CX Gaps that are Hidden in Plain Sight

Despite the growing emphasis on CX, many companies still struggle to meet customer expectations. There are CX gaps that remain unnoticed for years, they widen over time, resulting in long-term damage

Customer experience (CX) is no longer a buzzword; it’s the business mantra of a successful venture. Today, when customer loyalty is hard-won, “not-so-good” CX can destroy your positive image at any time. Being consistent in delivering a positive experience is thus survival imperative for businesses. 

Despite the growing emphasis on CX, many companies still struggle to meet customer expectations. There are CX gaps that remain unnoticed for years, they widen over time, resulting in long-term damage. This article delves into the concept of the CX gap, explores the reasons behind it, and offers actionable strategies for businesses to bridge the widening gap while creating a truly customer-centric experience.

The CX Gap: A Disconnect Between Perception and Reality

Here’s a real-life scenario. Let’s say most of your offline footfalls result from the large-scale marketing you do online. 

They envision a helpful and knowledgeable salesperson assisting them, a smooth checkout process, and a hassle-free return policy in case the product doesn’t meet their expectations. However, upon arrival, they’re greeted by an indifferent staff member, encounter a long queue at the checkout, and discover a restrictive return policy. This is a gap between expectation and reality. The customer’s anticipated experience and the one he gets while visiting the store are different from each other, resulting in a dodgy CX and zero customer loyalty.

Suh CX gaps often remain unnoticed and can manifest in various ways.  From slow and infrequent responses to complex product information- everything falls under poor CX. It’s not always about providing excellent services, rather it’s more about delivering personalized services While a company might believe they’re providing exceptional service, customers may have a vastly different perspective. This disconnect can lead to frustration, disappointment, and ultimately, customer churn.

Causes of the CX Gap: Why Businesses Miss the Mark

CX gaps originate from the difference between expectation and reality. But, most of the time these blindspots are so elusive that they often go unnoticed. Here’s a look at the common culprits behind  CX gaps and why businesses miss the mark.   

  • Communication Silos: A business is structured with distinct departments – marketing, sales, operations, customer service and more. Unfortunately, they operate in isolation, which leads to communication silos. Being unaddressed it becomes a norm over time. It results in a fragmented customer journey which affects the credibility of the company. For instance, the marketing team might portray a product as user-friendly, while the customer service team struggles to address customer inquiries due to inadequate product knowledge. This inconsistency creates confusion and frustration for customers.
  • Customer Feedback Disconnect: Prioritizing customer feedback is crucial for every business. However, many businesses fail to maintain consistency in collecting customer feedback. They never solicit feedback through surveys, reviews, or social media interactions. This lack of customer insights makes it difficult for businesses to understand customer needs and expectations, leading to a mismatch between what they offer and what customers truly desire.
  • Employee Disengagement: Employees are the face of the brand, and their attitude and behavior significantly impact customer experience. Disengaged employees who lack proper training or motivation are less likely to go the extra mile for customers. This can result in impersonal interactions, slow response times, and a lack of empathy, ultimately creating a negative customer experience.
  • Stay Aligned with Technological Advancements: Technology is rapidly evolving, and customer expectations are keeping pace. Businesses that fail to adapt to these advancements risk falling behind. For instance, if a company doesn’t offer a user-friendly mobile app or an omnichannel customer support experience, it may create a gap between its offerings and what customers expect in today’s digital age.
  • Focusing on Sales Over Relationships: While sales are undoubtedly important, businesses that solely focus on closing deals often neglect to build long-term customer relationships. This transactional approach can leave customers feeling like a number rather than a valued patron.

Bridging the CX Gap: Strategies for Customer-Centric Success

Fortunately, the CX gap is not an insurmountable obstacle. With the right strategies it can be achieved   Businesses can implement several strategies to bridge the divide and create a customer experience that fosters loyalty and drives business growth.

Obsess Over Customer Feedback: Make customer feedback the cornerstone of your CX strategy. Actively solicit feedback through surveys, reviews, social media interactions, and even informal conversations with customer service representatives. Analyze this feedback to identify areas for improvement and tailor your offerings to better meet customer needs.

Embrace a Customer-Centric Culture: “Lack of customer focus is a point of failure”, says Gartner.  In the next five years, more than 30% of businesses are going to succumb due to this, yet, only 14% of the CMOs perceive “customer-centricity as the hallmark of their business”, reports CMO Council.

