actualizing customer feedback
As they connect, listening to the basis of a relationship and improvising how you attend to customer feedback is the key to enhancing CXM.
Pay attention to your customers’ feedback and assess them. Do not allow a customer experience gap. You can even automate it for better results.
There are different ways to address their feedback and interact with your customers.
Introduction to the Omnichannel Customer Experience
Multiple channels of communication with customers are the latest buzz for success. Customers who communicate with your brand through various touchpoints have higher chances of converting and becoming consistent customers.
It is essential to connect these touchpoints to deliver an omnichannel CX to enhance your customers’ interaction with your brand and boost sales.
An omnichannel customer experience allows a customer to contact your brand using multiple channels, enjoying a seamless customer journey. Promotions, sales, customer assistance, and store experiences are all calculated together so customers can go from one channel to another to finish their transactions.
For instance, a potential customer browses Facebook and sees a pair of shoe advertisements. They click and reach their Facebook store page and check out customer reviews.
Now the customer further clicks on the store website to order it. Sadly, the customer finds out their size is unavailable, so they click on the chat widget to speak to an agent about it. The agent says the product is in stock in their nearest store and reserves the shoe for the customer, which he gets the next day.
There are five touchpoints here. Every touchpoint is connected efficiently to the next one to offer a seamless customer experience to the customer.
So, the end goal is to offer positive CX and look for ways to improve it.
Remember, customers, don’t forget what you left feeling them with. A positive customer experience is essential to your business’s success because it helps convert a happy customer into a loyal one and boosts your revenue.
Word-of-mouth marketing is the best and most free marketing you can enjoy for your company, and it only comes from someone loyal to your company.
A positive customer experience is essential to the consistent growth of your business. It promotes loyalty, customer retention, and brand advocacy. Today, customers enjoy supremacy and power.
This is why offering a remarkable experience has become so important. But, you may experience a lot of challenges while doing so. It is essential to address these challenges.
CXM Challenges & How To Improve Them
Some challenges that CXM faces include:
✅ Inefficient customer data
✅ Improper omnichannel support
✅ Overlooking qualitative data
✅ Inadequate communication with the customer
Improving customer experience has an essential effect on your bottom line. Here are some tips to improve customer experience:
1️⃣ Begin with addressing your customer’s needs
It may be simple for companies to develop content picturing around their products and services. But you will find the checkpoints when you sit in your customer’s position and assess brands from their perspective.
When they visit your website, are you resolving your visitor’s pain points? Do you have a well-designed pathway to address their pain points? Do you know how your competitors handle these issues? Meeting your customer’s requirements and queries will help you map out their customer journey and generate better business results.
2️⃣ Know the genuine CX sentiment
In several cases, customer journey assessments, testing, and feedback don’t share their actual customer experience. They may share what is working well and what is not working well. But, a simple thumbs up or thumbs down cannot share the experience. Hence, you must gauge how your customers feel about the experience you offer.
Surveys work effectively but should be structured cautiously with the right questions. Choose open-ended questions as they offer the independence to write anything. They help identify issues and opportunities you didn’t even know existed.
On the other hand, multiple choice questions are simple to assess and quicker to fill out, but they restrict the respondent’s ability to answer.
3️⃣ Customize every customer experience
Chat windows open with an ordinary sentence, “How can I help you?” However, a higher and better CX would be a digital support team asking a question customized to what a customer is experiencing.
For instance, I see you have added a size 6.5 and a size 7 for your shoes in the cart. Do you need help in determining the perfect size? The chat will work better and deliver a more customized and personal experience.
4️⃣ Automate customer experience processes
Automation enhances CX. It lowers the challenges of human errors, optimizes workflows, and simplifies things. But is it possible with CXM, something tangible and abstract simultaneously?
A human may face difficulty assessing open-ended surveys and find measuring the efficiency of your customer experience processes tough. Every time it reduces to generalizations, available selections, and guessing.
However, this can be eliminated. Automation helps use relevant customer data to offer a complete view of how customers interact with you, what they get from that and which areas of experience require overhauling.
5️⃣ Make data a priority of your CX process to preserve customer centricity
One thing that has remained the same from the beginning of time is that the customers are the center of everything marketers do, especially when developing a customer experience. So, anything marketers add will impact their customer data, targeting strategy, streamlining, and audience dissection.
6️⃣ Use AI and ML for better experiences
2/3 of organizations reported using one enhanced technology for customer experience. Around 45% of those use AI for customer experience to boost sales per customer.
Digital marketers endeavor to make the most of testing and optimization tools and software decked with AI and ML. Virtual assistants, voice search, and conversational assistants offer better ways to reach customers, and many brands capitalize on these new-gen tools.
51% of companies lowered customer time to resolution using chatbots.
Best Examples Of Great Customer Experience Management
To show why a good customer experience is essential for a brand, here are some of the best examples of customer experiences from industry giants.
