The Evolving Customer Experience (CX) Landscape: Where to Focus and How to Prioritize
The ultimate aim of all businesses is to generate profit – and that can only be done if you keep your customers satisfied. In today’s digital age, customers are smarter than ever, have higher expectations, want a personalized experience, and demand more meaningful relationships from companies.
This means businesses need to work harder than ever to keep their customers happy. However, delivering great customer service is not without its obstacles:
Obstacles to Delivering Great Customer Experience
Here are some of the top-most obstacles that can hinder customer experience:
People and Processes
Executives admit that one of the major obstacles to the customer experience is people and processes — in short, their organizational structure. About 83% of companies say silos exist in their business and prevent information from flowing smoothly. In addition, different departments have conflicting KPIs, which makes working together very difficult.
To prevent this, it is crucial that organizations involve all employees from the getgo, align their goals with that of the organization and ensure smooth communication.
Investments
Many leaders complain they cannot get the capital and resources required to run processes that are effective. However, the truth is that getting money for any business initiative is challenging. A leader needs to have the ability to fight for the resources to start initiatives that can make their company more profitable.
Technology
Many companies cite technological obstacles like limited infrastructure, inability to track customer responses, and siloed system that prevent information sharing. However, many companies find that they don’t fully use the technology they already have. By knowing how to use existing technology, employees can help improve customer experience.
Resistance to Change
Often, company leaders have the investment and technology to start an initiative, but they struggle to achieve them since they require change. It is human nature to fear the unknown, but nothing good can happen if you do not take a few risks. To alleviate this, leaders can gather their teams to let them know what can be done to improve customer experience and ask them questions like: “What’s the worst that can happen?” “What is our Plan B in case of the worst-case scenario?” and “Do we have everything in place to make the change a success?”
If your employees can foresee real issues, they will be more amenable to accept change.
How to Build Digital Engagement to Improve Customer Experience
Customer engagement is built with every brand interaction, which provides a unique opportunity to address customer needs and deliver solutions.
Implementing a Customer Engagement Strategy
Companies need to outline their digital strategies and goals. These goals should be realistic, actionable, and based on concrete data with measurable metrics and KPI, with clear instructions for your employees. This can help keep your team on track and ensure customers receive a smooth and streamlined experience throughout their buying journey.
Implementing Personalization
Traditional, sales-y marketing tactics do not work like they used to. Today, customers want a more human brand-customer relationship.
It is important for leaders to do complete research on their target market’s demographic, behaviors and lifestyles and create a marketing strategy that is tailored to them. Personalized content improves customer engagement by providing them with relevant content at the right time and increasing the likelihood of customer loyalty.
Using Customer Engagement Platforms
This type of technology allows businesses to engage their customers across various touchpoints and track their buying journey. These platforms include features that facilitate omnichannel capabilities for communicating with customers across various digital channels; intelligence routing that ensures the customer is redirected to the right customer service personnel; tools to evaluate agent performance; and data reports that provide rich and valuable insights into the customer’s experience.
How Can You Improve Organizational Agility?
Many organizations have already set on the path of transforming their processes and structures to react and adapt quickly to changes as unpredictable changes can happen at any time.
Businesses are always at risk of VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), which can make even very small deviations lead to complicated and far-reaching results. In such an environment, businesses have a hard time navigating markets with the cut-throat competition or creating strategies that last even from short- to medium-term — and adaptability is the only way to survive.
In order to improve agility, organizations need to question themselves on where their business is lacking in agility, which aspects of companies they need to address next, and what kind of improvement is needed. It is extremely important to revise your work model as new people join your workforce or new experiences are made.
If you believe that the decisions that you make for your companies are not almost always better than other group’s decisions, you need to find out what you are passionate about and what decisions you want to be involved in.
Role of Leadership and the Board in Transforming the Customer Experience
Since March 2020, we have been facing an unprecedented economic recession. Consumers are facing a shortage of disposable income, while business and consumer confidence is also at an all-time low.
As the importance and influence of customer experience continues to grow, leaders need to step up into their role to guide their organization through this transformative journey. Part of their responsibilities is to collectively assess the competing demands on resources and money and then make informed decision on what is funded and what gets cut.
If your customer experience programme needs to ensure a long term future, it will require the support of the entire board, not just an executive coach or sponsor. It is important that the organization’s executive leadership get to know all the members of the board, connect the dots for them and discuss with them what can be done to positively influence the CX.
As a leader, you need to do what you can to identify and improve your organization’s customer experience and work towards a more systemic CX opportunity. When it comes to the future of your business, trial and error can be very expensive. If you are unsure about what steps your business needs to take, we recommend consulting with Steven Paul and letting him help you find a unique and customized solution to increase the productivity of your business.
