We are in an era where customer expectations are rising. As a result, these newly empowered customers expect superior experiences from any business they engage with. In today’s competitive marketplace, an organisation’s brand is built – or broken – on its Customer Experience. There’s three reasons why. Contributor Lisa Kenny Marketing Manager – Maru/Syngro.
It’s not enough anymore to offer a solid product or competitive price. Customers now have an abundance of goods and services to choose from, therefore businesses must make an extra effort to convert a customer into a repeat purchaser. A competitor to your business is just a Google search away, so you must give customers a reason to keep dealing with you, even if they were fully satisfied with their purchasing experience. This is where Customer Experience comes in.
By 2020, Customer Experience is set to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. The study by VisionCritical in 2013 found that changes such as the explosion of digital, the empowered customer, and the acceleration of innovation are having a profound impact on customer expectations.
Customers expect companies to know their individual needs and to personalise the experience to meet those needs. Tellingly, the study showed that 86 percent of consumers are prepared to pay more for better customer experience. This means truly understanding what it is that customers really care about and what role businesses need to play in the customer journey.
If you look after your customers, they will never run into the hands of your competitors. Investing in Customer Experience has become a strategic priority and indeed a challenge, for organisations worldwide. The organisations who are getting it right by using customer feedback to guide their processes are reaping the rewards, and are miles in front of their competitors.
However, if a customer’s experience is consistently poor or if they are asked their opinion and subsequently ignored there is only one outcome. Quite simply, they will become someone else’s customer. Companies who fail to listen to customers typically experience end results that, though well intentioned, are disjointed and ultimately ineffective.
Organisations must harness Customer Experience in a meaningful way to drive the changes that customers want while improving what they already love. One of the most powerful ways to do this is making sure each experience is personalised. From content, emails, landing pages and phone calls. This makes your customers feel valued and it shows you care about their wants and needs. Try to also always exceed customer expectations by offering surprises and gifts to make them feel special.
Customer Experience is something that can be included in everyone’s job spec
The entire business needs to engage in the Customer Experience. Too many customer-centric change initiatives fail to engage with all the business units within a group. Too many people say “But, that’s not my job!”. If the result of your job is to benefit the customer, add Customer Experience to your job specification.
Breaking down departmental silos and establishing real commitment to customer experience is sustained by communicating the value of CX. It’s impossible to have a seamless end-to-end brand experience if your employees don’t have a customer-centric mindset and don’t have the motivation to keep customers happy; this means there needs to be a shared vision.
As well as communicating the value of Customer Experience to the business as an entirety, it is also beneficial to include a CX specific reward strategy to motivate and engage employees. These initiatives could include bonuses when an individual’s CX KPIs are met, provide perks to enhance the employee experience or reward those named in customer surveys.
Customer Experience is an organisation-wide priority. It follows, then, that any Customer Experience strategy or programme should also be adopted across the organisation. A great CX programme should make it easy for staff from any department to customise and configure their own customer data to monitor, drill down, and analyse the customer information that is most relevant to their role and objectives. Employees who feel they are in control of their own customer experience outcomes are much more likely to feel engaged with overall objectives.
The new battleground highlights the significance of really understanding the importance of Customer Experience to grow your supplier business, secure repeat orders, acquire new customers and cut costs. The future of businesses now depends on it.
