Why CX Transformation Is the Future of Business
written by
Gunalan Ram
posted on
January 26, 2022
The point of running a business is to make it easy for customers to work with you. Whether you are into retail, hospitality, or banking, your customers will appreciate your willingness to meet them on their terms.
Every interaction a customer has with your business is an opportunity to create an experience they’ll remember. You will build a loyal customer base by providing value at every touchpoint.
How do you make your brand stand out from the competition to achieve it? The answer is customer experience transformation.
Let me show you how you can transform your customer experience (CX) and create brand loyalty to propel your business to new heights.
What is customer experience transformation?
In simple words, customer experience transformation is about enhancing your customers’ experience every time they interact with your business at any touchpoint, through any channel, at any time, for any purpose.
Businesses look for ways to enhance customer experiences in every industry. The banking sector is focused on safeguarding its customers’ assets, while the hospitality sector strives to make each guest feel welcome. Accomplishing this goal is challenging for every business in every industry, as it requires humanizing customer interactions.
Companies are driven by two different paradigms when it comes to customer experience.
One approach is where the company focuses on what’s best for itself and its shareholders. The other is where the company focuses on what is best for its customers.
In the past, most companies fell under the first category and focused on efficiently allocating their resources and talent.
With the rise of social media and digital communication channels, the customer is no longer a faceless entity but a person with a story and feelings. Companies realize how important it is to listen to customers’ voices and help them reach their goals or solve problems. This has led to the rise of new business models focusing on building customer relationships instead of just selling products and services.
While Gartner research shows 58% of customers believe most digital experiences don’t impact their purchase decision, companies are now shifting their focus from creating digital experiences to building relationships.
Align your entire organization to make customer satisfaction an integral part of its activities.
4 benefits of customer experience transformation
As a CX strategy expert, I will highlight the following benefits of a customer experience transformation.
1. Greater performance
Transforming the customer experience helps improve your customer retention rate and enhances employee morale by laying the foundation for company-wide collaboration. Empowering employees to build relationships with customers increases brand loyalty and advocacy.
2. Enhanced adaptability
Transforming the customer experience helps improve your customer retention rate and enhances employee morale by laying the foundation for company-wide collaboration. Empowering employees to build relationships with customers increases brand loyalty and advocacy.
3. Improved efficiency
The borderless, globally diverse workforce requires an enterprise-grade CX solution to manage customer interactions. The solution should facilitate collaboration between team members by providing access to real-time data about customer interactions and resource allocation and enabling the transfer of customer inquiries between team members without breaking the interaction chain.
4. Longer retention
When you provide an exceptional customer experience and interactions, your customers are more likely to stay loyal to your business, raising the lifetime value of that customer to your business.
How to elevate your customer experience
To compete in the next normal, companies must identify current customer behaviors that will shape the customer experience in the near future. They must ensure these opportunities align with their business strategies and capabilities.
Let’s look at some of the priorities.
1. Improve the capabilities of your operations
The key to improving operations is to create a culture where people are empowered to take ownership of processes and outcomes. Give your teams the skills, training, and encouragement they need to deliver a great customer experience.
For example, when they experience high call volume during peak hours, they must be able to troubleshoot quickly and resolve issues without transferring customers to another department or putting them on hold.
A well-trained team can reduce waiting time, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and increase revenue.
2. Deliver the right experiences to customers
The gap between telecom and digital experiences can be bridged by unifying all touchpoints on a single platform. Businesses can create more seamless and contextual experiences by effortlessly switching between social media channels, emails, SMS, video, and phone to adapt responses.
The key to gaining post-pandemic customers’ trust is to offer them live human support on their preferred communication channel—before and after they purchase. This requires a unified customer service platform that gives real-time insights into customers’ needs, pain points, and preferences.
3. Guide your customers through their journeys
To keep customers coming back, you must treat them like VIPs.
Smart routing capabilities allow you to route customers to the most appropriate staff. With a comprehensive communication platform, a consistent level of service across all channels and devices can be achieved —including voice, text messaging, email, and social media.
This breaks down silos, centralizes customer data by integrating with the existing tech stack, and automates common inquiries to improve the efficiency of your workforce.
4. Leverage unstructured data
Uncovering and understanding customers’ intent and sentiment by stitching together unstructured customer interaction data helps businesses create personalized experiences at scale, which lets them provide exceptional services.
For example, by analyzing data from social media, emails, and call logs, companies can uncover which products customers are interested in, what they like about them, and how they use them. This information can be used to create highly targeted marketing campaigns that drive conversions.
5. Place importance on innovation and security
Invest in technology infrastructure to empower businesses with robust calling, messaging, and conferencing capabilities. When choosing a SaaS communication solution, look for one that supports data retention capability.
How AI and digital transformation impact customer experience
As technology advances and customer expectations evolve, businesses must find new ways to deliver a compelling customer experience. AI-powered bots can automate routine requests, allowing your business to focus on more complex tasks such as personalization, customization, and providing value-added services.
Customer journeys become increasingly complex, especially for businesses operating in highly regulated industries such as financial services or healthcare, where compliance is paramount.
To meet the demands of customers, businesses need to adapt their customer experience strategies quickly.
By leveraging data and analytics, organizations can better understand how their customers interact with them and what they want from their business. This can help companies improve customer interactions by making them more personalized, relevant, and helpful.
Plan the future of your business
Remembering that CX is the heart of every successful transformation is crucial. The ability to drive positive emotions and build trust are critical factors in delivering high levels of customer experience.
Studies from Forrester show that 54% of customers who report positive emotions, like happiness and appreciation, forgive brands that make mistakes. Besides, the quality of brand interactions is integral to building customer trust. In 2022, an average of 59% of customers trusted the brands they interacted with, two percentage points higher than the 57% of customers who trusted brands in 2020.
The customer experience is a critical differentiator in today’s competitive economy. Successful businesses leverage every customer interaction as an opportunity to strengthen loyalty, reduce churn, and boost revenues.
Now that you know customer experience transformation is an ongoing process, you can prioritize it in your organization.
For companies to respond quickly to a constantly changing environment, they must have a broad base of employees that know how to empathize with customers, apply insights learned from customer research, and redesign the experience through digital excellence and contactless engagement.
Hello there!
My name is Victoria.
I am an SEO expert, Medium top writer, solopreneur, and the founder of Self Made Millennials. I help companies create optimized content and attract potential customers through organic search results. In addition, I share how content creators can monetize their writing skills.
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