Customer Experience Is the New Competitive Battlefield
Customer experience (CX) management is a key focus area for countless C- suite executives and decision makers. So what is this Customer Experience – Well, Gartner defines customer experience management (CEM) as
“the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”
So the first challenge after defining customer is to decide what to measure and how to exceed those measured customer expectations.
Measuring the customer experience has multiple purposes, depending on the maturity of the organization. The purpose might be to move from a measurement anarchy to a state where measuring is an aid to an overall customer experience performance enhancement. Over the years, software organizations have established various programs to track and report customer feedback from experiences in the field. The crusade started almost 6-7 years back when a few prominent software and hardware providers formalized these efforts into voice of the customer initiatives to include this information throughout the product development process.
More recently, IDC research has shown that these voice of the customer initiatives have evolved into significant enterprise wide programs that are designed specifically to monitor the overall customer experience. While voice of the customer initiatives were typically focused on driving customer feedback into the product development process, customer experience programs are tracking customer experience at a much wider, and an all-inclusive level. They are an overall look at customer success across all aspects of the customer life cycle, across the product and services, and outside of support and development.
Business demand is still growing for the 360-degree view of the customer, driven in large part by desire to improve the customer experience. Enterprise information management helps customer experience, CDOs and other information leaders ensure that trusted data is available for this view. Securing and maintaining customer trust is a critical element of customer success initiatives, and research from IDC and Gartner proves that over the next five years, technology providers will invest in extensive efforts focused on monitoring and analyzing the overall customer experience to improve their product suite and service offerings.
4 time tested ways to ensure an optimal Customer Experience:
Establish and maintain strong policies and procedures around transparency for data collection and dissemination, and stick to it. Customers need to know that their participation in these initiatives will be private and anonymous (if they so choose) and will be used only for the purposes of evaluating their overall experience with products and services.
Develop and expand support for customer experience initiatives at all levels of the organization, including C-level executives. Many C-suite executives lack insight into the day to- day operations of their organizations as well as a detailed examination of end-user experiences with products and services. Establishing these initiatives with strong C-level sponsorship can help solve these problems and can help ensure long-term viability when unpleasant, unflattering data and results arise.
Take advantage of big data and analytics to fully examine the customer experience. With a growing number of enterprise solutions in big data and analytics, software and hardware providers can tap into a wealth of expertise and functionality to examine and synthesize the data from their own customer experiences. When configured and executed properly, customer experience teams can gain almost unlimited insight from their proprietary enterprise data to stay in close touch with customer needs and wants, as well as broader market trends and overall strategies.
Make sure team members and their cross-functional counterparts are empowered to act on any data that is gathered and analyzed as part of this process. This is the most critical step in the entire process and is an absolute requirement to build credibility into the initiative. Customer experience teams must have the power not only to both build actionable advice and recommendations but also to execute and initiate change based on the customer feedback and data from the process. Without this step, customer experience teams are just data gathering programs with no power for real and substantive customer-driven change.
Customer Experience Foundations for Marketing Leaders
Domain | Description | Sample Providers |
|---|---|---|
Customer Data | A unified audience record that captures profile, preferences and all pre- and postsales interactions | Acxiom, Experian, Harte Hanks |
Customer Voice | Direct, indirect and inferred customer feedback through social listening, sentiment analysis and surveys | Medallia, InMoment, MaritzCX, Satmetrix |
Customer Insight | Primary research and secondary panel data to inform understanding of customer needs, preferences and perceptions | comScore, Nielsen, eMarketer |
Competitive Insight | Use of primary and secondary benchmark data and customer voice for tracking and optimizing competitive performance | TrackMaven, Meltwater |
Goal Setting | Definition of strategic KPIs and operational metrics to guide your customer experience efforts | N/A |
Persona Development | Archetypes that embody the behaviors and preferences of specific audience need states | Razorfish, Ideo, Isobar |
Journey Mapping | Detailed definition of the stages and touchpoints of a customer decision journey and/or lifetime relationship | Razorfish, Ideo, Isobar |
Customer Experience Architecture | A framework that combines personas and journey maps to inventory and prioritize cross-functional customer experience investments | Razorfish, Ideo, Isobar |
Content Supply Chain | The workflow for fueling customer experience initiatives with relevant and resonant value-added content | Adobe, Sitecore, Percolate, Kapost |
Loyalty | Incentive and rewards programs to grow CLVT through a system of points/credit accrual and redemption | Brierley+Partners, Maritz, Comarch |
Advocacy | Programs to drive positive word of mouth at scale through references, referrals, ratings and reviews | Influitive, Bazaarvoice, Pluck |
Automation and Orchestration | The tools and workflows that drive appropriately timed and targeted audience interactions at scale | Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, Marketo, Kitewheel, Thunderhead.com |
Analytics | Instrumentation and analysis of customer touchpoints to measure and optimize performance to goals | IBM, Adobe, Webtrends, Google |
Source: Gartner (January 2015)
While marketing, indeed, has a growing role to play in customer experience initiatives, the scope of a customer experience will almost always exceed the formal boundaries of the marketing organization. That's why it is critical that customer experience initiatives begin with a cross-functional orientation — and the support of cross-functional stakeholders. Just as importantly, to be successful, these initiatives require processes for sharing customer insights and driving the appropriate actions through the digital and human-centric channels within and outside of marketing's control. The highest-performing companies establish processes that cross these boundaries, ensuring that insights flow to the appropriate stakeholders and that actions can be taken in the moments that count, in the service of the customer experience (see Table above).