Exceptional End-to-End Customer Experience
Over the past decade, customers’ expectations for Customer Experience (CX) have changed, technological innovation has made it possible to incorporate near-real-time information into companies’ interactions with each and every customer.
Used correctly, this type of information can reduce friction, helping customers get what they want much more easily and delighting them along the way.
Today Customer Experience packs a more powerful punch when it comes to organizational success because it’s integral to differentiating a brand, generating revenues, and fostering customer loyalty.
What makes exceptional CX such a weapon is that it can be direct, such as facilitating automatic transfers so a customer can make rent payments, or it can arm workers with more tools to provide it, like giving frontline employees more customer information to help patrons get what they want faster or more effectively.
Read other related blog: The Customer Experience (CX) is it the key to success?
More personalized service doesn’t end with the purchase.
Exceptional CX extends post-purchase, and companies have to continue to communicate with their customers in a helpful way or face rejection if their messaging is egocentric. But there is an adjunct to this personalization mandate, namely that organizations need to always study each customer interaction so they can learn customer needs, reduce friction, and identify ways to optimize the customer’s journey.
End-to-End Data Visibility
As technology is used more and more to achieve outstanding CX and facilitate information sharing, however, other risks have arrived. One risk, given the use and movement of data, is security in general and cyber attacks in particular. So, ensuring that customer data is safe and secure has become a CX priority.
Engaging a Customer With Their Data
We need to know what our customers want in an experience. Data analytics, AI, and machine learning help companies make sense of customer data, whether it’s from the internet, social media, or credit agencies, among other sources, and use that information to personalize and improve CX.
Using Technology to Complete Customer Objectives
Getting customer feedback and showing it will be acted upon is important for organizations as they attempt to reduce friction between what customers want and their ability to get it.
For example, if customers easily transfer money on their phone but are stymied on the website (frequently abandoning a transfer before the transaction is complete), companies should know that it is a pain point. AI and machine learning can be used not only to alert the company to the problem, but also detect whether it’s part of a larger pattern. Companies can then adapt their business so that their CX is seamless across all channels.
Personalization needs to feel seamless.
Advertising a promotion when a customer is trying to solve a problem, for example, could frustrate customers. Companies need to help customers achieve their objectives easily without adding any interference. In fact, if companies make it harder, not easier, for customers to get what they want, it can damage the customer relationship and hurt the company in the long term.
Technological attempts at personalization on websites, like pop-up windows or chat bots, can backfire on organizations if they are poorly designed or are used in place of well-conceived content that helps customers understand the product/service.
Preferred Modes of Communication
Understanding a customer’s preferred mode of communication is also critical. Covid-19 has changed the world, often making digital channels the best way to reach customers. Sometimes, customers want the option of communicating digitally and with a person, too, depending on their specific need (companies can uses multiple forms of communication with customers for its products or services).
The key, is really knowing your customers and being able to identify preferences that make it easier to engage with them. A Millennial may only want to receive a text, while older customers may want alternative forms of communication. Understanding these preferences is key.
Delivering a Consistent CX
To deliver a consistent CX to customers, data must be shared in a seamless manner throughout the organization. That goal can be difficult to achieve because many times information exists in silos and is not shared within departments. Build systems with users in mind to optimize the experience for both organization and customers make it easier to share information between groups, enabling one part of the organization to pick up where another part leaves off so that the CX feels cohesive throughout a customer’s entire journey.
Customer Experience in the health care industry for example, is increasingly virtual - in-person doctor visits have given way to exams over Zoom, curbside tests, and remote monitoring via a new array of devices.
Finding Ways to Measure CX
A good CX often means that customer interactions are recurring and repetitive and require minimal effort from customers, another important metric that reflects a good CX is customer retention. Acquiring new customers and measuring the endurance or persistence of that relationship is a critical indicator of customer experience. A third measure is reciprocity, which evaluates CX by looking at what both parties are contributing to the relationship. Companies should always be improving their services and giving their customers more as time goes on, the reasoning behind reciprocity goes.
Evaluating CX may require using more than one numerical measure, finding common threads in customer answers to thoughtful questions. In any event, the quest for exceptional CX doesn’t just end with a more personalized experience for the customer or a continuous dialogue to nurture brand loyalty.
The journey to improve CX continues, by continuously quantifying the quality of each interaction, an organization can strive for higher CX scores and, with it, the ability to keep growing revenues and bolstering customer loyalty.
Improving your customer experience begins with understanding where you are now, take our Free CX maturity assessment to identify the strengths and opportunities in your program.
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