A compelling, positive customer experience with an organization is more important to customers than ever before. Just how important? It’s been reported that customers desire a great customer experience (CX) so much that 86 percent of consumers are actually willing to pay more for it.
CX is poised to remain a key brand differentiator in the coming years, perhaps even more so than the price of products and services or the quality of the products themselves. This information might be hard for some companies to digest if their primary focus is on providing premium goods and services or budget-friendly options. However, CX is more than just a passing fad; it’s shaping the landscape for how businesses across industries must operate in the days, months, and years ahead.
Additionally, brands should keep in mind that consumers have waning patience for poor customer experiences. In fact, 32 percent of customers will willingly abandon a beloved brand if they have just one negative experience.
With growing importance placed on creating a positive customer experience and with every interaction being a potentially deciding factor for customers, what must businesses know in order to craft winning CX strategies?
What Factors Into the Customer Experience?
Before looking at what makes a great customer experience (CX), it’s important to understand just what the term “customer experience” really means. In truth, CX is so expansive that it touches almost every department of an organization and each aspect of what they do.
Customer experience encapsulates everything that customers think, feel, and perceive about an organization based on how they interact with them. This includes the organization’s products and services and encompasses the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with the business. This starts before a purchase is made, continues throughout active use, and includes renewals and repeat purchases, as well as the end of the customer journey.
Here’s what some organizations fail to understand: All brands that interact with customers provide some kind of customer experience; they just might not realize it. After all, customer experience is all about what customers think and feel. Brands may believe they offer great products or services, but the ultimate decider is the customer, who forms an opinion based on their experience throughout the customer journey.
Nurturing a great customer experience is essential for businesses today, especially those looking to create sustainable growth. As HubSpot shared, “A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps you retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy.”
In our technology-driven, online society, customers have all the power. They have seemingly countless options available in just a few taps of their screen. They also have the resources to research organizations and make buying decisions long before they ever talk to someone in the company.
This is why it’s so crucial that brands put CX at the top of their priority list.
At first, CX can seem hard to fully manage. After all, there’s no telling what customers will think or how they will respond to a brand. Organizations should be prepared to examine every touchpoint throughout the customer journey to refine their customer experience to put the needs of customers first.
The Growing Emphasis on Customer Experience
Great customer experience is increasingly becoming not just critical to corporate growth strategies, but expected by consumers as well. Organizations and their leaders are taking notice and making moves to make CX a major focus at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.
In fact, according to one survey, 87 percent of business leaders here in the US and the UK chalk CX up as being their primary growth engine. This near-unanimous acceptance of CX as a critical driver of growth is only increasing as digital transformation continues to surge.
So, what is the connection between customer experience and digital transformation? The answer lies in the way businesses relate to their customers and clients, and how this relationship is evolving. There are more technologies available to create and manage customer relationships, and more ways to nurture great customer experiences.
With digital transformation gaining more and more steam, organizations must find ways to leverage these new tools to create robust, digitally-supported CX protocols.
The reason more and more organizations are placing greater emphasis on CX? Customers are the ones calling for it. In this overwhelmingly digital age, customers have seemingly countless choices at their disposal. If they have a negative experience, they can take their business elsewhere. And if they find a solution that’s more welcoming or better suited to their needs, they don’t have to stay loyal to one organization.
Just one negative experience has the potential to turna customer off from an organization for good. In fact, in a global survey of 4,200 consumers, 65 percent of survey participants shared that they would abandon a digital service if the sign-up process was unpleasant or too challenging.
Customers want, and often expect, a seamless experience. But all too often, they deal with a fractured ecosystem that’s filled with broken journeys and hurdles that today’s customers don’t want to work to overcome. Having a CX that’s not just effortless, but also convenient and welcoming for customers is more important than ever before.
Building a Strategy for an Exceptional Customer Experience
At the moment, many organizations are focused on creating great CX strategies because they know that with a great CX comes trust. Forbes points out that this is important because when customers trust businesses, they are more likely to be willing to share data.
