Customer Experience as a Key Driver for Growth

By 2020, customer experience (CX) will overtake price and product as the key differentiator as more businesses plan to distinguish themselves based on CX (source: Walker Information Inc.).

How employees deal with end customers is an important focus area. To maintain or improve customer experience, businesses must understand that every employee can influence CX, whether they are in a traditional ‘customer-facing role’ or not.

Most roles in a business liaise with customers in some way – but not everyone has access to feedback that informs their work. At the same time, this challenge is exacerbated because customers are engaging with businesses in more varied ways than ever before through social media, web chat, email etc.

To improve CX, organisations will need to analyse customer interactions across the entire business, not just in the contact centre, using analytics tools that are accessible to SMEs. This is reflected in a study by Econsultancy and Adobe, where 65% of respondents said improving data analysis capabilities to better understand customer experience requirements was the most important internal factor in delivering a great future customer experience (Digital Intelligence Briefing: 2018 Digital Trends).

Analytics products must therefore continually evolve in order to understand and review customer interactions. As customers engage using omni-channel communications, so customer interaction analytics need to evolve in line with demand. However, tools need to develop in such a way that they match the profile of customer communications – there is no point in adopting analytics tools that analyse ten methods of communication when only two are used by customers.

This presents a big opportunity for the channel. By maximising their use of analytics, resellers and service providers can differentiate themselves in a crowded market, improve how their customers work with them and in turn, deliver services that help their customer to improve CX down the line.

CX is effectively a launchpad for growth, feeding into marketing, product or service development, sales strategy and more – but it needs analytical insight if it is to thrive.

As published by Comms Dealer.