The propulsion of Customer Experience, both as a theory and as a practice, to the forefront of business strategies, over the past few years, makes for an interesting trend. After all, not so long ago, businesses could easily recover from losses and win over customers through discounts, sales offers, etc. Price was a huge competitive differentiator back then.
Times have changed, and so have your customers! Today, we witness brands from all over the globe wanting to invest in understanding their customers and their experience. In other words, Customer Experience Management is a concept that is turning heads of late. And that’s not just because customers have started to lay more emphasis on their experience, but also due to the fact that investing in Customer Experience has a proven ROI.
That’s not it though. There are so many wide-ranging benefits of a Customer Experience Management platform. Here, we take a look at some of the most important ones that should get you to start investing in it!
1. Make Customer Feedback Useful and Important
Most organizations have no clue as to why they collect customer feedback, merely doing it for the sake of it. A Customer Experience Management platform, firstly, eliminates the wastefulness of customer feedback. Also, it makes customer feedback data collection cost-effective. No longer does your business have to deal with cumbersome paper surveys!
By providing a simpler, effective and more intelligent means to reach out to customers for their feedback, a CEM platform lets you see the value in customer feedback data, and also helps improve survey response rates. Moreover, organizations begin to understand the importance of this customer data in shaping processes and policies, and soon collecting feedback becomes a priority and not just another initiative.
2. Fetch Valuable Customer Insights regularly
The customer feedback data collected is then analyzed by a Customer Experience Management platform before displaying the insights to the business owner, staff in-charge, etc. Data analysis yields customer painpoints that need to be addressed, reasons for customer churn, customer dissatisfaction as well as satisfaction.
Organizations, therefore, can drill down into raw customer data to study and understand customer behavior. This presents them a meaningful set of action points to address/implement in order to improve the product or service and the overall customer experience along with it.
3. Deliver Omni-channel Customer Experiences
The modern-day customer has resorted to using multiple channels while interacting with a brand. Some visit your website, then go to your store or vice versa. Some might visit your store, get an idea of what to purchase, and then order the same via your mobile app. So, from a Brand’s perspective, omni-channel customer experiences have become the need of the hour.
And with a Customer Experience Management system in place, businesses have the opportunity to collect feedback across multiple customer interaction channels – mobile app, in-store, email, website, and so on. This ensures that your brand is present wherever the customer is – you don’t miss out on any conversations! Also, the data collected across these different platforms is sent to one centralized location in order to fetch a holistic view of the customer.
4. Choose the Right Customer Investments
By constantly collecting and analyzing customer data, businesses can, over the long run, find out what’s resonating and what’s not with the customer. This helps in determining the right investments to make. Would investing in this piece of technology benefit the customer? Also, how necessary is this investment? Do I need it right away or can I look into it after a couple of months? A CEM platform helps answer these questions!
It’s important that you do not spend money on redundant areas or improve something that is hardly of any value to your customers or their experience. You don’t want to shift to a process-centric business mindset!
5. Address Customer Concerns in Real-time
Let’s face it. Customer attention spans are dwindling. Customers are spoilt choice at the same time. One bad experience with your brand could mean ‘game-over’ and that they start going to your competitors. But not when your brand is able to fix their bad experience as and when they happen!
One of the biggest benefits of a CEM platform is its ability to help brands respond to negative customer feedback in real-time. Brand owners, store managers, staff, etc, will get notified the moment a customer leaves a negative feedback. This gives you a more than slight chance to flip their experience. Apologize and offer them a discount or a coupon on their next purchase! In fact, customers would be surprised and happy to see that you are responding to their issues instantly!
6. Measure and Improve Customer Loyalty
With a Customer Experience Management platform in place, businesses can effortlessly track as well as improve the much-revered Net Promoter Score®. NPS®, for years, has been the standard measure of customer loyalty and approximately tells you how many customers are actually promoting or criticizing your brand in the outside world.
Brands can ensure that collecting, managing and analyzing NPS is made an organization-wide initiative and that the NPS question is asked across multiple customer interaction channels. There’s also the possibility to benchmark your NPS with the industry standard and also find out the exact steps you need to take in order to improve your score!
7. Motivate and Empower Frontline Staff
With actionable customer insights at your disposal, it becomes easier to instruct your frontline staff on how to carry forward customer interactions and engagements. Frontline employees, perhaps, interact with customers the most and because of this, influence the customers’ experience to a large extent.
With a CEM platform, it is possible to drill deep into customers’ feedback and find out what’s stopping your frontline from doing their best work. Is it a lack of product knowledge (this requires better training from your side)? Or is it poor communication skills (institute a spoken English class if needed!). The advantages of a CEM platform are not inhibited to the customers’ experience alone – even employees benefit from it!
8. Align the Organization towards the Customer
Ultimately, any brand that delivers great customer experiences consistently has to nurture a customer-centric internal culture. It’s about the whole organization being aligned towards the needs and expectations of the customer, and being focused on delivering on the brand promise.
A Customer Experience Management platform, through quantifiable metrics and actionable insights, injects purpose and direction to your customer-centric goals. It aids the whole organization to place the customer at the heart of everything it does and this way, every single employee right from a C-level executive to a frontline staff will know what role they play in shaping the customers’ experience.