How have you been coping with your efforts at trying to design and react to customer interactions in order to meet or exceed customers’ expectations and, hence, increase their satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy? It’s certain that without customer experience management (CEM), you must be doing a very poor job at that.
Since having a competitive advantage in the face of the very stiff competition in the global market entails that you have a good grasp of your customers’ conscious and subconscious perception as well as their relationship based on all their interactions with your brand during their life cycles, you must focus on the report by Havard Business Review that 84 percent of customers said their expectations weren’t even met how much more of being exceeded in their last customer service experience.
Customer experience management (CEM) is not just about serving your online customers, it’s definitely much more than that. You can’t stop at ordinarily knowing where your customers shop and believe you’ve got it.
CEM is about knowing your customers thoroughly to the extent that you can go about creating and delivering personalized experiences that will entice them to not only remain loyal to you but also to become brand ambassadors and influencers who will end up evangelizing to others about you. This form of advertising which could be through word-of-mouth or any other means is definitely the most potent way of converting potential customers.
You don’t believe you can gain this depth of knowledge about your customers from the blues, you must put in a lot of work, you must incorporate CEM. You work hard at extracting customer insight from all touchpoints and channels across your entire organization.
It’s about surfing, browsing through, and collating large volumes of customer data from online channels and beyond, with the view of extracting valuable insight from that data with speed and precision.
If you want to sideline the impact of customer experience, you may be doing so at your own peril. In the global hyper-competitive, hyper-connected marketplace we have today, customer experience is playing the unequivocal role of a critical differentiator.
You gain a lot from effectively managing your customers’ experience. The following are four benefits you derive from good customer experience management.
1. Capitalizing on differentiated experiences
Inasmuch as you have set out to exceed your customers’ expectations, you must take into consideration the effectiveness of differentiation strategy. This is all about how you set your company, product, or service apart.
How you bring the distinctiveness of your brand to the fore in the midst of other brands. Your differentiation strategy is an integrated set of activities you have designed to produce or deliver your goods or services in ways that customers view as being not only exceptional but also important to them.
You are not out there to make marginal, meaningless changes with your differentiated customer experience. You want to impact your customers in such a way that they clamor for your business.
It means making the changes that will impact your business the most. They own their own will vouchsafe the difference.
You don’t need to go about pointing out the difference inasmuch as the difference is glaringly clear and evidently noticeable to your customers. This is what CEM does for your brand.
2. Boosting ROI with incremental sales
Your existing, satisfied customer is more likely to buy than a new prospect. Therefore, there is no way you can beat the idea of designing a customer experience that is geared toward creating a life-cycle of feedback.
Feedback will definitely boost ROI with an increase in sales but that shouldn’t be the outright focus. You should work more at prioritizing relationships.
The same hand should be extended to new prospects. You shouldn’t treat them like binary sales points, you should focus on generating more value through campaigns and interactions.
Once you’ve built the relevant relationship, you are assured of converting prospects into long-term customers.
3. Improving customer loyalty
It’s true that word of mouth marketing is not a new concept, however, the rise of digital and social media has made this form of marketing exceptionally powerful. Brands today ride on the goodwill of their customers to broadcast the good news about their businesses.
In a study carried out by Nielsen in 56 countries, it was found out that about 92 percent of consumers rely on recommendations from their friends and families. Social media undoubtedly plays a vital role in customer acquisition.
Brands are seriously overhauling their media presence to cultivate customer trust and build loyalty. They are capitalizing on CEM to ensure that consumers have a great experience from the first point of contact.
They work hard on building a long-term relationship with their customers to get solid word of mouth recommendations.
4. Reducing customer churn.
CEM enables you to give your customers what they want and hence engaging them. Even visitors to your site can become converted if they get engaged.
Engaged customers are retained and have the potential of becoming a company’s biggest fans. The social platforms have made it abundantly easy for customers to have access to mammoth information.
This information they gather is shared online with relative ease and any customer who wants to make a purchase decision must have had ample time to research your brand online. According to a report released by the Ecommerce Foundation, it was discovered that 88 percent of consumers research products online before buying.
Since a customer can give a negative review that will do on to affect the fortunes of your company, CEM works on making customers feel special. This is a wholesome way to increase their loyalty towards the brand and enhancing your customer lifetime value.
And how do you beat this report by Bain & Company that, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit?
