Why Your Brand Should Invest In Customer Experience In 2018
A new year means new opportunities for your organization to craft a leading Customer Experience, but curating this level of service and satisfaction requires a significant investment of time, energy and resources. Brands need to properly measure, analyze, understand and act on information to ensure they are retaining and expanding their customer base in 2018. If your organization has not yet began to invest in measuring and understanding its existing CX, then it is most likely already losing out to competitors who have been able to prove how much they value the consumer.
In the last year, we saw brands across every industry ramp up their CX investments for two primary reasons. Close to half of businesses listed customer retention as the primary reason they wanted to improve their existing CX, and a third of companies profiled listing satisfaction as the primary reason. It is considerably cheaper to keep your existing customers happy, instead of investing heavily in acquisition. Profit usually follows a combination of excellent retention and satisfaction methodologies because highly satisfied customers will recommend your product or service to their personal network, making an investment in these two areas an investment in acquisition as well. On the other end, if your CX is consistently frustrating customers, they will spread this costly reputation to their friends and family.
The first step towards providing a leading CX is capturing a solid understanding of what your customers want out of their experience with your brand, and measuring if your team is actually delivering this value. Traditionally, brands relied on customers to actively voice their perception of the brand, good or bad, and then make changes based on these suggestions. However, according to CX thought leader Esteban Kolsky, only one-out-of-twenty-six customers that have a complaint will actually voice their concerns to the brand. A lot of leaders within brands will think that if they are not receiving negative feedback, that means the organization is performing at peak levels; do not get caught in this trap of stagnation. To get a complete picture of your current CX status, implement active measurement programs like mystery shopping or voice of customer surveys instead of relying on customers to reveal these issues.
One area to focus your investment in after implementing measurement programs is ensuring a seamless omnichannel experience. Consumers are using more channels than ever before to discover, research and purchase products or services, making it essential that your organization is delivering a consistent experience across all these frontiers. In fact, Aberdeen Group Inc. stated that brands with the best omnichannel experience will be able to retain 56% more customers compared to those that lack this value. Your organization needs to strive to reduce customer effort as much as possible, regardless if the customer is contacting your brand on their computer, in-store, on the phone or on their mobile device. There is a considerable amount of effort and energy necessary to curating consistency across these different channels, but doing so will contribute greatly to the all-important satisfaction and retention metrics mentioned above.
2018 is a great opportunity for your organization to make a leap in the eyes of your customer. Initiating mystery shopping, voice of customer survey or other custom research programs will help your team uncover the data that can guide your employees to improve average retention and satisfaction levels. Gartner predicted that by 2018, over 50% of brands will move towards investing more towards their Customer Experience, if your brand has not already made this step, it is undoubtedly setting itself up for a disappointing year.
1,2,3,4 https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/
Second To None empowers customer-centric brands to deliver consistent, intentional and authentic consumer experiences.
We adeptly design and manage mystery shopping, compliance, engagement and voice of customer solutions grounded in strategic relevance, program integrity and actionable insights. Our solutions are developed on the basis of solid research and statistical science. We achieve success through a relentless focus on quality and innovation, consultative relationships and a talented team of professional associates.