Customer Experience (CX) refers to the overall relationship customers have with your brand, and your focus should be on how your customers perceive you and interact with you throughout their journey with your company.
If you can walk in the customer’s shoes, you can sometimes see one brand is just another among so many other brands. This is where your job comes in: to stand out in order to increase customer numbers and loyalty.
For an outstanding experience, in the short term, you can take various actions, but we think your mindset is also for the long term, right? Well, in that case, the focus is on proactively enhancing the customer experience with your brand.
The evolution of technology, digital transformation and AI solutions are obviously integrated into the development of organizations’ strategies worldwide. About how Artificial Intelligence can help you take your company to the next level, we wrote in a previous blog post.
Why do you need to prioritize CX initiatives?
Let’s be honest: the budgets allocated to CX initiatives are limited.
We strongly believe that any proposed initiative, if it has at least one of the following goals, should be prioritized:
- Controlling customer churn;
- Improving customer loyalty;
- Boosting revenues;
- Earning customer advocacy.
For an initiative to be effective, there must be a balance between the direction of your business and the needs of your customers.
Spending Priorities
According to “The Global State of Customer Experience”, CX professionals have voted that AI technologies and Customer Journey Mapping have a higher share of the budget than Data and Analytics
“When you have mapped and truly understand the customer’s path/journey, then you can start to think about how to enhance this experience. And whether automation is the right thing to enhance the journey. Automation is expensive and is not substitute for knowledge and understanding of your customer.” says Adam Firbank, journey practice lead for customer communications at British Gas. From here we can deduce that customer journey mapping is a critical step in considering technologies such as AI and automation.
Therefore, in order to be sure that the allocation of in customer’s journey mapping investments generates returns, they should be prioritized in the relevant departments, so as to have an impact on the customer experience.
Since last year, CX professionals have started implementing AI technologies, noting that it is a very strong and impactful field. The strong and wide range of use of CX AI, such as scaling customization, is enough to get many to embark on an AI deployment journey.
It’s vital to have a collaboration between IT professionals and business leaders to clearly establish the right infrastructure, budget, skills, and learning process. In the near future, any organization will invest in AI, but by doing so now, the results, of any kind, will surely come in the future. Of course, a well-developed strategy is needed.
The customer’s voice also gains ground in the rankings. It is certain that feedback is taken into account in the strategies implemented in organizations. We can conclude that the pandemic has accelerated the digitalization process of many industries. And budgets seem to be distributed in the direction of developing digital solutions.
But what is the ROI of customer experience?
Linking CX initiatives to money and statistics puts a better story on the table than anything else. And this is the ticket to the integration of executives in the CX strategy.
Here are 3 statistics that summarize very well what we have told so far:
- Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.
- Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors.
- 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
In order to maintain funding and gain future support for new programs, CX leaders need to be able to clearly link customer-focused initiatives to financial growth.
According to Gartner’s “Modernize Data Privacy to Put the Personal Back Into Personalization” report over 40% of all data analytics projects relate to an aspect of customer experience. It’s clear that proving ROI comes down to focusing on the proper analysis of data and the right metrics.
Clearly, when done right, investing in customer experience brings a strong return on investment.
Conclusion
As Adam Firbank, Journey practice lead for customer communications at British Gas, says “When you truly understand the customer journey, then you can start to assess how to enhance this experience and whether automation is the right thing to enhance the journey.”
