Investing in the Customer Experience is Great Marketing

Brands that value their customers are notoriously more successful than those who do not – but arriving at this simple truth and effectively making it happen are two very different things. Believe it or not, putting a winning customer experience plan into action is anything but simple.

Valuing customers is a multi-faceted, trial-and-error, data driven project that holds a different reality for each company. It can include open lines of communication, customer product satisfaction, customer experience and a laundry list of other factors.

It’s not a riddle you can unravel overnight. It is, however, absolutely a riddle worth solving.

Some Crazy Stats on the Importance of Customer Experience (CX)

There are plenty of numbers that back the significance of customer experience in today’s marketplace:

• 45.9% of businesses rank customer experience as their top priority for brand differentiation over the next 5 years, over product and pricing
• 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience
• 2/3 of businesses say they compete primarily on customer experience, a figure that has doubled since 2010
• Investing in CX offers the potential to double revenue within three years

And the list continues.

Developing Intuitive Customer-Led Journeys Impacts Your Bottom Line

From building long-term customer relationships to boosting conversion, cross-selling, up-selling and customer satisfaction, the impact of nailing CX on overall business performance can be significant. Yes, investing in improving the customer journey takes time, energy, data collection and, of course, money, but getting it right can set the stage for big success in the future.

The challenge is that the path to a better customer experience isn’t always well lit and getting there will be different for every brand.

The Backbone of a CX Master Plan

To get started with improving your company’s customer experience you must first develop an intimate and extensive knowledge of your own brand. Until you know exactly what your brand is, and what it represents, you won’t be able to facsimile that representation into your target market’s true interaction with your brand.

With this knowledge in hand:

1. Create a customer experience vision that can be easily defined with clear guidelines. Communicate these guidelines across your organization.
2. Divide your customer base into different customer personas. In this way, you can more accurately meet the wants and needs of each segment.
3. Focus on emotions. Figure out how to create an emotional connection with your customers that goes beyond solving their pain point with your product or service.
4. Capture customer feedback in real time to keep your finger on the pulse of how your CX is performing.
5. Implement training programs to provide quality at every customer touch point with your brand.
6. Drive employee satisfaction. Unhappy teams provide poor customer relations, regardless of the industry or brand.
7. Track ROI. Determine which CX initiatives are working by looking at revenue.

The Time is Today

Whether you just require a few adjustments or need to completely revamp your customer experience, putting this project on the backburner would be a big mistake. Moving forward, CX optimization will no longer be a game changing differentiator. It will be a new “must have.”

Move over “The 4 Ps of Marketing,” CX is taking over.