Disney’s Magic Band offers an omnichannel customer experience
Customers get electronic write bands in their mail once they buy a Disney World ticket. Firstly, it adds a surprise element right from the start of their customer journey. The wrist bands work as a digital storage space, key to their room, simplifies payment, and more.
Disney develops brand loyalty and encourages repeat customers by setting itself unique from such purchase moments offering an innovative and incredible CX to make their customers feel valued and customized throughout their journey.
Amazon’s delivery stations are all around
Since its launch, Amazon has focused on what its customers want: quick delivery and low effort. Amazon has opened thousands of delivery stations worldwide to narrow the distance between its fulfillment facilities and shipping points.
Amazon recognizes the significance of same-day or 6-hour delivery as its USP and is ready to invest money and time to enhance CX through this method.
Volvo’s AI, security, and customization work together
Volvo knows that nothing is more critical to customer experience in the automobile world than safety. Thus, its engineers developed a new OS that connects their cars worldwide, warning one another about accidents and bad road conditions.
It is a good way to win the trust of your customers and boost confidence in the Volvo brand without giving up aesthetics or drivability.
Apple’s a town square
According to the Senior Retail Vice President of Apple, the recent store layouts of Apple don’t just aim to sell things to people but work as a community hub with seating, eateries, and play space for kids, facilitating better face-to-face communication.
Apple aims to work on community building to promote on-site programming and education to youth. The company is transforming into an experience for its customers that its employees no longer refer to its store as stores but as town squares- a unique, vivid, and living community.
Zappos unique CX to sell shows
Because of the unique Zappos return policy, returns are thrice here than any other brick-and-mortar store. The company offers a 365-day return policy and two-way shipping, meaning it takes care of the returns but offers the confidence to its online customers that they need to shop with Zappos.
This is the perfect CX example, showcasing how a short-term sacrifice develops long-term customer loyalty and repeat business, paying them well in the long run.
HubSpot
After checking the conventional marketing and sales funnel, HubSpot developed its schema. It makes marketing, sales and service rotate proportionally around its customers.
When an industry majorly works around maxims and jargon, HubSpot emerged as a thought leader by developing its own.
It is an excellent move for a brand with B2B customers who come to it for help and expertise with critical areas of their business operations.
The above examples show that regardless of your business’s current situation, you always have a way to improve and enhance the value you offer to your customers.
Leveraging Tools To Improve CXM
A customer experience management strategy is incomplete without the right technologies to help it. Here are some significant technologies to support it.
Some companies may gain from developing their customer experience technology from fundamental software. For instance, a production company that records its global supply chain with an SAP ERP system may find adding an SAP customer experience tool better than beginning from scratch with a new vendor.
Some customer experience tools to improve CXM are listed here:
Personalization engines
A foundation tool for CX programs ahead of sales and service tools is a personalization engine that mechanizes interaction with customers on an individual basis. Personalization goals include technologies like location-based services and mobile marketing that make companies market where the customers are in real-time.
Automation tools
AI can significantly enhance CX in areas you can think of. AI automation tools are very helpful in managing customer experience, lowering human involvement in CX and fulfillment, and resolving complex issues easily.
Contact center software
This helps manage all inbound and outbound calls, but modern call center software goes ahead by offering advanced reporting, integrating speech analytics and call routing.
VOC
Voice of the customer software uses customer data from different sources and integrates it with the contact center of your brand to offer a nuanced perspective of customers’ feelings.
Emotional analytics
The tool measures whether customers benefit from their communication with the company. It helps assess the success of several operations linked to customer service like supply chain management.
Knowledge management
These tools and systems offer seamless customer service. Agents use knowledge management software to collect product data and interact with customers. Agent team this information with customer data and stock information to provide customers with the proper knowledge about the product.
Use Automation To Offer A Consistent And High-Quality CX
Automation can improvise, streamline, and standardize practices such as order processing, marketing, delivery, and post-sales assistance to help you deliver a consistent brand experience, meet customers’ expectations, and develop trust.
It also supports better customer communication and ensures they don’t get lost in the gap. For instance, if an email from a customer is received, the workflow is automated to be routed to the appropriate department and monitored till it is dealt with.
Automation also helps track business processes and collects insights to fine-tune things and enhance CX further.
Summing Up
Ignoring the potential for a positive customer experience will have a disastrous impact on your business. CX is getting more critical for brands, with every passing day influencing their standing and future in the market. Positive customer experience boosts retention and loyalty and drives repeat transactions.
CXM may appear to be a tough job, but once you’ve understood the fundamentals, it is all about staying aware, updated, and open to the demands of your customers. Seriously, things have become much easier now with social media and automation.
Furthermore, it is essential to treat customers as a priority. Respond politely and treat them with respect. Be ready to hear from them if you want them to listen. It may take time, but with the right CXM strategies, you can develop a two-way relationship effortlessly.
