CX champions often face challenges if they start new initiatives around customer services. It often isn’t as easy to see the value of customer experience as it is to see the ROI of other investments. However, customer experience is incredibly valuable. Executives often won’t invest in customer experience without “proof,” even if the writing is on the wall. Here is actual proof you can share with your teams. Without a customer focus, companies simply won’t be able to survive. We are living in a time where we face the commodity trap. Too many of our products and services are the same. To stand out in a sea of sameness, CX is the only way to do that. These statistics prove the value of customer experience and show why all companies need to get on board.

Companies with a customer experience mindset drive revenue 4-8% higher than the rest of their industries.

Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80%.

84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.

73% of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors.

96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

83% of companies that believe it’s important to make customers happy also experience growing revenue.

Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience.

73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties.

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.

Loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a friend to the company.

Companies with initiatives to improve their customer experience see employee engagement increase by 20% on average.

81% of companies view customer experience as a competitive differentiator.

68% of customers say the service representative is key to a positive service experience.

The top reason customers switch brands is because they feel unappreciated.

64% of companies with a customer-focused CEO believe they are more profitable than their competitors.

75% of customer experience management executives gave customer experience a top score for being incredibly important to business.

Companies that use tools like customer journey maps reduce their cost of service by 15-20%.

Offering a high-quality customer experience can lower the cost of serving customers by up to 33%.

71% of the companies say the cloud has influenced the customer experience.

Customers are likely to spend 140% more after a positive experience than customers who report negative experiences.

A 2% increase in customer retention is the same to profits as cutting costs by 10%.

Data Source- Forbes

In its simplest definition, customer experience is the sum of all the interactions that a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship and includes the customer’s feelings, emotions, and perceptions of the brand during the course of those interactions. Some people question whether product and price are part of customer experience.

Customer experience is actually the “umbrella discipline,” so to speak, while customer service falls under that umbrella. Customer service is just one of those interactions, one touchpoint in the overall customer experience; servicing customers is one action of many that comprises the customer experience.

Journey maps are a way to walk in – and to capture – your customer’s steps and chart her course as she interacts with your organization while trying to fulfill some need or complete some task, e.g., call support, purchase a product, etc. The map (created with customers, from their viewpoint) describes what customers are doing, thinking, and feeling at each step in the journey. With the right data integrated into the map, you can identify key moments of truth, i.e., make-or-break moments or moments during which the customer decides if she will continue to do business with your or not, and ensure that those moments are executed flawlessly going forward.

Important to the journey mapping process is to have the right customers and the right stakeholders in the room to create the maps. The right customers are those for whom you’re mapping, obviously. We typically identify the personas for which we’ll map before beginning any mapping workshop; the right customers will represent those personas. The right stakeholders include individuals from the cross-functional departments that are either directly or indirectly involved in the journey that you’re mapping.

The customer service experience is one of my favorite journeys to map because it is such a rich experience; it affords such a huge teaching and learning opportunity.

People contact customer service when the product isn’t working right; the documentation isn’t clear; marketing set expectations that the product didn’t deliver; sales sold the dream and not what the product actually does; the invoice is not accurate or hard to decipher; or for a variety of other reasons. Something (i.e., the experience) broke down somewhere upstream, long before the customer even thought about calling – or even wanted to call – customer service.

In other words, when messages are misleading or confusing, when the customer has a complaint about an interaction or a transaction, or when something doesn’t work the way the customer expects, the experience is broken. The resultant action: the customer calls customer service to get help or to get answers.

This call isn’t customer service’s fault. This isn’t a breakdown in service; this is a breakdown in the experience. And so, customer service takes the beating and the anguish from the customer for something that could’ve been designed better upstream. Had that proper design occurred, the number of frustrated customers calling the call center would have been drastically reduced.

Customer behaviors and expectations develop quickly. To distinguish themselves, companies have to adjust their strategy continuously. The need to fulfill outstanding customer service has nevermore been more significant than now – customers use digital channels more than ever. They expect seamless journeys through their transactions, even when switching between those channels.

So, what are the new expectations of customers? How do you stay ahead of the competition in 2020? Take a look at our essential trends to consider in 2020.

1. Customer service is not limited to a department

As customer experience becomes the main criterion of choice, this area is gaining more importance within companies. While it used to be seen as a cost center solely dedicated to answering customer inquiries, it now has a more central role and is transitioning to a profit center.

We can see a growing interest in customer experience from the C-suite. A YouGov survey found that 97% of executives believe customer satisfaction is key to business success. When top management understands the value of CX, this transposes to the company as a whole. It contributes to driving investment in this area and develops a culture centered around the customer.

