Customers now have more purchasing options than ever before. They also want to do things their way and want brands to accommodate them. When choosing between brands, more buyers are putting experiences first. As a result, narrowing the customer experience (CX) gap between what customers anticipate from their experiences and how effectively a company believes it’s achieving those expectations is becoming increasingly important.
Studies show that providing factual marketing, care, and commerce experiences across all touchpoints while always putting the needs of your consumers first can have a significant influence on your bottom line.
- Customers are willing to pay more for a positive purchasing experience.
- Customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than non-customer-centric businesses.
- According to business leaders, prioritizing employee pleasure offers organizations a competitive advantage and makes it simpler to retain talent.
The Temkin Group found that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within three years of investing in customer experience. Specifically, SaaS companies can expect to increase their revenue by about $1 billion. Investing in CX initiatives has the potential to double your payment within 36 months. A good CX means your customers will spend more. 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
According to research from PWC, customers are willing to pay up to 13% (and as high as 18%) for luxury and indulgence services to receive a great customer experience. CX also influences on-the-spot purchasing, as 49% of buyers have purchased impulsively after receiving a more personalized experience. But the most convincing reason CX has become so important, according to a Walker study.
Understanding New Consumer Expectations
Organizations must understand their customers’ demands and exceed their expectations to compete. Here are some expectations that are reshaping the business landscape.
- Customers expect journeys to be connected, so dismantle your company’s silos.
- Customers anticipate constant interactions across departments from 76% of companies, while 54% believe sales, service, and marketing departments don’t share information.
- Customers have used numerous channels to initiate and complete transactions in 74% of cases, and they expect customization, so they personalize everything.
- Customers want offerings to be tailored all the time, up from 49% in 2019.
- Customers expect businesses to understand their specific requirements and expectations, but 66% think they’re often treated like statistics.
- Customers expect new ideas and continue to push the envelope.
Due to COVID-19, 88% of customers want enterprises to accelerate digital investments. In the aftermath of the epidemic, 69% of customers feel corporations should offer new ways to obtain existing products and services, while 54% believe they should offer wholly new products and services.
What’s the Importance of Customer Experience?
Customer experience matters. The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer but maintaining and managing them is difficult. 50% of customers will decrease their spending with the company after one single bad experience. If they share their bad experience on social media, on review sites, or by word of mouth, the company loses its reputation, and it’s a chance to close the business brand. Most successful companies capitalize on the secret by improving CX with companies that are many people more likely to recommend and potentially repurchase things.
The most important thing is that CX doesn’t start with the customer – it begins with the employee. A happy employee can have a good experience with the customer. That’s why companies are more careful in taking care of employees’ experience. CX results from every customer’s interaction with our business, from surfing the products from the website to receiving products and product quality and service from us. With their experience, we can develop our brand to the next level and rectify some mistakes to improve the customers’ comfort level or what they expect from our business.
A positive command from CX promotes allegiance, helps us withhold customers, and boosts business support. That’s why customer experience is an essential topic to discuss. Though some questions/doubts, we get some knowledge about customer experience, and in this way, we savvy, how to build customer experience and its strategy or tips.
For example – we must know the difference between the same-day delivery versus waiting for an extended period. Offering same-day delivery might have seemed impossible just a few years ago. Many firms regarded it as too costly and complicated to implement, but it’s now considered a standard of customer service.
- Walmart is testing a same-day delivery service in collaboration with Uber, Lyft, and Deliv.
- Postmates has partnered with American Garment and Everlane, an online apparel shop, to deliver clothes in 60 minutes or less.
- Amazon’s same-day delivery service is now available in major urban regions, and the business is expanding the service to new locations.
At the same time, Amazon is also working with NASA on prototypes to develop its delivery drone system to deliver packages directly to its customers. However, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations and safety concerns make drone deliveries a thing of the distant future. The emergence of self-driving cars seems to be a more viable opportunity for businesses to use automation for same-day delivery and instant gratification to customers.
Recently, Anheuser-Busch and Otto of San Francisco, the self-driving trucking startup acquired by Uber, made the world’s first fully self-driving truck delivery, delivering 50,000 cans of Budweiser from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Colorado Springs. Consumer behavior is evolving and is willing to pay for its convenience.
According to a Boston Consulting Group survey, 50% of US shoppers use same-day delivery for last-minute gifts. And if you need to convince its importance, consider the following: 40% of consumers said they’d abandon their online shopping cart if they couldn’t deliver gifts and flowers on the same day. Then we must know the differences between the captured picture and collect vs. in-store purchase, direct visualizing and waiting to see, self-checkout vs. waiting in line, and self-support vs. it being put on hold.
Why Companies Need to Rethink CX Strategy?
Design or create a high-level customer strategy based on the data collected, then clarify the self-service journey of different customers to understand the flow of conversation. Also, consider your personal self-service experience when deciding to travel to customer service. Determine channel support based on these customer service processes. Make the right decisions to understand better how escalation occurs when you move from self-service to a supported channel. Based on your research into current technology gaps, look for a fast and reliable solution to support your multichannel strategy.
Leveraging customer journey analysis: Complete knowledge of the customer journey process flow is critical to the enterprise as it helps improve future and current interactions. Special analytics tools help businesses understand how they interact with cross-channel customers. In addition, organizations need to adopt the concept of customer engagement hubs to manage better the channels and analytics they receive. Customers moving from one track to another may indicate serious problems such as agent availability, technical errors, or channel failures. Recognizing these issues helps enterprises improve their services while providing an opportunity to prioritize the need for priority channels.
Pillars for Your CX Strategy:
A CX strategy supported by these pillars of customer experience embraces customer centricity and will help your business. Creating great customer relationships requires this universal set of qualities.
- Align: Align your organization and teams with the CX journey.
- Personalize: Make sure that every customer is addressable in a personalized manner.
- Build: Create an experience-based architecture that delivers performance.
- Deliver: Don’t fake it or over-promise – meet your customer expectations.
- Consistent: Stay consistent and reliable across your customer base.
- Team #1: Build and train your team that will define your success.
- Efficiency & Effectiveness: CX should drive quick and better value to your customers.
- Technology: Implement the right digital and technology platforms.
- Be Human: Mistakes happen and customers appreciate good communication.
- Innovate: The market, industry, and technologies are changing.
- Embrace Agility: Adopt an agile mindset
- Connected: Be available 24×7
Future of CX Strategies:
- The circle of change is fast. Over the next 5-10 years, customer experience will be a continuous line of stabilizing brand objectives and customer relationships in unprecedented disorder.
- CX’s progress is gaining momentum as companies tackle fundamental issues like data debt and frontline revitalization.
- The CX is essential for brands to avoid mediating, irrelevant, conspiracy, and ignorance of their customers’ emotions.
- As the CX’s mission becomes more critical and complex, the CX team must be tasked with changing operating models, operating CX signals in real-time, and driving revenue and margin growth.
My Thoughts
Data is a clear differentiator when it comes to defining your CX. Data-based strategy and decisions are beneficial to improve and build a company towards success. This CX may be valuable to rectify business mistakes according to customers’ needs. Consistency is more critical to maintaining good customer experiences. We should make sure that the quality of our materials is high, and it should satisfy customers. Research shows that increased customer satisfaction leads to more excellent customer retention, higher lifetime value, and a more substantial brand reputation.
Be transparent and clearly articulate the benefits or issues with your products so that it helps your customers to understand your products. Build your CX based on a system and platforms built towards performance. CX is critical for any business to succeed and drives customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price. Remember that your customers and not YOU define CX.