Many current business models are being disrupted. Retailers that are just providing shelf space will soon be out of business. Amazon is continually disrupting existing business models by combining a customer experience based on utility, with convenience at the center of their strategy.

The multi-channel buying habits of consumers demanding a seamless experience pose complex challenges businesses.

Businesses that are thriving have figured out ways to design experiences that attract and retain customers by offering a personal experience that is relevant and personal. Sometimes entirely new business models are required, other times altering the existing model is all that is required.

Creating new products is a daunting task. One study has identified what they term a “decay curve”. According to this study, it takes over fifty ideas to create a new product. By ideas they mean an idea that has been screened, analyzed, developed, tested and marketed.

The Customer Experience Challenge

The customer landscape is rapidly changing, it’s being transformed by a confluence of technology, the internet, and new consumer social behaviors. Digital transformations in unrelated industries play a role in shaping consumer expectations in all industries. For example, when Starbuck’s created their mobile app that enabled increasingly elaborate purchasing interactions, other industries began to look for mobile solutions.

The availability of smart devices provided unprecedented mobile computing power for consumers. As the adoption rate of these devices has soared, so have expectations for a personal, seamless mobile experience.

In the new consumer landscape disruption isn’t a destination or an event, it’s a journey. Companies that want to survive recognize that the reality of the new competitive ecosystem requires new rules of engagement. This shift in mindset starts at the top, it’s a critical success factor.

Consider some of these statistics

According to McKinsey over half of all customer interactions happen during a multi-channel journey.

Today’s internet consumers want their online questions to be addressed promptly; 42% expect a response within one hour.  Source Gigya

45% of consumers prefer a cross-channel combination of online, mobile, and in-store shopping. Source Gigya

68% of consumers agree that shopping today is less about brands or products themselves and more about what they are feeling and needing. Source Gigya

74% of modern consumers rely on social networks to guide purchase decisions. Source Gigya

86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience, but only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations. Source CEI.

Various studies detail levels of customer frustration with the friction they encounter in many organizations. Having to wait on hold for lengthy periods of time, repeat the same information to multiple employees across multiple channels, and failing to get their questions answered in a timely fashion are just a few examples of friction.

The Customer Experience Solution

McKinsey’s research dispels the traditional buying funnel. In the new landscape, consumers operate differently. The new buying process is more like a journey than a linear trek through buying stages. To be relevant firms must recognize that their customer’s experience journeys vary depending on the product or service they are offering. These journeys are continually evolving with the rapid pace of digital innovation.

A few journey examples might be:

• Onboarding
• Making a payment
• Resolving a customer service issue
• Billing
• Reordering
• Checking product or service availability

Brands that are closing the customer experience gap are finding ways to remove friction by transforming the customer experience from moments to journeys. Even more critical, is evaluating the efficacy and experience of each journey from the customer’s perspective.

Most companies are finding ways to get their employees in close proximity to their customers so they can observe and interact with customers to gain an empathetic perspective. In an ecosystem, solutions may be found outside your existing buying process.

Customers expect a seamless multi-channel experience that gives them access whenever wherever and however they choose to connect. When in the midst of a journey, they expect to continue with the process from their last contact point.

50% of all customer interactions happen during a multi-event, multi-channel journey.

Embracing the Customer Experience Challenge.

Removing friction requires agility, collaboration, engaged stakeholders and a culture that nurtures continuous learning and an accurate understanding of what matters most to the consumer. Consumers and brands now function in a world of constant innovation; all are subjected to a barrage of multi-channel noise each and every day.

Here are five factors that can contribute to a satisfying and differentiating customer experience.

Culture

An innovative culture is the fertile soil of new ideas and innovation. It creates the space where the mission, vision, and values of the firm align with the behaviors of the employees. At its best, it’s a community of all stakeholders working toward a common goal.

Are you part of creating a culture that values the customer experience? When values are aligned employees are motivated to serve the customer and each other. Is everyone able to articulate the mission and values?  Are new employees screened for behavioral alignment with the values of the organization?

Listening

Feedback is the fuel of innovation. Giving and receiving feedback is a skill that must be developed and honed. Our biology works against us. The brain doesn’t always appreciate feedback, especially the developmental kind.