Personalization is Key: The customer relationship management (CRM) system helps build a relationship with customers by giving them personalized information about their needs, what they like and don’t like, and how to fulfill them. In addition to providing basic customer data, CRM systems can also be used as an advocacy tool. Customers will appreciate this high level of service if they know they will receive it consistently.

Omnichannel Customer Support: Customers today interact with brands across various channels – phone, email, social media, and live chat. Businesses must provide seamless and consistent support across all these touchpoints. Invest in omnichannel solutions that allow customers to easily switch between channels without having to repeat their inquiries.


Final  Thoughts

Customer experience (CX) is the battleground for business success in today’s competitive landscape. A critical yet often overlooked threat is the CX gap – the disconnect between what businesses perceive they deliver and what customers experience. This gap can manifest in various ways, from communication silos to employee disengagement, ultimately leading to customer frustration and churn.

The good news is that the CX gap is bridgeable. By prioritizing customer feedback, fostering a customer-centric culture, personalizing interactions, and offering omnichannel support, businesses can close the gap and create a seamless, positive experience that fosters customer loyalty and drives long-term growth. Remember, happy customers are your biggest advocates – bridge the CX gap and unlock the true potential of your customer base.

Top 6 Customer Experience Megatrends to Prioritize in 2024

Delivering exceptional CX becomes more of a business imperative. It hinges on seamless digital and self-service options. While empowered employees remain vital for tackling intricate customer scenarios, AI is emerging as the ultimate game-changer, capable of optimizing every stage of the customer journey.

2024 is going to be absolutely amazing for the companies preparing to embrace the power of Cloud computing, AI, and advanced customer experience (CX) applications. It’s not unknown that the customer demands are shifting significantly. The need for instant, hassle-free solutions are rapidly increasing among the customers. At this point, delivering exceptional CX becomes more of a business imperative. It hinges on seamless digital and self-service options. While empowered employees remain vital for tackling intricate customer scenarios, AI is emerging as the ultimate game-changer, capable of optimizing every stage of the customer journey. By harnessing these technologies, companies can unlock dramatic improvements in customer loyalty and streamline CX operations across the board.

1. Sustainability Drives Customer Satisfaction

A 2023 study by IBM revealed that 83% of global consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainable brands. Additionally, a Cone Communications report found that 90% of U.S. consumers consider a company’s commitment to environmental and social responsibility when making purchasing decisions. 

From the above-mentioned status, it’s quite evident that consumers today are increasingly aligning their purchasing habits with their values. Businesses that go beyond simply offering products and services and demonstrate a genuine commitment to sustainability will win over environmentally and socially conscious customers. This can encompass eco-friendly packaging, ethical sourcing practices, and community engagement initiatives.

2. Omnichannel CX: Meeting Customers on Their Terms

73% of customers expect consistent service across all channels (phone, email, social media). Additionally,customer experience becomes 1.5 times more important in omnichannel customer journeys. Customers today expect a seamless experience regardless of the touchpoint they choose. This necessitates breaking down siloed operations and integrating all customer interaction channels to ensure consistent messaging, information access, and service quality.

3. Smart Subscriptions and Personalized Experiences

The subscription economy is booming, with a McKinsey report indicating that global subscription services revenue reached $335 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2025. A majority of the customers expect companies to use their data to personalize their experiences. Businesses are moving beyond one-size-fits-all subscription models. By leveraging AI and advanced analytics, companies can offer dynamic pricing, tailor content and recommendations, and personalize service levels based on individual customer preferences and behavior. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also increases customer lifetime value.

4. Prioritizing Customer Accessibility   

A study by the National Center for Disability and Journalism found that 26% of adults in the United States have some form of disability. Additionally, a WebAIM report highlights that over 98% of home pages on the top 1 million websites have at least one accessibility issue.

Creating an inclusive and accessible customer experience goes beyond just complying with regulations. By making websites, mobile apps, and customer service channels accessible to users with disabilities, businesses tap into a wider market segment and build stronger customer relationships.

5. Personalization Powered by Generative AI and Data

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40% of customer service interactions will involve generative AI (like chatbots). Additionally, a report by Accenture reveals that companies with strong personalization capabilities achieve loyalty program revenue that is 18% higher than their competitors..

Generative AI offers exciting possibilities for personalization. Businesses can leverage this technology to create dynamic marketing campaigns, tailor user experiences, and offer personalized support through chatbots. However, it’s crucial to ensure responsible and transparent use of AI to maintain customer trust.

