In this opinion piece, Vicky Katsabaris (pictured below), customer experience subject matter expert at Qualtrics, identifies five core business outcomes that mature CX platforms are designed to achieve.
Great customer experience (CX) is not only a tagline – it delivers better business results. World-class customer experience programs are designed with business results in mind.
In order to deliver business results, it requires embedding customer insight into each level of the organisation to enhance strategic decision making, allowing teams to take informed actions.
Here are five core business outcomes that mature CX programs are designed to achieve:
- Improved customer retention and loyalty
Reducing customer churn is a top priority for most organisations, and is often a result of operational factors such as poor service and strategic factors such as competitive pressure.
Leveraging CX platforms with case management capabilities can remediate operational failures by pushing early alerts and feedback to front-line teams. The result delivers efficient issue resolution as teams can respond to customers in a more informed and timely manner.
- Increased customer share of wallet and lifetime value
The ability to increase the average revenue per user and overall customer lifetime value rests in segment-specific research into the drivers of upsell and cross-sell. Typically, it involves both customer feedback and operational data to identify investment priorities and offers that are most relevant for each customer.
Post-transaction feedback is an ideal starting point to identify the barriers to greater customer spending. Management can leverage the feedback to either improve team performance or adjust service delivery models in ways that minimise required customer effort. More sophisticated customer experience platforms can provide automated recommendations and alerts, allowing customers to receive the right offer at the right time.
- Optimised customer acquisition
CX programs are designed to accelerate customer acquisition in ways that drive profitable growth and increase market share. The key to evaluating the effectiveness of customer acquisition methods is through customer feedback. Feedback not only gives organisations visibility on what sales strategies are effective, but also helps leaders allocate spend and resources where they are most likely to see a return. The critical steps organisations need to take in order to optimise customer acquisition include identifying priority customer segments, delivering the right experience, capturing real-time customer feedback, and adjusting what they deliver to the market.
- Reduced cost to serve
Reducing costs and prioritising investments are core benefits of CX programs. Customer feedback can be used in combination with operational data to measure and track the cost to retain customers. This metric relates to the total marketing efforts essential to reinforce loyalty in existing relationships. By identifying key drivers of marketing efficacy and evaluating cost to deliver, leaders can invest in the approaches that best deliver ROI. In a similar manner, customer feedback and analytics can be used to anticipate ROI related to potential marketing campaigns and experience investments, allowing leaders to plan effectively.
- Improve brand awareness and equity
It is every organisation’s wish to convert brand detractors to brand promoters. To do this, they need to understand what drives brand awareness and brand equity. By combining analytics and comparative assessments, they can gain real-time performance insights that allow teams to improve service levels in more granular detail. This level of insight, combined with systematic follow up systems that can trigger automated alerts, allow teams to respond to dissatisfied customers first.
CX programs should be a priority for all organisations looking to develop a strong brand and boost the business’ top line, as satisfied customers have significantly higher lifetime value and freely promote their favourite brands.
Organisations that use sophisticated platforms can take ownership of their program and choose to extend it as they grow their customer understanding. This ensures they are engaging with customers with relevance and deriving actionable insights.
