How to harness the power of customer experience to reach your entrepreneurial goals?
The entire business landscape is obsessing about the customer experience, or its trendy abbreviated version, CX. At the startup stage you will often hear about customers being at the heart of your every initiative. After all the survival of your business depends primarily on your customers! So whenever I start a session on customer experience, the common response young entrepreneurs give me is, “Of course we are a customer-focused business!”
Gartner’s survey on customer experience in marketing highlights the opinion voiced by more than 80% of organizations. By the end of this decade, customer experience will be one of the top parameters based on which organizations would compete against each other.
So let’s take a step back. Do you just focus on your customer or is your customer the driving factor in your entrepreneurial decisions. What’s the difference? I’ll explain with an example.
A customer-focused Toys R Us versus a customer-obsessed Amazon
WHAT CUSTOMER EXPERI ENCE SHOULD NOT LOOK LIKE Toys R Us were the giants in the toys retail sector, yet in what appeared to be a sudden move, they recently filed for bankruptcy. At the surface, this disaster struck because Toys R Us could not meet their competitors Amazon who were capturing all their customers through online retail options. But many studies assessed the reason behind this startling downfall. It became increasingly clear that the actual reason for this failure was their inability to understand what their customers really wanted. While their humongous stores had every imaginable toy that any child could ever hope for, they did not really do much to simplify the shopping experience for the customer. Nor did they innovate their services to match the changing expectations of their customers. The result was a gradual but clear decrease in their sales, leading to bankruptcy.
AN INSPIRATION IN CUSTOMER EXPE RIENCE Now cut straight back to Amazon and you will see an incredible contrast here. Customer experience circulates through their entire organization and supply chain ecosystem. Their every decision depends on what their customers want or would want in future. Amazon’s current focus on winning the last mile battle and their predictive shipping concepts are great examples of the extent Amazon would go to meet their customers’ expectations. Their symbiotic combination of a customer-centric business model and technologyand data-driven innovative solutions keep them at the top of any search across the world.
The questions you need to ask yourselves Right at the startup stage, you will need to consider your customers and evaluate what your initiative has for them. It’s not just marketing or customer service anymore. It’s about how you treat your customers every
time they interact with you. Be active on social media and find out about their needs and problems from your context. Determine where you need to improve, and instill customer sensitivity as an organizational culture.
So the next time any of your stakeholders casually mentions “customers coming first,� go back and check your business model. Find out where your customers stand in this model. If they stand outside the model or in the periphery, then you are in for disaster. Your customers must definitely be present all across the organization. They must take the top spot in the minds, intentions, goals, and strategies of your every single employee and partner. Without this granular level of customer engagements, your claims of customer experience will just have an artificial ring to it.
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