6. Embracing New Technologies, with an Eye on Data Privacy

According to a study by Statista, the global market for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) is expected to reach $800 billion by 2025. Additionally, a report by PwC highlights that 72% of consumers are concerned about how companies use their data.  Emerging technologies like AR and VR have the potential to revolutionize customer experiences by offering immersive interactions and product demonstrations. However, businesses must navigate the ethical and legal landscape surrounding data privacy. Building trust by adhering to data regulations and prioritizing transparency is key to successful adoption of these technologies.

Final Thoughts

Strategically implementing these top customer experience megatrends in 2024 empowers businesses to build resilience and cultivate enduring customer relationships. By prioritizing sustainability, omnichannel accessibility, data-driven personalization, and ethical AI integration, organizations demonstrate a commitment to environmental responsibility, customer convenience, and building trust. Furthermore, empowering employees through automation and fostering a customer-centric culture not only elevates customer satisfaction but also cultivates loyal brand advocates, propelling businesses forward in a competitive marketplace. Embracing these trends transcends mere adaptation; it signifies a proactive approach to shaping a future-proof customer experience that thrives in the ever-evolving business landscape.  

Customer Experience vs. User Experience: What’s the Difference?

Customer experience and User experience both sound similar at a certain level, but they are not. Neither of them are mutually exclusive, but there’s a fine line of difference ( at the experience level) that distinct one from the other.  

Customer experience and User experience both sound similar at a certain level, but they are not. Neither of them are mutually exclusive, but there’s a fine line of difference ( at the experience level) that distinct one from the other.  

User Experience (UX) is all about how your users vibe with your product – the feel-good factor when they interact with it. We measure this groove with metrics like success rate, error rate, and the cool digital stuff, like clicks to get things done.

Now, Customer Experience (CX), on the flip side, is like the big picture of how peeps connect with your whole brand. We are talking about the whole matter– the overall experience, how likely they are to stick around, and if they’d shout about it to their buddies. Think of UX as the smooth dance moves in the broader groove of CX. It’s like UX is the snazzy beat drop, but CX is the entire party playlist, including stuff beyond just the product. Cool, right? 

CX is the more advanced version of UX

User experience happens at the individual level and not holistic. While a user experience  revolves exclusively around the product or services, the CX seeks to fill out the empathy gaps that user experience often leaves out at a level

CX talks about the overall satisfaction level and the emotional connect a user develops with the brand. When the  experience of a user develops at various stages of the customer lifecycle, it finally translates into a 360-degree understanding of the brand as a whole. It involves emotional, psychological, and practical elements that shape the user’s relationship with the company. 

High quality digital UX gives a user/customer the ability to:

  • Seamlessly extract information from the website 
  • Effortless completion of tasks
  • Easy navigation

Good CX gives a user/customer the ability to:

  • Experience pleasant interaction with organization/company representatives
  • Develop an emotional connect with the brand and  everything associated with it


The Role of UX and CX in Charting Business Success

Today, when customer-centricity is paramount, both User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) become instrumental  in shaping the success of businesses. Read on to explore.

Key Elements of  UX 

Usability: The ease with which users can accomplish their tasks within a given system.

Accessibility: Ensuring that the product is usable by people with disabilities.

Design: The visual and interactive elements that contribute to a positive user experience.

Performance: The speed, responsiveness, and efficiency of the product or service.

According to a study by Forrester, a well-designed user interface could raise a website’s conversion rate by up to 200%. 75% of users judge a company’s credibility based on its website design, says Qualtrics.

Website Navigation

Smooth and effortless website navigation is the key element that goes a long way to shaping a positive user experience. For example, Amazon’s website comes with an easy-to-navigate interface, thus allowing users to find their products in the most hassle-free way possible.

Mobile App Usability

Usability of the mobile apps is also considered a crucial element of creating a positive UX experience. Apps like Instagram and Uber are exemplary in terms of app usability. Their interfaces are user-friendly, providing a seamless experience from onboarding to daily interactions.

Key Elements of CX 

1. Holistic Nature: CX considers every interaction, from marketing and sales to customer support and beyond.

2. Consistency: Providing a consistent experience across various touchpoints.

3. Emotional Connection: Establishing an emotional connection with the customer throughout their journey.

73% of customers point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, quotes PwC. A study by Temkin Group found that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to gain, on average, an additional $700 million within three years of investing in customer experience.

