Customer Experience (CX) Is No Longer an Afterthought.
Today, the experience has become one of the customer’s primary concerns. Customers are more demanding than ever before, and they need to feel their wants and needs are top of mind. However, not all companies are meeting these demands. This is the invisible ceiling of customer experience. This blog post will explore how companies can bridge the gap between the customer’s expectations and what companies can do to exceed them.
Customer experience (CX) is a rapidly evolving field that is currently being revolutionized. It’s not just the frontline employees but also the back-of-house and ‘behind-the-scenes’ staff that play an essential role in delivering a superb customer experience. There are a few methods an organization can adopt for CX Transformation™:
The Building Blocks of Customer Experience Transformation
- Customers want consistency. Organizations must ensure they have a consistent message, tone, and voice across all channels and touchpoints – e.g., through all messaging, branding, communications tools, and online/offline brand experiences.
- The customer experience continues to evolve with technology and data. To provide customers with an excellent service today means employing centralized analytics and predictive analytics to employ tactics that go beyond the traditional “call center” of yesteryear. The combined CX Stack ™ means bridging technology to actionable insights habitually.
- A shift in power dynamics needs to occur within organizations. Organization Leaders need to have a customer experience first mentality. The challenge to break the politics within organizations and power struggles impede customer experience momentum and agility.
- Realizing the need for unforgettable CX. With customers demanding an unforgiving level of personalization, how does a company meet the demand? With so many specialists and siloed work streams, an organization needs the ability to stitch and prioritize projects as this is essential to providing an unforgettable customer experience (CX).
Your Brand / Customer Equilibrium across the Omni-Channel
It’s not enough to have a consistent message on your site if you are inconsistent with messaging on social media, customer service, or via email. Customers never see or feel discrepancies in an organization’s customer experience. This inconsistency will lead to negative word of mouth, costing your business more than you realize. The brand equity you have built to acquire your customer reaches a ceiling.
Employers must ensure a consistent message, tone, and voice across all channels. This includes all messaging, branding, addressing customers by name, and so forth. Your employee’s interactions with customers should be the same, via phone, email, or other channels.
This consistency will help create a positive experience for your customers and develop trust between them and your company. In addition, when your employees provide the same level of service no matter what channel they are interacting with clients, you are building customer loyalty.
Your CX Stack™
The customer experience stack is a new way to think about your customer’s journey and how your organization prepares to deliver and bond with your customer.
The customer experience stack combines all the factors that influence your customer’s perception of your business. Each customer enters your eco-system through a series of touchpoints, and the ultimate goal is to keep engaging post-transaction to generate lifetime value. Each of these touchpoints is an opportunity to create an extraordinary customer experience.
The ultimate goal is to keep engaging customers post-transaction to generate lifetime value. Each touchpoint in a customer’s journey is an opportunity to create an extraordinary customer experience and build loyalty.
How the CX Stack™ powers customer engagement:
- CX Blueprint™ – a solid foundation of who your customers are, what they like, and why they engage with your brand. Included in the CX Blueprint™ are the visual components, branding, and messaging you communicate throughout the omnichannel.
- Data Propulsion – having a robust data architecture that pumps data through your organization in a fast and agile manner is no secret to today’s CX Success. But where do you start – and how do you marry all your data sources into a cohesive unison team working towards the one goal of creating a data refinery? Most organizations are working hard to meet this goal. They should be working smarter bridging this across business unit leaders is essential to creating a holistic forecast of technology integrations, solutions, and data science. The future of CX lies in the ability of the organization to generate predictive analytics and diminish the human factor of error.
- Technology Refinement – having a technology roadmap is great. But how will it support your CX Vision™, and more importantly, how will you help build the team of experts that lift and thrust solutions forward to execute engagement initiatives? At the core of technology investments are holistically understanding your current CX posture and re-prioritizing projects. Customer Experience drives Digital Transformation, and Digital Transformation enhances the customer experience – it’s a synchronous relationship that operates in harmony within executive huddles.
