CX champions often face challenges if they start new initiatives around customer services. It often isn’t as easy to see the value of customer experience as it is to see the ROI of other investments. However, customer experience is incredibly valuable. Executives often won’t invest in customer experience without “proof,” even if the writing is on the wall. Here is actual proof you can share with your teams. Without a customer focus, companies simply won’t be able to survive. We are living in a time where we face the commodity trap. Too many of our products and services are the same. To stand out in a sea of sameness, CX is the only way to do that. These statistics prove the value of customer experience and show why all companies need to get on board.

Companies with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their industries.

Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80%.

84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.

73% of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors.

96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

83% of companies that believe it’s important to make customers happy also experience growing revenue.

Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.

73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties.

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.

Loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a friend to the company.

Companies with initiatives to improve their customer experience see employee engagement increase by 20% on average.

81% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator.

68% of customers say the service representative is key to a positive service experience.

The top reason customers switch brands is because they feel unappreciated.

64% of companies with a customer-focused CEO believe they are more profitable than their competitors.

75% of customer experience management executives gave customer experience a top score for being incredibly important to business.

Companies that use tools like customer journey maps reduce their cost of service by 15-20%.

Offering a high-quality customer experience can lower the cost of serving customers by up to 33%.

71% of the companies say the cloud has influenced the customer experience.

Customers are likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience than customers who report negative experiences.

A 2% increase in customer retention is the same to profits as cutting costs by 10%.

Data Source- Forbes

• It costs up to 25X more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
• Improving customer retention by just 5% can send profits soaring up to 95%.
• Loyal customers are 5X more likely to repurchase, 4x as likely to refer and 7x as likely to try a new offering.

With figures like these, it’s no surprise customer retention is a primary business objective, and the stakes are extremely high. Two-thirds of customers are willing to switch brands over a poor customer experience.

It’s no wonder, then, that customer experience is a top strategic priority for driving growth in 2020. The problem is, most companies are ill-prepared to execute on that strategy. While some 87% of senior business leaders say CX is a top growth engine, only one in three feel prepared to address it.

What’s holding them back? Poor data. Customer feedback is notoriously difficult to collect, pinpoint, and track, which makes it difficult to accurately measure customer sentiment, understand issues, and make corrections to drive appreciable improvement.
So, what’s the solution? It’s certainly not burdening customers with more of the same lengthy, generic surveys. If the data companies are producing now isn’t working to reduce churn, the solution isn’t more data–it’s better data with more insights in less time. Here’s how to get it:

• Make it quick.

  Customers are busy. If they feel it’s going to take too much effort to provide feedback, they simply won’t. Keep your feedback requests short and sweet: a quick 1-5 overall experience rating and a few easy-to-choose attributes will provide the specifics you need without burdening your customers with a lengthy survey.

• Be immediate.

  Send feedback requests immediately after an interaction and over an immediate channel: mobile devices. By sending quick surveys via SMS as soon customers leave your store or complete a transaction, the experience will be fresh in their minds, resulting in higher response rates and more accurate feedback.

• Tie experiences to specific employees.

  Give your customers the opportunity to name the specific employee they dealt with—or better yet, include that information in your request for feedback, so the customer can rate and describe the specific person who helped them. By tying the customer experience to the specific employee, you will get measurable, actionable data on each customer-facing employee. By connecting this to internal talent management systems and performance reviews, you can also set goals to improve CX at the individual employee level.

• Identify employees who impress customers.

  By capturing employee-specific customer experiences, you can clearly identify who interfaces well with customers and who needs training. Without this data, you’re operating on the assumption that no news is good news; i.e., no customer complaints means an employee interacts well with customers. This leaves you in the dark about problematic patterns until they manifest as major complaints or lost business. By tracking CX performance with hard data for each employee, you can correct these patterns before they become full-blown problems and reinforce behaviors linked to higher customer ratings.

• Reward performance.

  We hear about customer complaints all the time, but rarely do we hear about an employee doing a great job or going above and beyond to deliver superior service. CX isn’t just about how you correct problems– it’s also a function of how you encourage excellence. With an effective customer feedback program that ties CX to specific employees, outstanding performers can be formally recognized and rewarded for their impact.

• Monitor trends vs. isolated incidents.

  When customers report a bad experience, it can be difficult to determine whether their experience was an isolated incident, or if they’re a particularly difficult customer, or if their experience is indicative of a larger problematic trend. By tracking customer feedback as measurable data, companies can get a clearer picture of what’s happening at the point of every employee/customer interaction. This keeps you from catastrophizing one-off experiences and helps you focus on consistent issues.

• Intervene immediately.

  Customers can be quick to abandon your brand, so it’s crucial to respond to their issues immediately. However, most customer feedback platforms are cumbersome and slow which means the experience has long-since-passed by the time it shows up on your radar. By implementing immediate feedback solutions, companies can take swift action to intervene if a valuable customer relationship could be in jeopardy.

In an age where keyboard warriors can destroy a brand’s reputation with a single scathing review, and customers seem to be increasingly fickle, customer retention is both more challenging and more important than ever. Particularly in customer-facing industries like retail, hospitality and financial services, it’s imperative to gather actionable feedback to continuously improve upon the customer experience. By implementing a comprehensive people-centric feedback approach, companies can deliver the exceptional service that keeps customers coming back.

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