Examples of CX in Action

End-to-End Customer Journey

Companies like Apple excel in managing the entire customer journey, from product discovery and purchase to after-sales support. The seamless transition between online and in-store experiences contributes to a positive overall customer experience.

Multi-Channel Engagement

Brands like Starbucks successfully engage customers across multiple channels, integrating their mobile app, physical stores, and online presence. This omnichannel approach ensures a consistent and positive customer experience.

Intersection of UX and CX

While UX is a subset of CX, both play integral roles in shaping the overall brand perception. For instance, an improvement in the usability of an online shopping platform (UX) contributes directly to the positive perception of the brand’s overall shopping experience (CX).

Measuring the Elusive Customer Experience: Beyond Simple Metrics

While the allure of a single, definitive metric for measuring customer experience (CX) is tempting, it’s a mirage. A truly holistic understanding of CX demands a multifaceted approach that goes beyond the popular Net Promoter Score (NPS).

NPS: A Starting Point, Not the Finish Line

Though widely used, NPS alone provides a limited view of customer loyalty and advocacy. It captures a snapshot of customer sentiment, but fails to pinpoint specific areas for improvement.

Beyond Satisfaction, Towards Actionable Insights

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) offers another valuable perspective, illuminating customer sentiment towards specific interactions. But CSAT, like NPS, needs to be complemented by metrics that inform action.

Here are key metrics that paint a richer picture of CX

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This metric reveals the total revenue a customer generates throughout their relationship with your brand. Understanding CLV allows you to tailor your efforts towards high-value customers and optimize customer retention strategies.

2. Churn Rate: This metric indicates the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you. A high churn rate signifies dissatisfaction and lost revenue potential, prompting you to address its root causes.

3. Meeting Expectations: This metric measures the gap between customer expectations and their actual experiences. It reveals areas where your brand falls short, empowering you to bridge the gap and exceed expectations.

4. Customer Effort Score (CES): This metric measures the ease and effort involved in engaging with your brand across various touchpoints. A low CES indicates a seamless experience, while a high CES highlights areas for improvement.

5. Customer Advocacy: This metric assesses the likelihood of customers recommending your brand to others. It reflects their loyalty and trust, providing valuable insights into your brand’s reputation.

CX: A Superset of UX – The Foundation of Delight

Great CX rests upon a foundation of exceptional user experience (UX). UX metrics, traditionally focusing on tactical aspects like conversion, engagement, and perceived credibility, provide crucial insights into the ease, efficiency, and emotional impact of interacting with your brand.

By integrating UX metrics into your CX framework, you can:

Identify and address usability issues that impede customer journey.

Optimize user flows for better engagement and conversion.

Foster positive emotional connections with your brand.

The Evolving Landscape of Customer Experience

It’s important to remember that CX metrics are not static. Customer needs and expectations constantly evolve, demanding a dynamic approach to measurement. Regularly reviewing your metrics and adapting your strategy ensures you stay ahead of the curve and deliver a CX that truly delights your customers.

Ultimately, measuring CX is not about finding a single magic number, but about gaining actionable insights. By embracing a multi-faceted approach, integrating UX metrics, and staying attuned to evolving customer expectations, you can build a CX framework that drives loyalty, advocacy, and long-term success.

Impact on the Business

Financial Implications

Companies that prioritize positive UX and CX often witness significant financial growth. For example, after revamping its user experience, Airbnb experienced a 30% increase in conversions, resulting in a substantial boost in revenue.

Competitive Advantage

Investing in superior UX and CX provides a distinct competitive advantage. A survey by Deloitte found that 62% of companies view customer experience provided by competitors as a significant threat.

Challenges and Strategies

1.  Lack of Alignment:  Misalignment between different departments on the importance of UX and CX.

2.  Limited Resources:  Insufficient resources dedicated to the development and enhancement of UX and CX.

Strategies for Success

1.  Cross-Functional Collaboration:  Encouraging collaboration between departments to ensure alignment.

2.  Continuous Improvement:  Adopting a mindset of continuous improvement, addressing challenges as they arise.

The Final Takeaway

While spoken in the same breath, User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) are distinct yet intertwined concepts. UX focuses on the user’s interaction with a specific product or service, striving for intuitiveness, efficiency, and emotional connection. In contrast, CX encompasses the user’s entire journey with a brand, encompassing every touchpoint from marketing and sales to customer service and support.

