Business is innovating in all areas and day-to-day activities seem to be faster than ever. With the digital boom across every field, companies need to keep up to the needs and demands of their customers whether they like or not.
This is what Customer Experience (CX) is all about. CX is a part of overall marketing efforts that encompasses what most people think of as customer service.
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What is Customer Experience (CX)?
Customer Experience is the culmination of the entire customer journey, from brand awareness and visibility, all the way to customer retention.
When customers like your product or service, they will continue to do business with you and recommend you to the others. Reputation and customer feedback are key factors in keeping your customers loyal to your product or service.
Mood Media’s Global Research Report last January 2019 mentioned that a big majority of customers will likely to stay and spend more when the business’ music, visuals, and scent are enjoyable for them.
It has been a constant buzzword for a few years now, and Customer Experience in 2019 compels businesses to take this more seriously.
Companies and corporations are increasingly investing in their CX efforts to keep up with the growing demands of consumers. Gartner finds that more than 50% of organizations will allocate their resources to invest in customer experience.
While companies are ferociously trying to keep up with the demands, a lot of them are worried that in a few years’ time they wouldn’t be able to keep up their pace to follow the ever-evolving customer demands.
Importance of CX in day-to-day operations
Due to a lot of offerings in the market, customers nowadays have more power to make or break businesses. By 2020, customer experience will be the key brand differentiator, overtaking the price and product. It’s not really surprising since 73% of buyers consider customer experience as a vital reason to purchase a product. Positive experience with a brand is more influential than a great advertising strategy.
Customer Strategist Journal identifies six key areas of Digital Customer Experience.
1. Reachability
Communication is the key to gaining and retaining relationships. This is also the case when it comes to customers. Businesses should know where their customers are and assess if they have open channels where they can easily reach out to their clients and where their customers can easily reach out to them. Reachability can also be used as a helpful advantage when handled effectively.
2. Service convenience
With the internet and social media, businesses are expected to be swift in start-to-finish customer support. Consumers will not wait for your response to their inquiries about a product when they connected with you on a Friday and your staff will reply to them on Monday the following week.
Customers hate waiting, and another part of the customer experience is the processing time of their requests. Mckinsey & Company reported that 75% of online customers expect a response within 5 minutes.
A vast majority of customers (around 86%) are willing to pay more for a better, faster service according to Walker Study. Consumers will not hesitate to switch brands to support the moment they are not satisfied with the service rendered by a company.
3. Purchase convenience
Convenience is a strong motivator of customers in buying items aside from the cost and quality of the actual product. As a striving business, you wouldn’t want spending to be harder for your potential customers. Thus, you should also leverage an efficient strategy in easing the purchase of consumers while also opening an opportunity to showcase your brand and other products or services you offer.
4. Simplicity and ease of use
Mobile is the rising platform where consumers check out businesses, brands, establishments, and etc. When your website takes so long to open or quite hard to navigate on mobile, chances are, consumers won’t choose you. Consumers don’t really need a flashy, multimedia integrated websites or apps. What they need is a simple, comprehensive website that contains information that answers their questions -whether it’s about a product, service, or your company.
5. Channel Flexibility
Customer experience involves channel flexibility, aiming to provide a seamless experience for customers through the omnichannel approach. This approach is the solution for changing customer expectations.
Forrester Research reported that 95% of customers are using up to three channels to companies. This approach can also track how companies interact and connect with their audience.
6. Personalisation
Personalising the customer experience will help brands retain their customers using data. Many companies invest in AI to personalise the experience of their customers.
The predictive personalisation is a strategy that predicts the action of users based on their past behaviour. Using data to create personas to properly give the best experience to customers is the trend.
Forbes predicts that personalisation will become the demand of customers here on out. In Mood Media’ s Global Research Report, 4 out of 10 consumers will likely purchase something when “the experience is personalised” to them.
Humanising CX and Employee Satisfaction
A striking article from the Wall Street Journal highlights a lesson that before businesses see people as customers, they should see them as humans first. The trade of seeing your customers solely as customers is a thing of the past. Thinking about the customers’ best interests will be the focus of most companies now, and the competition will become fiercer in the coming years.
Crafting a strategy and switching a business’ effort to elevate Customer Experience should be human-centric first, and not customer-centric. Identifying what the consumers need and want before thinking of ways to profit from them.
The companies that improved their CX efforts ranked higher in Fortune 500 than the others who did not continue to use this strategy.
Employee experience will be as important as CX too. How the organisation functions reflect and affect customers. If the employees and staff of the company are happy and satisfied, they help customers be satisfied too.
The Company culture, environment, and employee collaboration can be reasons why good employees leave. In a competitive environment, a business will need to have a solid team with the best people. A great Employee Experience keeps the business invincible to other companies stealing your people.
Elevating Customer Experience in 2019 is the challenge organisations currently face. CX is not going anytime soon, and businesses need to keep up and improve their processes to satisfy and retain their customers.
Customers have the power to make or break businesses through their influence and feedback. They are also getting smarter when it comes to choosing the brands they want to support. Companies and corporations needed to create a convenient, seamless connection with their audience to stay afloat in the competitive scene.
Going through the Digital Jungle is hard, especially if you don’t know how to navigate it. With the help of Flexisource IT’s Digital Marketing Experts, you won’t have a hard time learning how to effectively improve Customer Experience. Our high-calibre digital marketers will deliver you your desired results strategised according to the industry trends and best practices. Get to know about our services and fill out the form below!
Bernard is a well-motivated and hardworking person who has acquired extensive training and experience in digital marketing. His broad experience in working with various international brands has helped him developed a strong capacity to manage multiple projects on strict timelines that adhere to brand identity and values. With his years of experience in digital marketing, he goes beyond the average marketers to help businesses achieve outstanding results.