- Insights & Constant Calibration – The customer experience continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. Companies can no longer rely on the traditional “one-and-done” approach that was popular ten years ago. Today, companies are seriously investing in building up their data assets and leveraging the power of data analytics. Data is used to optimize the customer experience by identifying growth opportunities, changes needed to bring products or services closer to customers’ expectations, or how best to target current customers with personalized offers. With data at its core, businesses quickly realize the benefits of predictive experiences based on data. What is a predictive experience? Predictive experiences are built upon predictions that are generated from analyzing data points.These data points can include information about your customers’ behavior, preferences, demographics, location, to name a few. Data-driven predictions help design experiences that better cater to what people want and need, making them more satisfying and valuable for both the customer and the company! Leveraging predictive experiences to calibrate CX creates an interactive process between organizations and customers to build a more intimate personal relationship while communicating their needs.
Organizational CX Leader™ – Who is it?
The landscape of businesses and organizations is changing. The customer experience (CX) has become the new priority which means that those who do not adapt to this new priority will not survive. It’s time for a shift in power dynamics within organizations to have a customer experience first mentality. The challenge is to break the politics within organizations and power struggles and find ways for everyone to work together.
Organizations need to create a space for creativity and innovation where people feel compelled to be more collaborative and helpful. Leaders need to be more open-minded and take ownership of their mistakes and learn how to give constructive feedback. For a business or organization to succeed, it must have a simplified approach with specific goals, values, and strategies in place. When this idea reaches realization, there will be less room for politics and power struggle.
Customer experience (CX) is the competitive differentiator in most businesses. The level of customer experience varies depending on the industry and type of product or service. With competition increasing, there is increased pressure to deliver an excellent customer experience.
The downside to this increasing focus on customer experience (CX) is that it’s not always clear who the Customer Experience Leader is within your organization. It could be the CEO or one of their direct reports, but it may also be someone in Marketing, Product Development, Sales, IT, or Services. Understanding your organization’s specific needs and what will make for an effective CX Leader™ will help you identify who best fits the role.
But understanding who best fits as a CX Leader™ is only a partial solution.
How will your CX Leader™ meet the demand for unrivaled customer experiences?
Exceeding the CX Demand™ – Breaking the Ceiling
The customer has always been at the center of every business. Now, the customer demands an unforgiving level of personalization, an expectation that companies are trying to meet. Customers are increasingly seeking more services and products with personalized features to help them feel in control, satisfied with their purchase, and appreciated by the company.
Over the last decade, a shift in consumer behavior has led to both customers and brands striving for greater personalization in any given transaction. We see how consumers now demand tailored experiences with their favorite brands. It’s important to note that customers aren’t asking for companies to change or compromise on quality to offer these personalized options; instead, they want their experience to reflect who they are as people. They want their preferences curated with care to find what best suits them when shopping online or walking into a store. The ability to stitch together projects that matter most to the CX demand across the organization is a significant first step.
Let’s not stop there; the CX demand and creating a forecast/roadmap of investments and activities is a great start. But how are you able to deliver on these projects with speed, agility, and reduced time to value for your organization? The combination of these three attributes is what will drive your CX Success™. The challenge we constantly see in any customer experience (CX) project, whether design-driven, data-driven, or technology-focused, is that it requires many experts to work within each of these lanes….. and that in itself is a process full of friction that hinders momentum.
We’re not saying your organization cannot train and develop these individuals. The alternative is CX Multi-Solutionist™ or CX Stewards™, then your ability to see your CX posture and execute on it becomes panoramic. With this increased lens, your organization can be more outcome-driven rather than the people and expertise needed. Of course, you’ll still need technologists, architects, and data experts. CX Studio’s CX Stewards™ provide the agility across marketing and IT to work in harmony when creating and crafting customer experience (CX) engagements with a time to value you can measure.
The evolution of customer experience (CX) is wanting a shift in the way we craft our experiences, and that starts with the people we bring into our organization to help meet the CX Demand™. So, whether you create a change management program or leverage our CX Stewards™, the shift must be made to stay competitive, break the CX ceiling, and meet your CX Demand™.