The Common Goal

Despite their differences, UX and CX share a common goal: to create a positive and memorable experience for the user. This intricate connection requires a delicate balance, with UX providing the foundation for a delightful customer journey and CX orchestrating the entire experience, ensuring seamlessness and emotional resonance across all touchpoints.

Thriving in a Customer-Centric Era

In a hyper-competitive landscape, where customer experience is the sole differentiator, neglecting either UX or CX spells disaster. By strategically investing in both, businesses can unlock tremendous benefits:

  • Enhanced Brand Perception: A positive user experience fosters trust and loyalty, leading to stronger brand perception and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
  • Increased Customer Engagement: A seamless and engaging customer journey encourages users to interact with your brand more frequently, boosting conversion rates and driving revenue growth.
  • Reduced Customer Churn: A delightful experience increases customer satisfaction and reduces churn, ensuring long-term customer relationships and recurring revenue streams.
  • Improved Operational Efficiency: By identifying and addressing pain points in the user journey, businesses can streamline operations and optimize resources, leading to increased profitability.

The Winning Formula: Recognition and Investment

The key to harnessing the power of UX and CX lies in recognizing their variations and uniqueness and strategically allocating resources to each. Here’s what is needed

  • Establish dedicated teams: Create separate teams for UX and CX, each with specialized skills and expertise.
  • Cross-functional collaboration: Foster open communication and collaboration between UX and CX teams to ensure a cohesive and holistic customer experience.
  • Data-driven decision-making: Utilize analytics to track key metrics for both UX and CX, identifying areas for improvement and measuring the impact of your efforts.
  • Continuous improvement: Embrace a culture of continuous learning and improvement, constantly refining your UX and CX strategies to adapt to evolving customer needs and preferences.

Precisely, investing in UX and CX both helps create a winning formula for sustained growth and customer loyalty. They help orchestrate a symphony of delight, where each touchpoint resonates with the user, building lasting relationships and securing a competitive edge in the ever-evolving customer landscape.

7 Easy Steps For Creating A World-Class Customer Experience Strategy

Did you know, businesses that focus on their CX or Customer Experience are capable of reducing churn and boosting their revenues which can lead to higher profits? In fact, according to Digital Marketing Trends Reports published by Adobe and Econsultancy, customer experience has been noted as the most exciting business growth opportunity to invest in this year. What is Customer Experience? CX or Customer Experience refers to the total of all the experiences that a customer has with a brand or business, which is based on all the interactions and thoughts that the customer has about the business.

Did you know, businesses that focus on their CX or Customer Experience are capable of reducing churn and boosting their revenues which can lead to higher profits?

1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. Click To Tweet

In fact, according to Digital Marketing Trends Reports published by Adobe and Econsultancy, customer experience has been noted as the most exciting business growth opportunity to invest in this year.

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

CX or Customer Experience refers to the total of all the experiences that a customer has with a brand or business, which is based on all the interactions and thoughts that the customer has about the business.

Is the customer experience the same as customer service?

Now, even though both these terms do not mean the same, yet customer service can be considered as a part of customer experience indeed.

For example, imagine you contact Amazon, since you found your order has not been delivered, whereby an employee from Amazon will reply to you fast, be very helpful and provide you with your refund within the next couple of days.
This can be considered as a great show of effective and efficient customer service.

Nevertheless, Amazon as a brand does not stop over here. Even after the service is over Amazon keeps recommending to you different products, based on the past purchases that you made, sends you reminders for your unfulfilled orders, and provides you vouchers from time to time.

Now, this can be considered as an example of great customer experience.

And because of this experience, the chances for you to leave Amazon will be very low.

This because great experience implies happy customers, and happy customers mean loyalty- which at the end translates to profits and growth for the company.

Therefore, now that you have understood the benefits of providing world-class customer experience.

let us find out how brands can create a better customer experience strategy for their business growth.

1. Start from within the company

To begin with and aspire for providing excellent CX, it is really critical that even before trying to cater a great customer experience to the customers, every employee within an organization must share the same vision and the core values of the company.

For example, the core values of Amazon are frugality, customer obsession, ownership, the basis for action, and providing high-bar for talents. Later Amazon also added a sixth value which is innovation.
Now, if you are employed with Amazon it is important that as an employee you must know and live by these values.

Hence ask yourself, what are the core values of your company?

What is the vision of your company or how do you want to be remembered by your customers?