The folks at IDEO, a design thinking firm, are careful about language. Because they must provide a lot of feedback they have adopted language that encourages candid feedback. When critiquing they use two types of statements:

“ I like …….”

“I wish….”

I like is obvious, I wish is a way to communicate improvement feedback without any judgmental baggage. Personally, I like these statements and I’ve found them quite useful.

Social media has created the opportunity for a dialogue with customers and associates. Emerging tools offer marketers a means by which they can monitor and even enter conversations. However, it’s important to understand the appropriate etiquette to avoid missteps and maximize the benefit.

Asking customers, prospects, and employees open-ended questions is a very useful practice. We are often blinded by our own knowledge and assumptions. Allowing, even encouraging candid feedback is a helpful way to identify opportunities and challenges.

Good listening practices can serve as an early warning detection system allowing companies to respond before potential problems become serious ones.

Empowering

Consumers are frustrated by an inability to get:

• answers to their questions
• resolution to their problems

According to an American Express survey, 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made the intended purchase because of a poor service experience.

More importantly, when companies engage and respond to customer service requests over social media, those customers spend 20% to 40% more money with the company than other customers do.

Many companies spend a great deal of time and effort defining the customer’s journey. They realize that designing an engaging customer experience can offer many benefits and ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line.

Try asking your associates a few open-ended questions about their experience with each other, customers, supplies. Ask them about suggestions for improving their lives.

Speed

Customers expect quick answers and solutions; this is essential if you are committed to listening socially. Even if you aren’t committed to social listening customers are increasingly presuming you will be listening or they’ll switch to a competitor.

Associates need the tools, training, and trust to quickly handle and resolve customer questions and complaints without transferring consumers from one department to the other. Ask frontline stakeholders to identify gaps and barriers that create friction and slow down responses. Are these gaps created internally? Externally? Experiment with design changes that offer faster solutions. In some cases, self-service options may be an effective alternative.

Speed is often relative, so it’s important to appropriately set and manage expectations. Make use of the feedback loop to develop an appropriate understanding of how your customer defines speed.

Agility

If companies are going to transform the customer experience from moments to journeys, then they’ll have to be willing to continuously learn and make adjustments. This is a new paradigm for many because it may feel more like a laboratory than a business. Successful companies will always be innovating, trying new ideas and methods, keeping what works and dropping what doesn’t.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE     CXREFRESH     CX                  BUSINESS MODEL

Today’s rapid pace of disruptive change is shaping customer expectations and, therefore, Customer Experience (CX) in ways that threaten to leave less agile brands behind.

What’s more, customers are judging brands against their most recent stellar customer experience. Your CX must be on par or your business future could be in question.

“Customer Experience is at the top of every business’ priority list. It concerns the CEO to the CMO and even the CIO. Emerging technology, changing consumer needs and effective use of customer data are critical elements to ensuring your Customer Experience Strategy is as powerful as possible in a competitive and digital landscape.”

In this article, we’ll look Top disruptions that have contributed to and are shaping Customer Experience and Customer Experience strategies today.

The increased pace of change.

Technological advances are unfolding at a vastly accelerated pace and it seems that not a day goes by without the next groundbreaking development emerging. What was groundbreaking yesterday is yesterday’s news today – I am being facetious but the reality is that the half-life of technology seems to shrink every year.

The challenge in all this from a Customer Experience perspective is to identify what is useful, relevant and desirable. The big wins being realized from this disruption happen when technology is humanized and made relevant to real people.

Abundance of customer data.

These days, brands are collecting vast amounts of data about customers, their interactions, buying preferences and behaviors, and more. Essentially, data can be collected in three ways:

• By asking customers for it directly (via profiles and preferences).
• By indirectly tracking customers (via interaction analytics).
• By connecting other data sources to our own (via third-party data providers).

Data collection on this scale, and the manipulation of the data collected represents a huge opportunity for the savvy disruptors to gain a competitive advantage and secure big wins over the competition.

Bear in mind, however, that in order to get the most from big data’s potential, it’s necessary to “translate” the information into actionable strategies that companies can use to grow sales, increase profitability and enhance Customer Experience. “Actionable” is key. If your translation is too complicated or doesn’t clearly demonstrate value, there’s a real danger it will be ignored.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)

Most applications of AI for business lie in the AI subset of machine learning. Programmers have designed clever algorithms that can “learn” from previous results and shape outputs based on that accumulated knowledge. These capabilities are being leveraged today to detect patterns in customer data, behavior and needs which, in turn, enable enhanced customer experiences through hyper-personalization and responsive customer service.

