Customer Experience (CX) Management has played an increasingly important role in maintaining brand relevance and market share. There are plenty of statistics available to showcase the potential value of investing in a strong CX Strategy; however there’s no available blueprint for guaranteed CX success.
Upon review of supporting statistics, most can agree on the importance of a CX Strategy but few are accurately connecting the dots. As a result, investing in a misaligned customer experience may result in still unsatisfied customers causing some brands to abandon the CX effort altogether. This is a mistake.
Let’s take a look at some statistics in favor of investing in CX Strategy and consider what’s behind the numbers; the underlying questions companies should ask themselves before diving in.
“The revenue impact from a 10 percentage point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion.”
(Forrester Business Impact of Customer Experience, 2016)
Before discussing ways to improve the customer experience a brand must ask itself, do I fully understand the individual elements that make up the experience of my customers?
Obviously, anything producing a revenue spike of that magnitude is worth considering. While one’s attention understandably drifts toward the dollar amount, of greater importance are the details behind a 10 percentage point customer experience score improvement.
Without a detailed customer journey map covering every phase of the sales cycle, from consumer awareness to retention, experiential adjustments will be based on guesses and presumptions; not data-driven insight. On top of that, brands must consider direct and indirect interactions with consumers across all mediums, from online shopping to in-store purchases. The modern consumer expects consistent omni-channel experiences which are impossible to address from a bird’s-eye view.
The full value of tracking customer satisfaction and applying results to CX Strategy is only achieved when the customer experience is broken down into its most basic elements; at which point data-driven insights translate to action items which produce the desired result of increasing revenue.
“60% of organizations see that customer service will be the top source of competitive differentiation in the next three years.”
(The Service Council’s Service Transformation: The Business Case, 2016)
While CX Strategy is clearly an increasingly popular industry trend, individual companies must ask themselves, how does CX Strategy apply to OUR business and how can we best use this approach to satisfy OUR customers?
It’s no surprise that companies are taking notice of industry leaders’ successes through positive customer experiences. Recognizing CX as having potential for differentiation and advantage is easy; understanding how to strategize and achieve such results is not.
Here’s another way to look at it; when the online marketplace began to boom the early adopters gained a huge advantage over its competitors. Eventually, as the late adopters joined in they realized simply being present in the online space wasn’t enough. They needed a unique strategy suited to their own customers’ wants and needs to fully leverage the value of this online medium.
Similarly, with 60% of organizations focused on CX as a key differentiator, we are likely to see that number increase as industry competitors hop on board. But the only way to find success through CX Strategy is to understand the unique wants and needs of each company’s respective targeted customers, then apply that understanding when creating unique customer experiences.
“86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience, but only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations.”
(Forbes, 2016)
There’s a clear opportunity to gain market share by simply offering customer’s the experience they want. But each industry is different and each customer within that respective industry wants different things. Companies should be asking themselves, which area of our customer’s experience offers the best opportunity to meet their expectation? Furthermore, how would our customers define a ‘better experience?’
Again, to leverage this opportunity there must be an understanding of who the customers are and what they are looking for. The idea of a “better customer experience” is a subjective phrase, and the only ones who can offer an accurate definition are the individual customers themselves.
Without clearly knowing customer expectations with certainty, there’s little chance of fulfillment. It appears easy to build upon 1% of customers, however if it were easy then the initial number would likely be higher than 1%. Modern consumers have fleeting wants and needs based on the ever-changing world around them. The only way to keep up is to regularly ask customers what they want and maintain an agile CX approach allowing for adjustments on the fly.
Each of the statistics listed above have one main thing in common; companies have to know their own customers experiences before they can effectively improve the customer experience. It sounds obvious, but it is complicated in its simplicity.
Whether the goal is increased satisfaction scores, revenue, or market share, the effort toward an effective CX Strategy starts by understanding the elemental details of the modern customer’s omni-channel experience.
By tracking and bench-marking key metrics, companies are able to monitor how specific experiential adjustments impact their customer’s satisfaction, and ultimately provide experiences as unique as their customers.
To read more on the value of investing in Customer Experience Management, click here.
For details on how your company can maximize results with a strong CX Strategy, give us a shout. For over 30 years we’ve equipped our clients with the data-driven insights needed to understand their customer’s path to purchase and how these insights can be applied to improving the customer’s experience.