2. Understand your customers

Customer segments are very generic. As a brand, you just cannot group people age 40-50 together just because it makes it easier for you. Moreover, it can always be 45 years old Steve might not be similar to 45 years old Patricia.
This is because, it can always happen that one among these two people uses technology throughout the day at work, and the other does not know how to even use a Smartphone.

This is the reason, as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions, we insist on the importance of creating personas so that your employees understand and know better the need of each customer, in their database.

Actually, personas are fictional characters, which businesses must create based on their research in order to represent the different user types that might use their brand, website, or offerings in a similar way.

3. Build relationships with your customers

In modern times, just serving your customers is not enough, since every brand can do that in their businesses.

Therefore as one of the most popular vendors of easy to use CRM tools, we found what can differentiate any business from its competitors in the marketplace os the relationship that they build with their customers.

Show your customers that you care about their satisfaction, happiness, and wellbeing.

For example, brands like Zappos not only responds to every email they receive from their consumers but stands by to this practice even if it is to the CEO.

4. Train your Customer Support employees

Now, even though you probably would think that customer service is the last thing that you would like to invest in, on behalf of your company. But honestly, all the best technological solutions and products that your brand is offering would literally mean nothing unless your employees don not know how to talk and build world-class relationships with your customers.

For this always remember- how you say something is more important than what you say.

5. Gather customer feedback

Your customers talk about you all the time, you just have to invest in the right business growth technology solutions that can help you to listen to your customers.

Hence find out the ways that can assist you to get feedback from your customers. Use live chat tools, follow up emails, reviews, surveys, and listen to the social media interactions made by your customers.

6. Analyze your customer feedback

Ow, even though gathering feedback from the customers can be a comparatively easier task, analyzing them is not at all something that you can do easily.

This is because analyzing a large amount of data that too from different sources can get messy and confusing.

Hence buy a CRM or use AI-based tools that can do all these processes automatically. Modern business growth technology solutions are software applications that not only help you listen to your customers, but it also helps analyze their feedback and thereby make the customers happy by providing them with better customer experience.

7. If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it

You might be thinking right now “How can I measure something as abstract as customer experience?

CX seems pretty intangible – right?

Nonetheless, three are three key metrics that you can find in most Enterprise CRM software tools that you can use to measure the customer experience of your company.

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is a CX metrics that survey the customers based on just one single question:

How likely are you to recommend our brand to a colleague or friend on a scale of 0 -10?

Customers who are “promoters” of your brand score 9 or 10, while customers who score 7 or 8 are “passive” and those who score 6 to 0 are “detractors”.

  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT/PSAT)

CSAT is another most popular transactional metric that is used for measuring customer experience.

In a CSAT survey, businesses ask a customer how content they are with the latest interaction with their brand, and often use a customer-service call or a purchase on a rating scale.

Unlike Net Promoter Score, CSAT is highly customizable and flexible in form, which implies you can ask different types of questions and use a plethora of formats in the survey to your customers.

  • Customer Effort Score (CES)

Lastly, businesses can even use CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys and ask their customers – “How much effort did you have  to expand to solve your request?

CES is a customer experience metric that is used to improve processes, workflows and systems that may frustrate the customers while purchasing or availing support from the brands.

Conclusion

We are sure as one of the award-winning CRM software vendors for small and medium business and startups that by following these steps one by one you will not only be able to create a great customer experience strategy for your brand but sticking to these guidelines will also make your customers happy and thereby decrease churn and increase your revenue.

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Why And How Customer Experience Is Ruling The Buyers Decision Nowadays

Businesses’ approach to tempting new customers for buying their products has evolved a lot over the last few years. In the past, it was easy to sell anything that was affordable and of high-quality for business growth. Well, in modern times, that has changed and we all know it will also continue to change in the days to come. Today, customer experience has become an element that is more important than product or price, when it comes to the consumer’s buying decisions for satisfying their needs. In a report published by Walker Info, it has been noted that by 2021 within the next one year CX will replace services or products as the key driver instead of price behind most decisions made by the consumers on whether they will buy an offering.

Businesses’ approach to tempting new customers for buying their products has evolved a lot over the last few years. In the past, it was easy to sell anything that was affordable and of high-quality for business growth . Well, in modern times, that has changed and we all know it will also continue to change in the days to come.

Today, customer experience has become an element that is more important than product or price, when it comes to the consumer’s buying decisions for satisfying their needs.

In a report published by Walker Info, it has been noted that by 2021 within the next one year CX will replace services or products as the key driver instead of price behind most decisions made by the consumers on whether they will buy an offering.

