Customer experience is the most important buzzword in any marketplace today.
Today, it's the key competitive differentiator for any brand, more critical than either price or product. Get your customer experience (CX) right, and you can influence the perception that customers have of your brand.
With the right customer experience, you convince people to buy from your company instead of your competitors. More importantly, you can also encourage consumers to become advocates for your business, meaning that they refer new people to your store.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience refers to the impression that you have on your target audience.
Multiple different touchpoints are involved in the customer experience journey, ranging from your contact centres to your messaging apps and chatbots.
The two most essential components in any customer experience strategy are "people" and "product. Your audience needs to be blown away by the performance of your product or service. What's more, they also need to feel good about the service that they get from a representative or agent. This year more than half of all organisations are expected to drive their investments towards customer experience.
Customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business, but it's becoming increasingly difficult for companies to keep on top of all the demands of today's digital audience. Your customers expect not only an excellent contact centre experience; for instance, but they also want you to interact with them over text, chat, email, social media and more.
This means that companies need to create more immersive omnichannel solutions for their audience. Not only that, but they need to make sure that they can continue to access the context delivered by customer data on every channel too. 89% of customers say they get frustrated by repeating their uses to various representatives.
In this complicated playing field, the companies that want to get ahead of customer experience need help. This means investing in everything from intelligent IVR systems to properly route conversations to the right people, to chatbots that offer 24/7 self-service.
Customer Experience Trends
The changing demands of today's customers is driving a host of trends that companies need to be aware of. For instance, 52% of customers say that they're less likely to engage with a company because of a bad mobile experience. Businesses need to understand precisely what their customer's journey involves and adapt accordingly.
Some of the most interesting trends that we're seeing at the moment include: