Worried about Customer Experience? You should be. No longer a nice-to-have, an exemplary customer experience (CX) has become a crucial part of doing business in the digital age.  It affects the customer’s perception of how they are treated, how they perceive your brand, and ultimately, it’s a determining factor in their behavior and loyalty. If they like you, they buy and they recommend you to others who buy.

Recognizing the importance of customer experience and taking concrete steps to address it can affect an organization’s profitability and growth. This is especially true with new CX technology constantly changing the way businesses operate.

THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Customers expect a seamless, personalized, and relevant experience across all touchpoints. Companies often struggle with how to achieve a great customer experience while managing operational spend and continuing to scale their business. This is especially true in industries where older companies must appeal to tech-savvy millennials by embracing new technologies, or the business will perish. Three critical things to think about when establishing your new CX strategy include:

  • Offer an amazing experience

Understanding each stage of the customer journey – awareness (realization there is a need), consideration (researches options), and decision (chooses a solution) – means knowing where you have an opportunity for improvement whether in marketing, sales, or customer service.

  • Listen to the customer

Technology offers us previously unheard of opportunities to both reach and listen to the customer. There are countless stories of customers posting product and service complaints on social media to get a response, especially when they aren’t being heard in any other way. Establishing a formal Voice of the Customer (VoC) program helps to ensure that customer needs and expectations are met.

  • The purchase is not the end of the relationship

Customer experience doesn’t stop with the purchase. Customer service plays a significant role in ensuring customer loyalty and company reputation. Service – and how you do it – are key differentiators for success.

BENEFIT FROM TECHNOLOGY

Modern technology offers previously unheard of opportunities to enhance CX. Not only can it improve customer experience, it can also help to streamline the business processes that lead to improved productivity and revenue growth. Some of the most popular technologies used to enhance customer experience are:

  • Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions

CPQ solutions are rapidly becoming a core technology and way to improve sales effectiveness in order to deliver higher profits. They improve the customer experience by streamlining the purchasing process with speed (generating complex quotes faster), accuracy (eliminating errors in quotes and configurations), personalization (such as custom pricing), and uses Artificial Intelligence (AI)to empower reps with customer insights at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

  • Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) software

CRM software enables organizations to form and maintain relationships with customers based on actual (digital) data. It can help to track online behavior in order to identify customers, personalize messages, predict purchasing behavior, help you to identify when and how to best contact the customer, and in general inform and tailor the entire customer digital experience.

  • Dealing with the data

Although it’s easy to collect information on just about anyone and anything these days, the huge potential benefits of your data can be lost without a way to sort through and apply the information effectively. Now, AI powered applications can provide real-time guidance and the marketing analytics that will define your business – and customer experience – into the future.

By adopting these technology solutions, businesses can create a seamless customer journey while at the same time obtaining the necessary data to ensure a personalized experience and helping the business to understand their customers and market better.

TAKE ACTION

A business can’t exist without customers, so it must focus on both how to win and how to retain its users. Understanding the customer journey and using technology to enhance the customer experience are key ways to succeed.