What matters to your customers? While product quality is an obvious answer, it isn’t just that anymore. The new battleground is customer experience.
After all, there are plenty of competitors in the market offering quality products at incredible prices. However, customer experience has become the new business differentiator.
With businesses across the globe realizing this, you aren’t just competing within your industry, but with experiences delivered by brands across segments.
If your customers have seen the exceptional quality of customer centricity when they buy from Amazon, that’s the expectation they have when they come to you. Despite businesses acknowledging the transformational power of CX, it’s surprising that many of the customers are still not as happy.
This experience disconnect is a direct indicator of the mismatched customer expectations and experiences. To ensure you leverage your insights, the first thing to understand is the impact of customer experience:
Why does Customer Experience matter?
When customers realize they are valued, companies win. But why has customer experience emerged to provide a competitive edge in a market of abundance?
The answer is simple: a great customer experience gives customers exceptional value for money. It builds trust and offers the certainty of reliability.
This leads to customers who talk about your brand, actively recommend it to others, and even come back to purchase some more.
Here are just some of the top advantages of investing in a great CX strategy:
Improved Loyalty
Customers who trust a brand are customers who stay loyal. At this point, price isn’t the key differentiator between your competitors, customer support and experience is!
As a consequence, you have customers willing to pay a significant premium, even when there are more competitive alternatives available in the market – just take a look at Apple!
The reasoning is simple.
Just like there is an acquisition cost for businesses, customers may need to put in additional effort to find alternate brands that match their needs. So when you don’t give them a chance to question/doubt your brand – why would your customers want to take the effort to look elsewhere?
Better Brand Reputation
Having a great relationship with your customers does more than inspire loyalty – it creates a great market reputation. Great experiences show customers they can rely on you, building trust and encouraging more promoters.
After all, great experiences get people talking.
And when customers have a personal recommendation (or even a raving review from a reputable site) they are more likely to trust your brand and confidently recommend it to others!
Increased Revenue
Increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase your total revenue by as much as 25-95%!
The reasoning is simple, customers who have had a positive brand experience are more likely to make a repeat purchase.
These are the customers more likely to purchase your newest launches, and even confidently recommend your brand to others – increasing their Customer Lifetime Value, and your revenue!
So if you’re wondering about the ROI of investing in a great CX strategy, just know that it’s big.
How to Ensure a Superior Experience
A great CX strategy can transform your business.
Despite knowing this, there remains a significant disconnect between what customers expect and what businesses provide.
The biggest global businesses understand this – and take steps to overcome the gap.
So, what are the common obstacles businesses face when setting up their CX strategy – and how can you optimize the strategy for the best outcome?
Trust the Numbers
It’s easy to go by what you perceive, but data-driven CX strategies can be significantly more effective at driving change (and loyalty!)
One of the first things to ensure is a consistent overview of the customer sentiment and experience across touchpoints. Use quick surveys and polls to capture data at critical milestones along the customer journey to assess the experience.
This will alert you to any experience gap and concerns early on.
Keep an eye on the changing patterns and trends to understand exactly what your customers are loving, and where you need to improve.
Focus on the Journey
With customer experience coming to the forefront, businesses have realized the importance of assessing key metrics at critical touchpoints.
While understanding how your customers are feeling at specific milestones has its merit, it doesn’t always show the complete picture. In order to create impact and ensure a positive experience, it’s essential to keep the journey in mind.
Take a step back to see the big picture and understand how the customer journey plays out. In doing so, you’ll get a better idea of obstacles and get early insight into experience gaps.
Get Personal
Want to really resonate? Make it personal!
In a market where customer retention is getting increasingly difficult, personalizing experiences ensures customers feel valued while also highlighting products that would resonate with their choices. This way you can make the right suggestions in a timely manner while remembering past interactions.
Amid the noise of competition, relevance and personalization help differentiate your business from the rest. However, getting it right is key.
When you’re keeping an eye on customer data (from past behavior to preferences), it’s essential to deliver value at every stage without taking it a step too far. By showing customers products and services specially curated for them, you can grab attention while ensuring that your content and products matter.
In Conclusion
A great customer experience isn’t created at touchpoints but is a constant effort in evolution. It combines a deep understanding of customer motivations and product offerings to create a cohesive, value-driven approach at every stage.
Building a CXM platform is essential in today’s business environment. If you need guidance in putting together a CXM platform that works for you, Sogolytics can help.
