Customers have come to expect more from businesses, and who can blame them? We've all had customer experiences that ranged from excellent to vexing. It increases the pressure on businesses to strike a balance between the experience they want to provide and limited internal resources and other priorities—especially when well-known customer-centric companies reap the benefits.
How customers perceive your brand is linked to customer retention, lifetime value, and brand loyalty—and according to one study, 52 percent of customers go out of their way to buy from brands to which they are loyal. Attracting and retaining customers in an ultra-competitive business environment is no easy task, and companies that overlook the importance of providing a seamless, effective customer experience risk losing out to competitors who understand that the customer defines good service.
This means that even one experience that falls short of customer expectations can have a significant impact on brand reputation, and the reduced margin for error is exacerbated by the ease of switching in the web 2.0 era.
Customer feedback provides insight into your customers' expectations and how they may change over time as your industry changes. It can also tell you where customers are getting stuck and what works well. The key is to acknowledge the feedback and do everything possible to act on it.
Customers would rather solve problems on their own than speak with a live agent. You can help them help themselves by providing data-driven content. Typically, it takes the form of help articles or chatbots that point customers in the right direction quickly.
According to our Trends Report, 76 percent of customers expect data-driven personalization. This could include discussions about their preferred contact method, account type, or status; product recommendations based on previous purchases or searches; or some other type of personalised online experience.
According to Gartner, by 2022, 72 percent of customer interactions will involve an emerging technology such as machine-learning apps, chatbots, or mobile messaging. Chatbots and virtual customer assistants powered by AI are useful for quick, repetitive tasks.
Customer experience management is "the practise of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Companies that are unable to successfully manage the customer experience frequently take a fragmented approach, in which they examine each factor and determine how each one can be improved. While doing so, they are not taking into account how each factor influences the others. This approach perpetuates the chaos that leads to poor customer experience management.