With stellar customer-experience, an increase in customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can increase profits by 25-95 percent. Click To Tweet

Therefore with so much competition in the marketplace, it is much easier for customers to leave you for a competitor that prioritizes customer experience for the buyers of their offerings.

Below we will dive and dig into the importance of providing world-class customer experience and how it can benefit you for your business growth .

Why is customer experience so important?

As in 2020 the biggest consumer demography in the USA are the Millennial(s) all businesses will definitely see a change in the customer-vendor relationships, since now if the customers are unsatisfied they can very easily spoil a brand’s image by spreading deadly comments across various social media platforms over the internet.

Therefore, with customers having so many choices when making a purchase, creating a reputation as a customer-centric brand is most crucial, as if you do not, consumers will buy from your competitors that do.

Consider these statistics, to drive home the importance of providing your customers with world-class customer experience:

• With stellar customer-experience, an increase in customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can increase profits by 25-95 percent.

• It costs five times more to get hold of a new customer than it takes to keep holding on to an existing one, and it is only a great customer experience that can generate loyal customers and reduce customer churn.

• Because of bad customer experience, 95 percent of customers say they have left or have taken action towards a brand.

• 86 percent of customers will be ready to pay 25 percent more for an offering from a brand that delivers excellent customer service to its consumers.

Hence, you see if you want to remain competitive in your industry and make the wish for your business growth come true, delivering stellar customer experience is now the baseline standard for all successful businesses.

Here are a few best practices and tricks for delivering excellent customer experience for business growth:

Stay in constant touch

Reach out to each of your customers individually to check how things are going on a routine basis, which you can easily do using your best small business CRM software and ask them what you could do to improve upon your services.

Make use of campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM software to create a survey and ask your customers if they need any help from you that they presently do not have.

This outreach can be done with the help of phone calls to make the interaction more personal.

Performing this type of regular outreach makes the customers feel them as your valuable partners, that you truly consider their opinions, and you are ready to do anything you can to improve their experience with your brand.

Always remember that once you have planned changes based on their feedback, communicate to your customers that you are making the changes they asked for since this will win big points for your organization’s reputation and also ensure that your customers are satisfied with the experience that you provide to them for their loyalty towards your brand.

Deliver stellar customer support

Customers form their opinions of your ability to deliver stellar customer experience based on several variables.

This includes how accessible you are to them, the contents your marketing teams provide, interactions with your sales and support reps that show empathy, and the list goes on.

However, the most important among all these factors is the quality of customer support, which is the one that provides the greatest impact on the customer’s perception of your brand.

Hence here are some of the most helpful tips for maintaining a powerful customer support presence of your brand in the marketplace.

Provide multi-channel support

If customers are made to wait, when they need assistance it is natural that they grow increasingly impatient and frustrated.

Therefore use Chatbots for providing your customers 24 hours support and Live-agents for providing support during the working hours to field more complex questions.

Apart from this, you can also use the telephone and email for those customers who prefer these modes of communication.

Finally, if you are using your best small business CRM software for increasing customer experience with your brand, you should also integrate social listening and social media monitoring tools to receive alerts when someone mentions about your brand on social media websites.

It has been observed that people are increasingly asking support questions on social media. Therefore, it is important that you must respond to these questions quickly with the help of these tools, which results in delivering stellar customer experience to your consumers in the marketplace.

Increase the rate of FCR

FCR or Fast Contact Resolution rate refers to the incoming help desk support tickets that your support reps can resolve on their first try.

The easiest way to boost your FCR rate is by hiring or training top talents in your organization to manage your support efforts or create dedicated help desk groups (support groups that are specialized in a specific product, services or any other areas of your business) to ensure that your customers receive superior customer experience every time.

Make employee satisfaction a priority

Employees who are happy working in your organization cares more about your customers, and go that extra mile to support them to resolve their pain-points, which eventually help deliver excellent customer support.

Therefore, create employ survey programs to measure the satisfaction of your employees in their job, and identify areas where you can improve and increase their satisfaction in their workplace.

Since when employees are stressed, tired, or overloaded they are more likely to be curt or rude with your customers which can easily damage the reputation of your brand.

Conclusion

As customer experience is becoming increasingly important and will be the most crucial determining factor in the consumer’s purchasing decision making process, following these tips and positioning your company as a customer-centric business along with the use of best small business CRM software to aid the process will help your company to deliver a world-class customer experience that will increase your revenue and solidify your future business growth .

