In 2022, just as pandemic restrictions eased and businesses returned to regular operations, the economy took a dive and threw businesses into a whole new set of challenges - including heightened customer experience expectations that are also in constant motion.
We sat down with our founder and CEO, Chip Kahn, and our President, Tim Attinger, and asked them for their insights on the state of customer experience management (CXM) in 2022 and what they predict for 2023. How did customer experience and customer journey orchestration change in 2022? And what’s ahead for CXM in 2023, especially in a turbulent economy?
How would you describe customer experience in 2022?
Chip Kahn: I believe 2022 was the year that the whole customer journey was recognized as something important and that it’s essential to have a holistic view of a customer across both products and journey types.
We're seeing many enterprises place attention on customer journeys by designating dedicated people and teams with related titles who are responsible for the end-to-end customer experience. That train has left the station. There's only going to be more attention to customer journeys and CX going forward.
What is your perspective on the current state of customer experience, especially in this uncertain economic time?
Chip Kahn: I think it becomes more important than ever to be proactive with your customers. A lot of today’s customer experience management is about the voice of the customer and evaluating what happened with them after the fact by asking, “Were you satisfied with the work we did?” Well, that is often too late.
Next-generation CXM has to be about delivering in the moment, in real-time, to make sure you don't have unsatisfied customers or lose them.
In our own research, we discovered that 3 out of 4 businesses walked away from a bank onboarding because it was too frustrating, so it’s a significant issue. In a recession, especially, a company’s most valuable asset is its existing customers, so you don’t want to find out later that a touchpoint on a customer’s journey went poorly. Instead, the newest customer experience management platforms, like CXMEngine, help companies deliver a customer journey that's ideal from the CUSTOMER’S perspective the first time.
Tim Attinger: Market leaders take advantage of rough economic times to drive even more deeply into their markets because there's an opportunity to take advantage of the failures of others to solidify their position. What does that failure of others look like? It is ALWAYS related to a bad customer experience.
If you are driving great outcomes for your customer, you're going to increase the penetration of your existing portfolio with more products. You're going to make yourself stickier to those clients. In the economic headwinds that everyone is facing in this downturn, it’s a requirement for companies to get the customer experience right.
There is no lower cost position in any industry than a satisfied customer, period. So you've got to hang on to the ones you've got, and the really good, customer-centric businesses are going to increase their share of their business in the customer bases they're serving today by winning on CX.
By retaining those customers as we come out of the downturn, they’ll have a pretty significant lead over others in the industry who may have recognized the CX challenge but haven't solved for it.
Looking ahead to 2023, where do you see customer experience and CXM going from here?
Tim Attinger: As we look forward to 2023, we have to start by looking back at 2022. We saw success achieved by several market leaders who drove into the marketplace through a partnership-driven, embedded finance solution structure. I think we're going to see more ecosystem delivery in 2023, where the strategy is to take best-of-breed services from the marketplace to my client base, but make it feel like my experience.
We will see more distributed delivery and distributed ecosystem management and the opportunities or challenges that come with that. That will depend on how business managers manage the dynamic interchange between their providers, the enterprise and their customers.
Chip Kahn: Yes, like Tim said, looking ahead, ecosystem collaboration, communication and visibility are all things that will be top-of-mind for customer experience management.
One example is embedded banking, where services are moved into the software that businesses use every day. In that delivery, there could be four or five businesses helping your enterprise serve your customer, for example your own legacy systems, infrastructure from an API perspective, software and third parties that deliver products, like tokens for instance. This has to come together into a seamless experience for the customer or they will receive a disjointed customer journey, (which businesses named as their #1 top CX frustration when it came to banking). It’s a growing CX concern that fundamentally requires an orchestration layer.
Learn more about how CXMEngine orchestrates customer journeys and connects businesses to their ecosystems for more seamless customer experiences.