To further this vision, companies must rely on a connected ecosystem of tools. An open customer engagement platform provides a seamless experience and promotes the flow of data across divisions. Integrating this tool with CRM or BI enables the leverage of information from customer interactions, which can be used by other departments such as sales and marketing.

2. Customer experience becomes the main criteria of choice

In 2015, a Walker study predicted that, by 2020, customer experience would overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Modern trends have confirmed this shift. With more competition and fewer opportunities to compete on product and price, customer experience is more important than ever. We now live in “the Experience Economy,” where customers value experience more than the actual product. Leading companies such as Netflix and Amazon reflect this evolution by providing a convenient experience minimizing the customer’s efforts.

HubSpot found that 93% of customers are more likely to be repeat customers at companies with excellent customer service. On the other hand, CITE Research found that customers have ceased doing business with brands an average of four times (five times if we focus on millennials) in the past year after a bad customer service experience.

Prioritizing customer experience is determined to have a positive economic impact: 84% of companies that work to improve this area report an increase in their revenue.

3/ UCaaS + CCaaS make customer experience better

The transition from on-premise to cloud solutions brings several benefits for companies, such as reduced implementation time, costs reduction, and more open frameworks for integrations. UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) are two of these main cloud services.

UCaaS is dedicated to internal communications between employees, and CCaaS facilitates interactions with customers. They used to operate in two distinct spheres, and these areas are now linked thanks to the Cloud.

This integration encourages a more satisfying customer experience. As aforementioned, customer experience is achieving a more central role and is not limited to a department. In that way, any employee can now have an impact on CX. When frontline employees lack information, they need to access those with the right expertise inside the company, ideally while engaged with the customer. Still, 70% of employees report they have to leave the customer communication app to consult with coworkers – increasing customer wait times and time to resolution.

Having a single platform for both CC and UC reduces the time needed to switch between apps, improving both the employee and customer experience. In a customer-centric organization, all employees have an impact on customer service. Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS is a necessary step to support this vision and is contributing to improved customer satisfaction, retention, and sales growth.

4. The majority of customer interactions are becoming digital

Digital channels are gaining more and more important for customer interactions. Email, social media, and now messaging has emerged as options to phone calls. Customers are used to these channels to communicate within their private circle and anticipate to use the same with organizations.

The multiplication of channels for customer service and new customer habits are supporting the growth of digital. More adapted to customers’ lifestyles, these channels allow them to contact brands on their terms. While the phone is still used, there is a general decrease in its use.

By 2022, Gartner predicts that 72% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies such as messaging, mobile applications, and chatbots, up from 11 percent in 2017. They also predict that, by that time, phone conversations will make up merely 12% of customer service interactions – vs. 41% in 2017.

The growth of digital requires not only to adopt new channels but also a completely new approach. The new challenge for companies is to go beyond omni-channel to offer multiexperience. It suggests being able to provide seamless and effortless experiences across all digital touchpoints. It becomes apparent that customers are not thinking in terms of “channels” anymore: they naturally choose the contact method that is the most convenient to them.

To adapt to this evolution, brands must adopt an omni-digital strategy that allows you to centralize the management of channels. With this approach, silos disappear, and agents manage any channel with a single tool. We don’t know what customers’ preferences will be tomorrow: by becoming channel-agnostic, brands gain the flexibility to deploy new touchpoints where and when customers expect them quickly.

5. Live-chat use is declining

The death of live-chat is not happening anytime soon. Live-chat is still widely used and relevant for customer service, especially for sales. However, it has some limits, such as its synchronous character, the lack of conversation history, and the limited compatibility with mobile devices.

Messaging is the fastest-growing channel for customer service and tackles these limits. Its asynchronous character doesn’t require customers and agents to stay focused on the conversation. It keeps the conversation history with compatibility across multiple devices. Like live-chat, it can be offered while customers browse the website to answer their questions quickly.

Even though, Messaging is mainly adopted through external channels such as WhatsApp and Messenger. Plus, you can add messages to the brand’s mobile app, thanks to in-app messaging. This provides more control and flexibility on the features and data. The next wave of this technology will be cross-platform: in that way, the brand will be able to deploy its proprietary channels on mobile and desktop with continuity in the conversation.

6. AI empowers customer service agents

As a Forrester study points out, companies must start creating Human-Machine collaborations to free employees to do more meaningful work. There are many ways in which AI can be leveraged to assist agents in their daily tasks. By routing messages, collecting customer information, or providing a knowledge base, AI is saving agents much time. This approach allows them to focus on more value-add tasks such as solving complex issues, identifying opportunities for upselling, or creating a more personalized experience.

