Real-time customer experience is a vital driver of growth. Acting in real-time, armed with the most up-to-date information about your customer, can hugely improve customer experience.

To truly “do” real-time properly, you need to be able to listen to real-time signals from your customers, understand what these signals mean in the larger context of their relationship with you, and then identify and execute the right action to meet these needs.

It’s time for marketers to adapt. Whether adapting externally to customers’ unpredictable behavior or internally within a brand’s organization, the time has come for traditional marketers to become Adaptive Marketers—agile customer experience enthusiasts who take a customer centric approach to marketing instead of a channel-centric approach.

Adaptive Marketers focus on optimizing the context, speed and state of each customer relationship instead of each channel. They can simultaneously achieve a business objective while creating the best brand experience possible, regardless of the channel. And they are making it happen now.

Understanding the customer’s needs is a common challenge for many businesses and studies show that this will become a make-or-break benchmark for most companies. Salesforce conducted a survey of over 6,000 consumers and found that 76% of them expected companies to understand their needs and expectations. This doesn’t leave very much wiggle room for your marketing and customer service strategy to fail. If you want to deliver a sound customer experience, then it’s imperative that you create a customer-centric company that is focused on fulfilling customer needs.

When customers discover a delightful customer experience, it’s likely that they’ll want to return to it again. Dimension Data even found that 84% of companies who focus on improving customer experience are reporting an increase in annual revenue. This is because these companies are gaining more customer loyalty which is highly valuable to the brand. Loyal customers make repeat purchases and offer recommendations to other potential leads who then become ambassadors as well. If you’re looking for new ways to increase your company’s profit margins, invest in bettering your customer experience.

Customer Experience    Customer Centric Approach    customer relationship   customer’s needs    customer service strategy    customer loyalty    Loyal customers

Today, businesses across the board-from agile e-commerce companies to those in the traditional manufacturing industry are realizing the importance of delivering a memorable customer experience. This can be evidenced by the way companies have been increasingly using their social media accounts to respond to customer requests for product prices and even address customer queries and disputes. When there are millions of things requesting your attention all at the same time millions of songs, millions of films, millions of books, millions of platforms to buy products from-delivering an experience that will help you stand out and be found is non-negotiable.

So how do you define and measure something as intangible as customer experience? It isn’t easy because it’s subjective and depends entirely on something as unpredictable and random as human behaviour. But as long as you’re asking the right questions about your customer experience strategy, you’re moving in the right direction:

1. Ease of access- Is your target customer easily able to access your product? How soon can your product be delivered to him/her?
2. Personalisation-Are you offering an experience that is tailor-made to your customer’s needs and preferences?
3. Guidance-Are you educating your customer to make the right choices and offering them continuous support along the way?
4. Quick dispute resolution-A customer has had an unpleasant experience on your site or with your customer service. How soon can you address this and ensure that he/she returns to your site in the future?

Needless to say, the best way to win a returning customer is to offer them a differentiated experience that goes beyond the transaction. Emails and calls with sales pitches that push your products will definitely turn them off. Instead, educate them about your products and services and present them with information that leaves the choice open to them. Placing power back in the hands of your customer will earn you their loyalty and trust and that counts much more in the long run.

Consistency in Delivery

There’s no reason to think that delivering an extraordinary customer experience is seemingly impossible. Technology has acted as a great enabler for consistently raising the bar for customer experience. Constantly improving your website and mobile user-experience in order to make them more customer-friendly and responsive plays a crucial role in defining a great customer experience and thanks to technology, all this is possible with quick fixes today.

Consistently delivering a positive customer experience can yield dividends for the long run. Returning customers are much less likely to drop off and are likely to convert better. You may call it the pitfall of the ‘attention economy’ but customers are no longer as brand loyal as they used to be. A 2013 study by Dimensional Research revealed that 59per cent of customers said they’d leave for good after having a bad experience. More than half said they’d go to a direct competitor. So no matter how many crores you spend on TV and newspaper ads, strong word-of-mouth is more likely to act as a better endorsement of your product and perhaps, even rake in more customers.

Delivering a positive customer experience should not be the KRA of your customer service team alone. It should be at the forefront of your thinking in all spheres of your business. The best way to get a sense of what your customer needs is to have your ears to the ground i.e. listen to your customers and map the journey on your website/mobile app from their point of view. Think of ways you can improve the user journey by way of refinements in content and design if the customer is encountering hurdles during the user journey.

Staying in sync with the ever-changing needs and preferences of customers may seem like an endless process, but if you’re in it for the long run, constantly evolving your business to offer a more personalized and positive customer experience will help your business to sustain and scale. With tumultuous changes like digitisation that have marked the financial landscape in the last couple of years aided by changes in the regulatory framework, delivering an unparalleled customer experience is now more important than ever. Putting your customers first in every business decision will go a long way in building not just your customer base but also brand loyalty.

Customer Experience    CXREFRESH    CX   Brand Loyalty   Customer Service   Customer Experience Strategy

Human interaction remains a vital component of customer satisfaction, even in the ‘digital age’. 83 percent of world’s consumers prefer dealing with human beings over digital channels to solve customer services issues and get advice (77 percent). Almost half (45 percent) of consumers say they are even willing to pay a higher price for goods and services if it ensures a better level of service.

Physical or in-store experiences are also highly valued amongst consumers. 65 percent agree that in-store service is the best channel for getting a tailored experience, and 46 percent say they are more willing to be sold new or upgraded products when receiving a face-to-face service compared to online.

How leaders of customer services succeed

Organizations that want to rebalance their digital and traditional customer service channels should look to:

1. Put the human and physical elements back into customer services: Rethink your investment strategy. The focus should be on delivering satisfying customer experiences – not methods of interaction. Ensure your channel management approach delivers integrated experiences.

2. Make it easy for customers to switch channels to get the experiences they want: Build customer service channels that enable consumers to fluidly move from digital to human interaction to get the outcomes they desire.

3. Root out toxicity: Define and address the most toxic customer experiences across all channels. These experiences can directly impact profitability. Identify the experiences that have the greatest potential downside and leverage those insights to guide an investment strategy.

4. Guarantee personal data security: 92 percent of consumers say it is extremely important that companies protect the privacy of their personal information. By not selling or sharing customer data with other companies, and guaranteeing that safeguards are in place to protect it, consumers will be more willing to hand over personal information which can be leveraged to deliver better experiences.

Customer Experience    Customer Satisfaction   Customer Services   CXREFRESH   Global CX