Data
Data is the key here. Technology—fueled by lots and lots of data—creates a plethora of ways for organizations to create memorable, positive customer experiences by levering personalization, omnichannel communication, and AI-powered knowledge. As technology becomes more and more advanced, companies will invest more in data-driven solutions designed to improve the overall customer experience. However, investing more doesn’t always lead to the outcomes companies desire, especially if that data remains holed up in disparate systems that don’t share information among themselves. When that happens, each team only sees a tiny slice of a customer’s interaction when what best serves the customer –and the organization is having a comprehensive and holistic view of a customer and their journey. When everyone is working with a shared view, seeing key touchpoints and even areas of friction or confusion, better decisions about how to help customers can be made.
Data is such an essential part of modern CX that 63 percent of marketing professionals report that it’s critical to enhancing their CX. When this data is captured, stored and visible to everyone involved in the experience, it can help craft CX strategies that are:
● Predictive
● Prescriptive
● Proactive
With today’s most cutting-edge CXM platforms, like OvationCXM’s CXMEngine, businesses can use data to make CX decisions in real time to offer personalized experiences that lead to greater success and satisfaction. Besides data, what are other tools and strategies that organizations can use to build winning CX strategies?
Humanization
Customer experience today isn’t just about creating touchpoints that feel personalized, they should also feel human. This is especially true of Gen X and Gen Z consumers who show deep preferences for humanized interactions with brands.
This doesn’t mean that businesses need to toss artificial intelligence (AI) to the curb. In fact, it’s been reported that 50 percent of consumers are open to AI interactions, and 26 percent interact with these kinds of solutions daily. But, these interactions must be empathetic and have a human feel to contribute to a positive CX experience, even when interactions are automated. This means making choices like opting for more intelligent chatbots that are as human as possible.
Cross-Device Experiences
In August of 2022, it was estimated that 59.4 percent of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. This means that an integral part of today’s CX strategies must include positive experiences on all devices, not just desktop or laptop computers.
Organizations hoping to connect with consumers through great CX should consider that in many cases, these experiences happen on the go. What’s more, 42 percent of consumers expect a seamless experience from device to device. CX must account for multiple screen sizes, different kinds of devices, and a responsive user experience (UX).
Service Options
Even in a world where 50 percent of consumers are fine interacting with AI-like chatbots—which can be quite helpful and very effective—we still want to talk to people if we choose. A lot of this likely stems from the fact that people want to feel heard, so companies that can solve problems quickly in the customer’s preferred channel can jump over competitors who struggle with CX.
Maximizing the effectiveness of customer service representatives so the information they need and the capacity to help a customer at the exact moment they need it can positively impact CX and revenue. With informed, empathetic frontline service representatives, organizations can see revenue between 4 and 8 percent above the rest of their market.
Customers also like having options, and they like to handle things themselves when they can. Tools like self-service portals are widely appreciated by consumers, 88 percent of whom expect businesses to offer a self-service portal so they can roll up their sleeves and address issues on their own.
The Bottom Line: Great CX Means Always Putting Customers First
At the end of the day, there are countless tweaks and plenty of adjustments that can be made to improve CX. But all of this fine-tuning only amounts to so much without true, organization-wide alignment over one very simple idea:
The focus should always be on the customer.
Whether it’s sales, marketing, engineering, or technology, each department can only make so much difference in CX. It’s when entire organizations start working together, with a clear focus on putting CX before everything else, that businesses can really make an impact.
CX is only going to continue to grow in importance, which means that organizations need streamlined solutions to foster CX alignment and unity across departments and even across the ecosystem with third-party providers.
One customer experience tool that’s changing the game for CX is OvationCXM, an all-in-one CX management tool that unifies data from different internal and external systems, from the core to a CRM to a third-party platform, and makes it visible in one place for the teams that support customers. Satisfied customers lead to outstanding business outcomes.
At OvationCXM, we connect all of your customer’s interactions into a single screen. You can track and guide each customer’s journey, make decisions in real-time, and prevent problems before they happen.
We are the first CXM platform purposely designed to guide and fix customer experiences in the moment so you can celebrate customer success while driving significant financial benefits to your business. Ready to discover what we can do for you? Contact us today to see Ovation’s CXMEngine in action.
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