Today’s experience economy

Customers have shifted from brand loyalty alone to making buying decisions based on the experience as well. This is the result of having easy access to information and alternatives from competitors.

The internet displays a wide variety of options at the click of a button, and organisations that want to deliver an outstanding customer experience face the challenge of meeting customers’ demands and high expectations.

Traditional customer service alone doesn’t offer the flexibility, convenience or agility to cater to customers today. Customers want an ongoing relationship with an organisation and not a series of isolated transactions.

To succeed, leaders must rethink their customer interactions to meet their customers where they are in order to bridge the gap between organisational goals and customer needs.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is the customer’s perception of all their contact and interactions with an organisation. This includes website navigation, talking to sales staff, social media, post-sale service and more.

Connecting insights to experience

As digital technologies bring new capabilities, customer expectations are rising. Customers expect to start an interaction or transaction through one channel and seamlessly continue it through others, without starting again.

Customers also have the choice of multiple devices with which to engage with an organisation today. Leaders must plan for customers’ changing preferences and expectations.

To deliver interconnected experiences, organisations must digitalise and integrate their processes. This will create seamless interactions with customers across devices, digital platforms and channels.

Digital transformation is key to elevating the customer experience and competing in the modern marketplace. These are some of the steps that will help your organisation get ahead when building a better customer experience:

Internal brand audit

It’s important to assess your current situation, capabilities, vision and mission before developing a customer experience strategy, as this will ensure that it aligns with the organisational strategy.

External brand audit

Research the competitive and market threats to gain an overview of the current landscape in your space. It’s important to know what experiences your competitors offer as a way to gauge expectations.

Define SMART goals and objectives

Analyse all the insights gained about your brand, competitive threats and opportunities. Then set SMART goals and objectives to help guide you to understand precisely what you want to achieve.

Know your customer

Gather information about your customers from interviews, surveys, analytics and focus groups to identify where customer value, organisational value and opportunity align.

Define customer personas

Analyse customer data to get insights into your existing and target customers’ needs, wants and moments of truth to define clear personas for your customers.

Map the customer journey

Use each persona to map out that type of customer’s journey and their experience with the organisation at every touchpoint. Design your map from the customer’s perspective.

Measure your success

The only way to know if your efforts are working is to measure your success. Use descriptive metrics from analytics, perceptive metrics like reviews and ratings, and outcome-based metrics like digital forms.

Thrive

Customer experience is not a set and forget strategy, it’s an ongoing process. Your customer experience must adapt to changing trends, regulations and customer behaviours.

Final thoughts

As people, we think rationally but act impulsively because emotions are a key motivator behind every decision we make. People normally follow their internal feeling despite their rational understanding.

To meet your customer’s needs and provide them with exceptional experiences at every touchpoint, you need to find out what your customers do, think and feel while interacting with your organisation.

The digital transformation of your operations will have the most impact on your organisation’s success in creating a memorable customer experience.

If you’re looking to move from where you are to where you need to be, get in touch with our consultants today to see how we can help you navigate your digital transformation journey.