Consumers are constantly interacting with brands. But how they interact, when they reach out, and why they engage is unique to each person.

Successful marketers and customer experience professionals know that having a great product or solution alone won’t bring you new business.

To attract and retain customers, marketers must focus on the holistic customer experience — creating and enabling interactions that are engaging, differentiated, and personalized to the individual at every step.

Today, this means building an informed, contextual relationship with your audience through every stage of the customer journey.

Adopting a journey mindset means the customer’s intent and needs come first.

Content, offers, and experiences are triggered and delivered in the moment, to the right channel, on an individualized basis. It’s a customer-first world, and your brand is just living in it.

The challenge is scale in managing many users and sequencing in real-time actions across many different touchpoints. You don’t just
have one customer, you have many — thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions — and your customers are always on the move.
They may visit your site, depart, resurface, read your emails, follow you on social media, call your contact center, and, if you’re a
retailer, walk into your store to interact with staff or purchase a product. All of which means you have a large and growing
accumulation of customer data that can tell you a lot about every individual. And you have many channels of engagement, including
those you control — say, website, mobile sites, email, in-store — and other channels on which you connect with customers, like
Twitter and Facebook, voice-interaction channels like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, and more. Even if you control of your
message and your channels, you can’t control who sees your message in what context. As a marketer or customer experience
professional, you are no longer in the driver’s seat. Your customers now decide the experience they want to have with a brand —
what they want to consume, where they want to consume it and when – and they expect that each and every digital interaction be
highly relevant and personalized for them. Here’s the tough part: It’s your job to anticipate, to react fast, and be where your customers
are in each moment of the customer lifecycle. Welcome to the era of the customer journey.

Customer Journey   Customer Experience  Customer’s Intent   Customer Lifecycle  Customer Data

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

Untapped value for all parties is common due to the absence of clarity on customer perceptions of value, which is a composite of his or her functional and emotional judgments of your product, service, brand, culture, processes, policies, and business model — all relative to what the customer is striving to do. A keen understanding of customers’ subconscious value equations and perceptions is essential to zeroing-in on management efforts yielding highest return on investment (ROI). Yet most customer research focuses on brand recommendation and sentiment or new product development. Customer value is typically implied, or awkwardly derived from questions about price expectations, or simply assumed. However, Customer Value Management supplies tried-and-true methodologies for discovering how customers think about specific value relative to your competitors and to their expectations.

Customer Value Chain

Another reason for untapped value is weak management of the inter-dependencies among entities in the value creation and delivery chain. Traditional thinking charges R&D with value creation, but in reality, the customer experience is impacted even by your support functions’ internal and external policies. In fact, everyone in the company, including suppliers and alliance and channel partners, plays a role in the snowball effect of decisions and hand-offs that eventually shape the entire customer experience.

Customer Value Techniques

• Total Customer Value Management,
• Customer Value Creation,
• Customer Value Measurement,
• Pricing & Customer Value.

Should Customer-Value-Added (CVA) be included in your financial statements? What are the customer-focus and value creation roles of your CFO, Head of HR, and other top execs? How can you recognize gaps in customer-centricity that invite competitive footholds?

By seeing value the way customers see it leaders gain the context for collaborative value generation that offers sustainable differentiation and is rewarded by the market place.

Customer Perceptions   Customer Research   Customer Value  Customer Experience   CXREFRESH    Global CX

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

The laws of customer experience are meant to empower highly effective customer experience efforts.

By understanding these fundamental truths about how people and organizations behave, companies can make smarter decisions about what they do, and how they do it.

“Every leader needs to understand the laws of customer experience.”

Here are highlights of the six laws of customer experience:

• CX Law #1: Every Action Creates A Personal Reaction. Simply put, experiences are totally in the eyes of the beholder.
• CX Law #2: People Are Instinctively Self-Centered. Everyone has their own frame of reference, which heavily influences what they do and how they do it.
• CX Law #3: Customer Familiarity Breeds Alignment. Given that most people want their company to better serve customers, a clear view of what customers need, want, and dislike can align decisions and actions.
• CX Law #4: Unengaged Employees Don’t Create Engaged Customers. While you can make some customers happy through brute force, you cannot sustain great customer experience unless your employees are bought-in to what you’re doing and are aligned with the effort.
• CX Law #5: Employees Do What Is Measured, Incented, and Celebrated. Employees tend to conform to the environment that they’re in, so you need to adjust the environment if you want change.
• CX Law #6: You Can’t Fake It. You can fool some people for some of the time, but most employees and customers can eventually tell what’s real and what’s not.

CX Law    Customer Experience  CXREFRESH   Global CX              CX Strategy