It is not uncommon for individuals to state that they have gone above and beyond to solve a customer’s problem. In this way, businesses could link customer service to customer experience as they have reacted to a customer’s issue. However, it is essential to realise that customer service is just a facet of a holistic customer experience strategy. While customer service is essential, it is a reactive action by a business and usually means that it does something memorable only when something goes wrong.
Instead, customer experience is about connecting with customers in every moment, whether big or small. It is about educating yourself about your customers’ evolving expectations so that you can provide them with an exceptional experience wherever and whenever they need it. To become what your customers need, you need to put them first. This is even more vital in a post-covid world where customers have started to expect more in terms of service, value, and convenience.
Research from PwC highlights that 41% of individuals shop daily or weekly through a mobile phone. As this figure was at 30% six months ago and 12% five years ago, it shows that customers will continue to demand digital experiences after the pandemic. This fact is also supported by a study that showed that 90% of US patients would prefer telemedicine for non-urgent issues, even after the pandemic.
Unfortunately, even though customers expect an exceptional CX at all times, those currently offered by most brands have not lived up to their expectations. Only 8% of customers agree that businesses currently provide a superior customer experience. This is the case even though a Deloitte study demonstrated improving CX is high on a company’s agenda as 75% of business executives wanted to improve personalization, innovation, customer connection and inclusion. Even established companies like Apple can get it wrong as they produce products that do not meet their customers’ needs in terms of price and comfort.
So how have some companies triumphed where others have failed? They have put customers first through tangible actions and proof, at every moment, not just at the touchpoints where things go wrong. As customers re-define their experience with a brand every time they interact with them, it is vital to delight customers to help them remember you.
Rather than relying on touchpoints, you need to use technology to monitor and track all customer interactions so that you can surprise them with offers and services that no one else has thought of. In other words, your business needs to move away from focusing on transactions to digital transformation so that it can use technology to change a company’s mindset, culture and processes.
The need for a human-centric, connected CX develops
As the need to create customer-centric experiences grows, so do customers experience management platforms. Recently, Sprinklr, an AI-based CX tool, launched in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace to give brands more of an opportunity to unify all business teams so that they could create better experiences for customers together. As a result of this partnership, AWS customers can now consolidate their billing and procurement data in one place to be analyzed by Sprinklr to produce more valuable experiences.
Additionally, CloudSmartz, an intelligent digital CX platform provider called Acuman360, joined forces with LastMileXChange to improve real-time carrier pricing and enhance the sales customer journey for communication service providers (CSP’s). This partnership allows CSP’s to transform their organization with a CX platform that will enable them to quickly design, sell, introduce, and configure new services while reducing internal costs and purchasing with one click.
Apart from the various CX management platforms highlighting the continued growth of the CX industry, brands like Southwest Airlines have also demonstrated that they can put the needs of customers before decisions related to finance and operations. For example, during the 2007- 2009 recession, they opted to not charge a fee for passengers to check their luggage in. While other US-based airlines charged this fee to offset fuel price increases during this time, Southwest did the opposite. This was because they wanted to stick with the overall ethos of the brand, which was to provide an affordable, simple flying experience. This passenger-friendly approach was a hit with customers as this action resulted in Southwest gaining $1 billion a year in market shares as their customers wanted to avoid baggage fees.
Similarly, after studying their different marketing channels and determining what their customers wanted, Eli Lilly used technology to create personalized pilot tests that allowed them to achieve small wins linked to successes their customers cared about. As a result, these experiments improved Eli Lilly’s ROI to between 12% to 35%. Moreover, this brand wanted to put the customer at the center of everything they did by creating a unified team of technologists, marketers and other specialists to work holistically to monitor interactions and predict what customers needed.
Lastly, after discovering that their users wanted more than fitness apps, Adidas launched the Hometeam Hero Challenge, which aimed to donate $1 to the World Health Organization (WHO) each time a user worked out in support of key health works and researchers working during the pandemic. This action resulted in a 240% year-on-year demand for their Runtastic app. On one day, it reached 600%! These results cemented the thought that Adidas’s customers wanted to connect with a brand that offered a great purpose.
From a problem-solver to an advocate
To be a customer advocate in all moments, start by adopting a strategy for a unified customer engagement process across your business. In this way, you can move from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach. Next, create a real-time data source across a customer’s journey and train all employees to recognise the importance of a single source of customer data.
Once they get into the habit of using and feeding into one source of data, they can also be trained on continually sourcing feedback from customers for this source to improve the quality of data. Then, power a customer-centric transformation by using technology to analyze customer data to identify sources of friction so that you can continually improve experiences through cross-functional teams who always act in the customer’s best interest.