A collaboration between chatbots and agents also answers to customers’ expectations: 86% of customers believe there should be an “escalate to agent” option when talking to a chatbot. In that way, they enjoy the best of both parties: instant answers from chatbots for basic requests and interactions with an agent for more complex situations.

Customer experience will rule 2020

2020 will be defined by the central role given to customer experience. This shift began a few years ago and now becomes a reality for most companies. Brands convinced of the value of CX are prioritizing this area to match customers’ expectations more accurately. It is a challenge now to adopt the right strategy and tools, providing multi-experience.

Customer service (CS) is critical for delivering a great customer experience (CX). All too often, these terms are used interchangeably, but they are not synonymous—CS is not the same as CX.

Customer service is part of the overall customer experience, not the entire customer experience. It is vital to understand the difference between CX and CS as you implement Voice of the Customer (VoC).

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is probably a more familiar term — it’s also the more narrowly scoped of the two.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your product or service as needed.

Customer service requires your customer-facing team to possess a particular set of skills, including patience, product knowledge, and tenacity, so they can provide the answers and assistance a customer needs. It’s the human element in the customer journey and the voice your customer will recognize as representative of your organization.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience, or CX, refers to the broader customer journey across the organization and includes every interaction between the customer and the business.

CX involves all the ways your business interacts with a customer, including and outside of traditional direct, customer-facing service. CX captures how the customer uses your product or service, their interactions with self-service support options, the feeling of walking into your retail store, customer service interactions with the team, and more.

Customer experience includes three main components:

1. Customer Service: This includes Customer Support, Customer Success, and self-service support — the points at which your customer interacts with your team.
2. Technology: This is the product itself — how it works and the interactivity points.
3. Design: This is the brand touchpoint — the marketing, the design, and the feelings your brand creates for your customer.

While those three areas are quite distinct, there are no hard lines between them. All of the pieces combine and work together to make up the customer experience.

Customer Service[CS] Vs. Customer Experience[CX]

The key difference between customer service and customer experience is that customer experience involves the whole customer journey, including customer service.

Customer service is limited to the interactions a customer has when seeking advice or assistance on a product or service. Understanding the customer experience, on the other hand, can involve analyzing data from non-customer-facing teams who contribute to a customer’s overall experience with a product or service.

Customer service and customer experience are both important pieces to an organization’s success, yet it’s not possible (or necessary) to draw hard lines between them. The line between how customers use a product and how they interact with the people supporting it are more blurred than ever. Customers consider the whole picture when thinking about your offerings, and you should, too.

CX is holistic and covers a wide number of touchpoints. Some of them are CS oriented, some are not. A complete VoC program includes all touchpoints, including those that are product or digitally oriented.

Customer service experts agree: customers have changed. They are more likely to share their feelings on different channels such as social media or blog articles, have higher expectations and are keener than ever on the customers’ lifecycle. 89% of customer service professionals agree that customers are more likely than ever to share the good or bad experience they had with businesses.

On the other side, most companies are not equipped to connect with and answer with their customers on every channel. They simply haven’t adapted yet to this new multichannel environment that is growing fast. I believe companies still have to shift to a customer-first-mindset to just not grow bigger, but also better.

Customer service is the new marketing, here is why it’s important

As stated before, customers lifecycle has been modified and is now increasingly complex. Customers can interact with businesses on multiple touchpoints and are waiting for the fastest answer at the highest level of quality.

By 2020, it is believed that customer experience will be the main brand differentiator instead of price or product.

For example, according to Forrester’s customer index, customer experience leaders gained 43% in performance compared to customer experience laggards who saw a decrease of 33,9%.

Customer service is a form of marketing

Whatever people say about the customer service they experienced, it has more impact due to the internet. A potential customer usually wants to know what are the main feedback about your product and there are lots of ways to do it.

85% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.

With a great customer service strategy, you can market your services or product through word of mouth, reviews, comments on social media, testimonials and so on.

Customer service is important for your company to grow

When you offer good customer service, you retain your current customer and gain more customers. The only side effect can be your growth and the troubles that go with it.

Customer service is very powerful when focusing on repeat buyers and I believe every company should have that focus rather working on acquisition.

More than repeat buyer, it can also increase the global lifetime value of your customers which is even greater if you want to invest in acquisition then because it will increase your acquisition cost.

Regarding B2B, great customer service leads to a shorter sales cycle which leads to a lower acquisition cost too.

More than acquisition, customer service can also help your business to retain your customers. Bain and Company revealed that increasing customer retention rates by 5% could increase profits by 25%

As customer retention is key for every business, the latest technology can help a lot to improve your customer service.

Customer Service   Customers Lifecycle   Customer Experience Leaders  Customer Service Strategy  Customer Retention