What makes a brand a leader in its market? Business leaders and analysts have asked themselves this question for decades.
Historically, companies typically focused on two specific areas: price and product/service features.
They assumed that customers picked particular brands to either enjoy the highest quality product/service or the lowest prices possible.
As a result, many business growth strategies revolved around innovation, internal cost-cutting, and price matching.
While many of these practices still prove beneficial to business leaders today, the influx of data in the CX landscape has also taught them something new.
Now, more than anything else, the experience businesses give their customers determines whether they will succeed.
The Rise of Customer Experience
Research conducted by Sabio and ContactBabel in 2022 found that businesses are changing how they compete against market rivals.
In the study, around 38 percent of B2B companies said their most competitive factor was their product or service quality, while just 15 percent stated that it was price.
The outright winner? Customer experience, with 48 percent of these businesses highlighting CX as their most significant differentiator.
In the B2C space, this trend is even starker. Indeed, 53 percent stated that they believe customer experience is what most sets them apart from their competition.
Here, 37 percent of businesses chose product/service quality and ten percent pinpointed price as their central differentiators.
These statistics show that many businesses no longer consider it enough to compete on price or product capabilities alone. Instead, they consider CX a mission-critical endeavour.
Metrigy research supports this assertion, finding that more than 65 percent of companies say they are increasing CX spending in 2023 by an average of 24 percent.
This increased spending – even during times of economic uncertainty may surprise many. Yet, bolstering their digital proposition and pushing the CX envelope allowed many businesses to navigate the last crisis: the COVID pandemic.
Moreover, moving the CX dial does not only result in better business results down the line. It can also allow internal teams to maximise efficiencies within the CX stack and do more with less.
Indeed, a business’s propensity to survive and thrive during difficult economic times often hinges on its capacity to wield CX technology to bolster customer, agent, and business results.
How Are Companies Boosting CX to Compete Today?
So, many business leaders now view CX as crucial to their profitability and business continuity. Yet, there are lots of approaches to using customer experience as a competitive differentiator.
Here are some excellent examples of how businesses have bolstered their CX proposition to move the needle and stand out from the crowd.
1. Lifeplus Uncovers the Barriers to Customer Satisfaction
To deliver on customer expectations, some companies choose to first understand the barriers to customer satisfaction. Much of this information sits within customer conversations.
Recognising this, Lifeplus leveraged conversation analytics tools to determine pain points within various customer journeys, which caused the customer to reach out to the contact centre.