Customer Xperience - A current & future state of mind for organizations: Praveen Nijhara
Customer loyalty does exist, but not as one knew it to be. ‘Solus’ loyalty is no longer an easily achievable target for brands in many of the markets/ sectors. Brands need to work harder and smarter to engage with their consumers. Marketers and CX professionals definitely recognize some of the organizational challenges in the market with one of them being delivery of a seamless customer experience. Just a few years ago, a leading experience management services firm based in the U.S, found that by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Customer experience has taken its place amongst the top organizational priorities today, even in India. The organizational priorities will be further re-shaped in the next three years, where Customer experience will undergo significant transformation.
Top Trends in transforming Customer Experience
The fact that organizations in India are realizing the value of focusing on customer experience is re-assuring, especially when consumers are willing to pay extra for a better experience.
Infact, a Hansa Consumer Survey amongst customers who use digital platforms services as OTT, Food Delivery Apps, and Online Banking etc, showed that close to 6 in 10 of these consumers were willing to pay extra for a better experience.
The # 1 trend amongst organizations in India for transforming customer experience, as identified by the surveyed executives in the HANSA 2020 Customer Xperience Outlook (CX-O) survey is through managing the ‘Digital experience’.This holds true in an age, where technology has imploded into the lives of customers.
While organizations are going forward and embracing ‘digital transformation’ in order to be more agile and dynamic, it is also emerging as complex challenge in itself, some also believe that the adoption is slow paced and technology remains under leveraged.
High Quality Customer Experience requires a customer-first culture
Focusing on digitization, consumer segmentation tools, technology and other tools, is not going to be the ‘Solution’ for delivering on Customer Expectations. In order to deliver high quality CX, it is not only crucial to incorporate ‘customer-centric culture’ as a part of the core strategy, but it is key to ensure that ‘Customer first’ is a well embedded culture.
According to Hansa Research, a well-embedded ‘Customer-first culture’ is a key gap that is impacting CX in India. 75% of the surveyed executives, acknowledged that their organizations had still not attained a true CX culture, inspite of it being amongst the top organizational priorities. In order to progress towards a customer experience world, it needs to be driven from the top. It needs to percolate down to each and every unit/function and role within the organization who shares it as a belief and a key value. This may involve changes in organizational practices, policies and programmes ranging from hiring practices, empowerment to changes in reward and recognition practices etc. Until then, transition to a CX culture will remain a challenge.
The Future: Prioritizing to manage challenges and develop Customer Experience
A seamless customer experience will lead to higher satisfaction and hence higher customer loyalty and reduced churn, setting the stage for business growth with increased revenues. This is an intuitive truth, but not easily achievable in this landscape where customer motivations, behaviour and expectations are evolving rapidly and understanding the customer in totality is becoming one of the biggest challenge that organizations are facing.
A sizeable proportion of Marketers and CX professionals believed that their own customers would currently rate them as ‘inconsistent in meeting expectations’ (36%). However, they do believe certain sectors such as E-commerce, Automotive, Travel, Hospitality and Financial services particularly Banking etc are more advanced in terms of providing a superior customer experience
They believe that it is key to prioritize resources and identify CX priorities in order to transform the experience for their customers. . The 2020 Hansa Research CX-O report reveals the Top 5 CX priorities
The Top 5 CX Priorities
1. Ensuring quality of Customer Contact Data
2. Using Internal Data (Customer Data) for Customer Insight
3. Actioning Customer Feedback
4. Creating an unified understanding of the customer basis multiple sources of consumer data
5. Internal Focus on Customer Experience within the organization
