Customer Experience - Why is it hard to build a reliable Strategy?
Customer Experience (CX) has been a buzzword for several years and is expanding its presence more than ever. It is making people rethink their business structures and how efficiently or poorly they are connected to their customers. And not just that, CX decides the fortune for businesses to grow beyond the customer service industry benchmarks. As per a study by PWC, 73% of people point to customer experience as a vital factor and also help people decide between buying options. If I ask you when was the last time you had a remarkable customer experience. It probably won’t take you too long to describe the impression of service that left you happy and satisfied. And the same goes for the poor customer experience too, like how you felt after the service that made you angry, annoyed or helpless. Today, we are living in an always-connected consumer ecosystem. As a result, the customers need to be heard, seen and feel good with every service they get. Therefore, it becomes essential to be at par with the expectations of modern customers and maintain deep connections with them.
The businesses across the world have different strategies, opinions, and frameworks to operate but what makes them stand apart in the competition is their planning and customer experience strategies. CX encompasses every aspect of a company’s offering such as the quality of customer care, product and service features, ease of use, and reliability. Your customers may have demands that you don’t know. They want the design of your website and mobile app to be user-friendly.
Customers want automation to ease the experience but these technological advancements are not meaningful if speed, convenience and the right information are lacking. However, technology is not the last solution but can be an enabler in boosting up customer experience journey. More innovative ideas, human touch and interaction, great employee experience can reduce friction for consumers and empower employees to bring higher customer satisfaction even if things slightly go wrong. Creating a cohesive strategy is a key step to create a customer experience that engages and persuades customers. However, customer experience leaders face challenges while bringing out that strategy and making it a reality. To build a unique customer experience, a company must understand that how it performs distinctively in the market. CX strategy makes an organization deliver an exemplary experience that not only inspires, aligns, and guides but brings innovation, energy, and a human face to what would otherwise just be a strategy.
Thus, what challenges make it hard to construct a good customer experience strategy? The following factors might help you to stop things going wrong.
Lack of information management How can you improve something if you don’t have any access to the current data? It’s similar to solving the problem without collecting the facts of the equation. Lacking information about the organization’s key operations and how teams work slowly can simply lead to a defect in customer experience. Having everything in one place makes it easier to understand what is vital and what isn’t informative. For a CX strategy to be successful, it must be grounded in data.
Managing an omnichannel experience Modern consumers, ultra-modern expectations! They want to shop in a manner that is most convenient to them such as check the availability of items in-store while being at home and then complete purchase. Similarly, shoppers will surely want to try out items in a store but buy them later online. Managing the accessibility and ease of this type of experience is something that top CX leaders aren’t quite sure they’re prepared for. All things not just get limited to technology but it should be the amalgamation of digital plus human touch. Every business organization must have a holistic approach to the purchasing decisions of the customers.
Blake Morgan, a CX futurist and a keynote speaker for Customer Experience strategies says that "The future of CX is around providing tailored and personalized customer experiences and customers want you to know them. With the advanced data and personalization, we should be able to provide personalized and omnichannel experiences to the customers. As more companies would figure out how to do this, in the future, customers will demand it more or simply leave.
Little and slow CX investment Customer experience strategists have to convince the decision-makers of their companies to invest fast enough to stay at a quick pace with technological advancements. This is because it can be difficult to get momentum behind initiatives that require more effort to prove the Return on Investment (ROI). Lack of understanding and sponsorship, being a significant issue reveals that it’s not that the companies don’t want to move forward with CX strategy, it’s that they don’t know how to.
Departmental silos CX is a team sport and playing it in a scattered way cannot really make major benefits to the business. This means it isn’t managed or controlled only by the marketing team or operations or merely IT. It means that each and every part of the organization needs to understand the strategy, their dependencies in the organization, and act accordingly. Beyond departmental or functional understanding silos, each employee needs to know their role, and how they are empowered to deliver on the strategy. After all, if your people don’t know what they need to do and with whom as a part of a team they simply can’t do it!
If there are challenges, they always hint towards the solutions as well. So, let’s see how we can conquer these challenges and how do they work for the brand while keeping connections with the customers.
Touchpoints, Interactions and Engagement
Touchpoints Customer touchpoints are the ones where customers come in contact with your brand. It could occur through a brand website, messages, or product, and other channels, devices. • • • •
Social media posts, advertisements, banners Receiving emails, messages and contact through them Reading blogs, annual reports, newsletters Brand website and app with great ease of use
Interactions and Engagement • • •
Communication with agents, sales representatives, and contact with the support team Checking and sharing brand’s resources and services over social media Signing into the freemium or free trial and then buy the product
Don’t rely only on the hype around new technology There’s a host of emerging technologies impacting CX like AI and ML offer significant opportunities to enable better customer experience. But technology alone is not the answer to your customer experience aspirations. Don’t believe the hype out there that only technology can do wonders to improve your CX challenges. AI and machine learning tools can do everything. Ensure that the technology solution being proposed is viable and will address your requirements. Don’t implement technology just for the sake of everyone doing it. The decision to implement any innovative technology should be based on whether it solves a problem or not. Will it save time, improve productivity in operations, increase customer or employee engagement? It needs to bring value to the brand and its customers.
Execute change Change is inevitable. One must accept that the plans we think might not execute in real. The kind of simple formulation like executing change can serve as a powerful foundation for problem solving and innovation at all levels. To believe in a reliable CX program and to engage customers, business leaders must know how to work together in an organization. There should be a strong understanding of what matters to customers to build a framework for change.
Summing up New things or management don’t have to be scary! Technology plus human touch do not have to stand far from each other. Ride the wave of innovation while keeping your eyes on the things of how you are doing; your CX will become a key differentiator in no time. Keeping your team on the top of the data and making sure that everyone in the company has an insight into what’s the status of customer experience can make an incredible tool for better organizational functionality and remarkable customer experience. It gives you the metrics to enable better implementation of customer support and customer service outsourcing. All in all, your teams can do well, if you know well.