by Antonia Rangelova, Senior Market Research Manager

CX is developing. Are you?

А BRAND IS NO LONGER JUST THE

PRODUCT IT OFFERS

DEDICATED SUPPORT

COMMUNITYBUILDING

ADDED VALUE

ONGOING COMMUNICATION

TAILORED ADVICE

The customer journey starts long before a product is bought - on average ten information sources are used to make a choice on any product - and continues through usage, disposal, and repurchase. That’s why customer journey mapping is the best way to identify moments of truth and pain points along the customer experience.

This sounds like a piece of cake until you don’t come to the realization that the real challenge is hidden in tracking all interactions per customer. This task becomes even more complicated now that most of the businesses are turning to e-commerce. How are organizations tackling this challenge? Well, they invest a huge amount of money in gaining information on customer experience via online behavior tracking, accompanied shopping, in-home visits, stakeholders workshops, and other traditional qualitative and quantitative research. Actually, this is the exact reason why we decided to build RecommendIT. We saw a need for creating a full-featured customer experience platform that will save money and time for our clients but at the same time will provide real-time insights on which they can act immediately.

Focusing on CX is crucial for business as it drives customer loyalty, which further results in:

Higher spending for the preferred brand Lower price sensitivity Boosting the word-of-mouth and brand advocacy Decreased churn rate

All together these aspects lead to increased customer lifetime value – a metric that is quickly gaining importance as a KPI of brand performance across different industries.

We know you’ve heard it before but we will repeat it - a brand is no longer just the product it offers. Customers increasingly demand an outstanding experience rather than an item or a service, urging companies to deepen focus on their clients and respond accordingly to the expectations. Following the aspiration of providing the best possible experience along all touchpoint across the customer journey, companies rely on programs such as “Customer experience”, “Customer excellence” and “Voice of the customer”.

Increasing customer lifetime value

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Emotions are influential, aren’t they?

As you are setting up specific metrics for your customer experience program, you should keep in mind that every individual customer is also an emotional being. Increasing experiential value of the brand interactions leads to greater potential to engage stakeholders emotionally. Thus, to boost customer loyalty and advocacy, every organization should identify the strengths of emotional versus rational factors. Multiple new methodologies are in place and more are still developing to elicit the true emotional charge of relationships – ranging from implicit-association testing, image-driven measurements and constantly improving sentiment and verbatim analyses.

The customer centric companies

Some organizations take an even larger step to increase the engagement of their customers with their offerings by actually involving them in the design and delivery of their products and services. Remember when the product was in the center of most organizations and the product centricity was the key to success? Today things have changed and customer centricity is one of the drivers of success.

Shortening supply chain and placing actual customer demand first instead of relying on projections.

Increasing emotional response and positive experience by bringing the customer in the product design for pre-testing innovations and providing customized solutions.

Making communication easier, more engaging, and more credible through the use of self-help pages, community forums, social media complaint responses, customized apps, video customer services, and mobile CRMs.

Key activities companies undertake during customer-centric transformation:

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The CX talents

The increasing emphasis on CX as a source of competitive advantage also leads to the necessity of more customer oriented talents within the organization. Usually, it all starts with the senior management who are put in charge of customer experience. Gradually, dedicated internal teams are created to support and coordinate the implementation of CX strategies across functions. Osten, they are also given another key function – training advocacy internally and creating an environment in which all employees can be promoters of the brand.

To help our clients stay ahead of the CX scene, Gemseek is releasing a 2017 CX Trends report. The insights are based on a specialized survey that will reveal, among other topics, which are the most common customer experience initiatives integrated within organizations and what are the most used metrics to track company performance and customer experience.

Interested in receiving а free copy of the report? Fill the CX Trends survey here and get your full report!