Customer experience is strategic for companies: secrets of an effective program

Creating an effective customer experience strategy can increase customer loyalty and thus, in the medium to long term, company growth.

How customer experience affects business operations

Developing a customer experience strategy is a structural and decisive step in optimizing interactions with customers during their journeys and improving KPIs related to satisfaction and business performance. Putting consumer feedback at the center of business decisions generates clear benefits in every area of the organization.

Companies that have understood this paradigm shift and its magnitude over the medium to long term are 26 times more likely to experience more than 20 percent revenue growth and 2.8 times more likely to meet financial targets. The data emerges froma study by Medallia Institute, a research and training company that evaluated 580 customer experience management programs globally.

Why is customer experience central for companies?

• An effective CX makes it possible to improve customer retention and increase positive referrals, as well as increase the client base. These are aspects that have a major impact on sales.
• A functional costumer experience enables the analysis of customer feedback and leads companies to optimize performance and integration across touchpoints, thus helping to improve various aspects of marketing and increase the ROI of its activities.
• Consumers’ opinions will lend an important hand to R&D and operations managers, who can then make products available in line with customers’ expectations.
• Dedicated customer care, customer service and after-sales teams will have to contend with significantly reduced complaint volumes.
• Human resources has the opportunity to make teams feel more involved in improving customer opinion and thus will have a greater sense of ownership and higher productivity.

What are the secrets of an effective customer experience program?

The study conducted by Medallia Institute found that leading customer experience companies provide an average of 3.3 channels for users to gather feedback, and 50 percent collect unstructured data from various interactions. Gathering feedback and measuring customer sentiment across as many channels as possible has become a key differentiator for businesses. This information enables data-driven decision-making to improve touch points and the customer journey.

The most effective companies on the customer experience front invest ina wide range of technologies focused on continuous analytics, reporting, and CX management to identify customer pain points in a timely manner and deliver a fulfilling and excellent experience. In fact, the Medallia Institute study found that 47 percent of organizations excel in CX by analyzing customer signals at least monthly, while this frequency is present in only 27 percent of the lowest-performing players.

The most forward-thinking companies in terms of customer experience have succeeded in creating a shared vision of CX and making it an integral part of corporate strategy. Indeed, board endorsement on this type of project and involvement of the entire organization are essential. Highly collaborative and responsive management of all departments enables not only customer-centric goal sharing, but also the transformation of data into action.

This is also why technology solutions carry significant weight to automate processes, act in a timely manner to improve customer opinion and innovate continuously, but also to support employees in managing what is called “close the loop” or the end-to-end framework that from collecting user feedback.