The Importance of Capturing Experiences

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Customer experience is key to improving your bottom line.  Today, customers have become accustomed to and have grown to expect a seamless, user friendly experience with agility and flexibility on any mobile device anywhere at any time.  The better the experience, the stronger the loyalty, therefore, it is important to fully optimize your customers’ experiences across all platforms.

In the ever-expanding digital experience economy, connecting customer and consumer insight with operations will be critical for determining winners and losers.  Those who are successful in understanding their customers’ behaviors will capture an oversized share of the market.  Customer experience and satisfaction drives increased value over time through developing a loyal customer base who not only returns to purchase again but also evangelizes the product or service to others, thus driving your market share.

Cultivating this successful relationship means giving customers the freedom to choose you. To do this, you want to provide a phenomenal all-inclusive omnichannel experience, allowing your customer the maximum opportunity to find you, then providing a clear and intuitive shopping experience that leaves them not just satisfied, but impressed.  Empower your customers with the freedom to be return customers.  More now than ever, technology serves as the key offering of this freedom…giving the customer an end-to-end experience to connecting, working, and buying.

Meeting changing customer needs and priorities with rapid innovation is essential. One way to create agile capabilities is to migrate customers to digital channels. Companies who make this shift and deliver superior service will have the opportunity to maintain and extend their customer relationships now and into the future. More than ever, customers expect a consistent brand experience across all channels, which requires seamless front and back-office operations integration to anticipate customer behaviors and identify new opportunities to engage buyers. Companies that effectively analyze the wealth of data available can deliver hyper-personalized experiences and gain a competitive advantage.

We find that companies need a cloud-based digital platform that offers intelligent, data-driven insights and extensibility with integration capabilities to help build a superior customer experience.

 What do your customers want?

Companies are dealing with rapid growth of online commerce and direct delivery of their competitors that exceed their capabilities.  Those companies that don’t have sophisticated customer experience platforms are seeing declining customer brand loyalty, unpredictable stock, and fill-in buying, and digital channels’ failure due to poor front and back-office integration.  Market trends that contribute to this include revenue growth management challenges as input costs soar shifting customer preferences due to a variety of recent economic circumstances causing market disruption Increased data-privacy laws restricting access to valuable customer information.

Interestingly, companies that have a higher quality product, but a poor digital customer experience platform are losing.  According to Qualtrics XM Institute study entitled, “ROI of customer experience in 2021: How breakthrough customer experiences are driving loyalty and growth”, “Brands that overlook the importance of customer experience also underestimate the damage bad customer experience can cause. Our research found that just one bad experience can have a negative impact on customer relationships and reduce future sales by up to 14.7%. "

Your customers are looking for value from their investments, freedom to choose, personalization, and transparency.  They expect loyalty from the companies they do business with, gravitate towards ethical and sustainable companies, and expect a complex mix of adherence to data privacy and personalization.  Your goal should be to maximize customer satisfaction at each of these touchpoints in the customers’ end-to-end journey because a satisfied customer is likely to purchase more and is also likely to recommend you to others.

How can you turn your understanding of these needs into Success for You?

Companies now need to provide customers with the freedom to explore and experiment with you as they please, when they please, without pressure to commit or interact.  Simultaneously, always be at the ready to meet your customers where they are. To serve your customers with answers, options, and delivery whenever your customer signals that they are ready.

To see success in this approach, you must build trust through consistent positive experiences.   The more satisfied your customers are with their experience, the more likely they are to be an advocate to your goods or services.  Recommendations matter.  Consumers are looking carefully at how others perceive your product offerings and are more likely to choose your product if it has high recommendations, especially from trusted sources.

Now is the time to invest in customer experience to grow your revenue base.  Digital innovation will allow you to respond with agility to customer preferences, even in times of market disruption, through digital channels.  It is important to gain actionable insights into customer behavior through predictive analysis.  The ability to connect the front office and the back office to deliver on promises will increase brand loyalty.  Developing hyper-personalized customer experiences will increase customer adoption.

Look for solutions that can support your goals to provide your customers the freedom to own their experience.  When customers choose to interact with you, ensure your technology helps you understand them better through each interaction. When customers choose to explore what you have to offer, digital innovations will help you engage with them in the most meaningful and effective ways and will allow your company the benefit of making confident decisions, ensuring sustainable, connected processes and data privacy, thus accelerating your business innovation.