However, AI still has a long way to go and a massive amount of disruption is still lurking somewhere down the road. If you consider machine learning as functioning on a single layer between input and output, deep learning (the future) will function across complicated cross-functional networks, multiplying its output capabilities exponentially.

Video.

While you might consider video as being yesterday’s disruptor, it deserves a special mention because not only has it turned the way we consume information on its head, there are serious downsides to not engaging with video.

A good example is how video relates to your business website – if you’re looking to get found in organic search that is. One of the metrics Google uses to determine the relevance of your website or web page is “dwell time”, which is how long a user spends on page. Video greatly enhances this metric.

Brands today can leverage video in old and new ways to enhance customer experience – old, but still good, as in step-by-step instructions on how to use your product or new as in a virtual reality video that allows you to test drive a car when you can’t go to a dealership.

The seamless omni-channel experience.

Regardless of whether you use Salesforce to manage customer support, SAP to manage orders and Riversand (Product Information Management or PIM software) to manage product information, your customers expect a seamless and unified customer experience that doesn’t require them to hop across systems/applications to do what they need to do. This implies integration across your enterprise.

This holds true regardless of how your customers choose to interact with your brand, be it via the web, a mobile device, social media, IVR, a call center, chat or any other available channel. A seamless omni-channel experience, with a strong and relevant brand presence at each stage of your customer’s journey, is key to delivering a superior customer experience, encouraging brand loyalty and maximizing customer satisfaction.

Seamless CX Spells Opportunity For Your Business.

Intelligent use of customer data and integrated digital experience platforms represent a serious opportunity for savvy businesses to outperform their competitors. A seamless omnichannel experience, with a strong and relevant brand presence at each stage of your customer’s journey, with the right message and functionality, delivers a superior and compelling CX that builds trust and relationships.

The mantra of modern enterprise is “disrupt to deliver more value” — use it to your advantage for CX.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE       CXREFRESH         CX STRATEGY       GLOBAL CX         OMNI CHANNEL  EXPERIENCE

Each of us understands what it means to be disappointed by a poor customer experience or delighted by the employee who goes above and beyond. Given the potential upside, dumping money into the customer experience (CX) seems like a no-brainer. But is it, really? Can you engineer an excellent CX by throwing resources directly at the customer or by demanding that your employees deliver service with a smile?

Many businesses certainly seem to think so. The market for customer experience management services and technology is expected to grow to nearly $17 billion by 2022. Companies are spending lavishly on comprehensive CX strategies and building or buying high-tech systems in order to mine what they see as untapped veins of growth. And the data insists that this preoccupation with CX is justified.

However, the methods that many organizations are using to try and duplicate those glowing figures just aren’t delivering. Only 37 percent of businesses surveyed said they were able to tie CX activities to revenue and/or cost savings. That means the majority are, in effect, just spending a lot of money on CX — and keeping their fingers crossed.

When it comes to the customer experience, keep in mind a simple equation — EX = CX

The employee experience (EX) equals the customer experience (CX). A superlative customer experience is the direct result of a solid employee experience. Yet, many businesses jump right past this simple fact, opting to address the CX as if it were something they could conjure up solely as a result of products, process, placement, pricing and profit.

So, you want to take care of your customers? Start by taking care of your employees. Employees interact with your customers, make them smile and carry your brand message. If your employees are having a great experience, so will your customers.

What, then, do we need to keep in mind when we consider the EX = CX equation, and why is the EX side so important?

