Unless you are one of the rare companies that don’t need customers (do those even exist?), you should be concerned over the customer experience you offer.
We are after all in the “experience economy”, where customer experience has overtaken price and product as the most important brand differentiator.
How do companies fare in offering a superior customer experience? It depends on who you ask. Eighty percent of companies in one study believed they offer a superior customer experience; only 8% of their customers agreed.
Why the disconnect? In our work with African organisations of all sizes and across all industries, we have seen similarities among companies that consistently deliver a great customer experience.
These are the common traits among companies that are winning in the modern experience economy:
1. Culture
Even though technology plays an ever-greater role in our everyday lives, not all problems can be solved with technology alone. Companies that instil a ‘customer-first’ culture among all employees are better able to deliver a consistent customer experience.
A customer first culture offers a more focused, unified and personalised experience to customers, one that exceeds expectations and secures you as their partner of choice for the long term.
2. Longevity
Customer experience success is a long game. It takes sales and sustainability to win in the experience economy. Successful customer experience (CX) strategies take a long-term approach to customer success and attempt to offer value and consistency across the customer journey.
It’s no longer enough to have only moments of once-off value to customers.
3. Measurement
Data-driven decision-making has been one of the great advances in modern business, with technology enabling the collection, storage and analysis of vast amounts of organisational data to inform more accurate decisions at every level of the organisation.
For CX success, organisations should be able to measure and analyse operational data (O-data) and experiential data (X-data). Tools such as Qualtrics give organisations a clear view to measurable CX and help establish benchmarks that allow constant improvement across end-to-end CX activities.
4. Intelligence
Every great building has a strong foundation. For great CX, the foundation is an intelligent core that can process and analyse vast amounts of O and X data, produce actionable insights and provide the agility needed to act on the insights.
We call this part of the intelligent enterprise strategy, a new approach to business that allows organisations to rapidly transform data into insight and feed process automation, innovation and optimal experiences.
5. Automation
The pace and sheer complexity of the modern business environment has made it impossible to rely solely on manual processes to ensure CX – or business – success.
With an intelligent core in place, many back-office operations can be automated to provide greater consistency in the customer experience, freeing up valuable internal resources to focus on more high-value, customer-facing activities.
