4/21/16 by: Kelvin Claveria at VisionCritical (excerpt)
In a recent webinar with Vision Critical, digital analyst Brian Solis shares what companies need to do to lead the customer experience revolution. The webinar was very timely given how, according to Gartner, 89 percent of companies expect to compete based on customer experience (CX). For many companies, improving their customer experience strategy and providing a seamless end-to-end experience is one of the most difficult but most urgent business puzzles to solve.
A recording of the webinar is now available. If you work in CX, here are three actionable tips worth noting.
- Close the “relevance gap.”
Brands today are “co-created” with customers, according to Solis. The experiences that customers share with other customers online (what Solis refers to as “shared experiences”) form the basis for a brand’s image. In the digital age, shared experiences are captured in online searches and conversations, shaping customer perception like never before.
This notion of shared experiences is something that Nick Stein, senior vice president of marketing at Vision Critical and co-presenter at the webinar, agrees with. Today’s customers have become their own intelligence ecosystems, says Stein, and we now live in an age when one customer can either spark a firestorm or inspire a new product or a great campaign.
Solis says that most companies are not in a position to take advantage of shared experiences. For many brands, there’s a gap between what they say they’ll do and what people feel (and) share about the brand. Narrowing this divide will allow companies to unlock their innovation potential, but doing so requires engaging with customers to answer a critical question: What would my digital customer do?
To answer this question, companies need to give customers “outlets to share their feedback in a meaningful way and ensure that they know you are truly hearing them,” offers Stein.
- Engage with connected consumers at every touchpoint.
It’s no secret that today’s customers are super connected. As a result, companies must make sure that their customer experience strategy and investments align well with the expectations, behaviors and motivations of connected customers.
The digital customer has given way to the rise of digital transformation: the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital consumers. The point of digital transformation isn’t just to beef up a company’s technology capability; the end goal is to “understand how innovation can shape the new customer experience,” says Solis.
To pull off digital transformation, companies must realign or fund new investment in technology or business models to more effectively engage digital customers and create new value at every touchpoint of the customer journey.
- Look for actionable insight.
In an effort to improve CX, companies track many different metrics. But often, the data they have on hand isn’t useful.
“Most investments in customer experience are not successful,” shares Stein. For instance, a study by the consulting firm Temkin found that only 11 percent of CX investments made a significant impact on the business. The explosion of the marketing technology landscape isn’t helping companies make better CX decisions either.
“There is a lot of data, but you can’t just find the actionable insight that you need,” says Stein.
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