1. Your company is your people. People, not legal entities, get things done. Who makes the sales, does the hiring, takes care of the customer, buys the media, teaches the student, tends to the patient or takes out the trash? Does the company do that? We cling to the delusion that corporations take action, make decisions and even have personalities. But, that’s a distorted perspective. It’s the people.
2. Your employees are closest to the customer. They are closest to your customers’ needs, challenges and wants. They are best positioned to resolve a concern or to delight a customer. They are also in the best spot to feed this information back up the chain so that your products and services hit the mark.
3. EX = CX. Some organizations spend a fortune on elaborate customer service safety nets designed to keep employees from damaging the customer relationship. Why? Because their employees don’t care. They’re having a lousy experience, so they’re not motivated to provide anything more than that to the customer. Employees will deliver a customer experience that matches their own experience within the organization.
4. Employees are your brand. “Brand” is the Holy Grail of business; we’re always growing, maintaining, repairing, protecting or defending it. But your employees create it. Not your marketing department. Not PR. If your brand is your promise to your customer, then your employees are responsible for keeping that promise. Your employees are your brand. It lives through the performance, interactions and genuine care of the people who bring it to life on the front lines every day.
5. Design your EX. Many consider the employee experience in the same vein as company culture — it’s just “the way we do things around here.” But, instead of simply “letting the EX happen,” design the EX you want to create and that will impact your customers in the way most instrumental to your organization’s success. Instead of orienting all ideas around the customer or organization, focus on the employee, with the thought that if the organization has an extraordinary EX woven into its DNA, an extraordinary CX becomes inevitable.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE    CX       GLOBAL CX    EX=CX     EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Consider the rise of customer success. Because 70 percent of consumers feel contacting customer service is a frustrating experience, few speak up until they’ve had a truly bad time. The trouble is, just one negative experience is all it takes to send more than half of consumers packing for a competitor. 

That’s why, instead of waiting for customers to call in, customer success managers monitor usage data like average session duration and login frequency. Although customers might hesitate to reach out about a page that won’t load, constant refreshing can signal that they’re struggling.

But customer success isn’t the only area where leaders need to pay attention. By sleuthing out signals in audience data, entrepreneurs can identify unmet needs, root out unwanted functionalities, and discover new ways to monetize existing products.

With almost any product, highly engaged users make up a small percentage of total users. Among those talking about the product, however, engaged users tend to dominate the conversation. As a result, companies often assume that what engaged users want is what the user base as a whole wants.

Shared some insights for every type of company to consider when it comes to improving CX.

• To the customer, it’s all one big team: Customers don’t care which department they talk to when they need help. They just want to get their questions answered and their problems resolved. A company may have different teams, but the customer doesn’t care. As mentioned above, the solution is to bring all interactions and data into one place. When technology doesn’t work together, neither can teams. When teams can’t work together, they can’t give a personalized customer experience. This frustrates both customers and employees.
• Create consistency in your processes to create consistency for the customer: When companies get big, they often have multiple teams with multiple processes. This can become painfully frustrating for customers who end up talking to different people in different departments. There could be conflicting information and explanations. That leads to confusion, and often a loss of confidence. Ultimately, that can lead to lost business.

The company may define its brand promise, but it is the customer who decides whether or not the company delivered on its promise. There’s a lot riding on delivering a positive customer experience. You hire and train good people, but you must also give them the tools they need to deliver a CX that not only meets the customers’ expectations but makes them want to come back. Be there for them – no matter how they reach out to you – be consistent, and build your brand through satisfied customers.

Consumers interact with brands across a multitude of touch points through the buyer’s journey. Every interaction makes an impact on your prospects that will set the stage for the relationship, making it crucial to ensure that every touch point comes with a positive experience, but above all, companies must monitor the big picture: the total experience customers have from end-to-end in doing business with your company.

In order to gain more meaningful insights into the results, we had respondents categorize themselves into one of four levels: ignore, novice, competent, and mature.

• 
  Ignore – These are companies that don’t view customer experience as a crucial differentiator. There are no efforts towards developing a CX strategy or measuring CX initiatives.
• Novice – These are companies that recognize the need to improve a customer’s experience. They’ve put basic steps in place to identify and measure CX-related issues, but don’t have a clear CX strategy in place.
• Competent – These companies make an effort to deliver a high-quality experience for their customers. They have a clear CX strategy with processes firmly in place to measure results.
• Mature – These are the cream of the customer experience crop. Their CX strategy is embedded in everything they do. Customer feedback forms the core of their strategy and decision-making, and they continuously iterate their CX practices to meet customer demand.

Only 12% of companies identify as being Mature CX companies, while 38% identify themselves as Young, 40% as First Steps, and 10% as ignore.

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