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Key Customer Experience Metrics That You Must Measure and Cannot Leave Behind

In this modern era of data analytics, most businesses have enough information, metrics, data, and dashboards in their easy to use CRM software platforms to deal with. However, unfortunately, when it comes to Customer Experience or CX, most organizations do not always keep a track or measure and report the right metrics for their organization. In a report published in 2018 by NPX & CX Benchmark states: “One-third of businesses (especially small and medium organizations) do not measure their Retention or Customer Churn.”

In this modern era of data analytics, most businesses have enough information, metrics, data, and dashboards in their easy to use CRM software platforms to deal with. However, unfortunately, when it comes to Customer Experience or CX, most organizations do not always keep a track or measure and report the right metrics for their organization.

By 2020, more than 40 percent of all data analytics projects will relate to an aspect of customer experience- Gartner Click To Tweet

In a report published in 2018 by NPX & CX Benchmark states:

“One-third of businesses (especially small and medium organizations) do not measure their Retention or Customer Churn.”

Well, this is indeed an irony since businesses spend a considerable amount of their time and resources in sales and marketing but ultimately they do not keep a track of how many of those acquired customers have been retained or try to find what were the reasons for their attrition.

Hence, how big or small your business is, and in which sector your company belongs to, here are key 4 top of the line Customer Experience metrics that you should track and measure at all times using your best small business CRM software.

What are the CX top of the line metrics?

Top of the line metrics in CX are those that bear minimum stats you should measure which are outcome indicators and lag measures that can be easily found in your easy to use CRM platform’s dashboard. These metrics help to keep us tied to our organization’s long term visions and goals for strategic business growth . Therefore, to show an improvement on these metrics, we need to improve other independent or lead Customer Experience (CX) metrics in your CRM database.

The most vital top line CX Metrics that you should always measure are:

  • Net Promoter Score
  • Customer-Lifetime-Value/Cost-of-Acquisition-of-Customer
  • Customer-Churn
  • Customer Effort Score

So let us talk about each of them now briefly.

  1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Possibly, there is no need for a detailed explanations since NPS has gained tremendous popularity in the recent times, as in a report published by Forrester it indicated that more than 70% of both big and small organizations listed in the Fortune 1000 companies use Net Promoter Score to measure the loyalty of their brands.

The biggest advantage of this metrics is its simplicity (you can use a single question format) to evaluate the customer’s intentions to recommend your offerings to their trusted ones, like friends, colleagues, and relatives.

The uniqueness of the NPS question lies in its 11 point survey, which is scaled from 0 to 10, with 0 to 6 as detractors, 7 and 8 as passive, and 9 and 10 as promoters of your brand.

In order to calculate your brand’s NPs, detract the percentage of Detractors from this percentage of Promoters.

For an example, if 60 percent of your respondents in the Net Promoter Survey (which you can perform using email campaigning functionality in your easy to use CRM) are Promoters and 10 percent are Detractors; your brand’s NPS is 50.

The importance of NPS is that it provides an insight into the customer loyalty spectrum for your business so that you can identify the weak points in your customer experience that needs improvement.

  1. Customer-Lifetime-Value/Cost-of-Acquisition-of-Customer (CLV/CAC)

What is interesting and we are looking for in these two metrics is the ratio of CLV to CAC that can be easily measured in all best small business CRM software platforms.

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) which is also known as LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) is the net economic or financial value associated to the relationship between the customer and the brand or the company.

CLV is an ideal metric that illustrates and lets us know how much revenue we are making from each customer. Additionally, when CLV is averaged out, any organization can easily generalize it for its entire customer base.

CLV is an important measurement that you must measure using your easy to use CRM software since if you are not making enough money from your relationship with your customers, it is no brainer that you may sooner or later seize to be in business.

Calculating net contribution (profit margin) or net financial value from an ongoing relationship with your customers will definitely involve the contributions that your buyers have made in the past and an ongoing estimate of their future contributions for your brand. Therefore, CLV or LVC is estimated metrics.

Hence, to explain it in its simplistic form, Customer Lifetime Value is the average sum of purchases made by your customers till they retire or churn.

Therefore, CLV takes into consideration the “average contribution from each customer per period” and the expected number of periods that the customer remains with the company.

For an example, if the average revenue of a CRM company like ConvergeHub is $59 per user/ month for its Premium Edition billed yearly, and if the cost of offering the service is $40, then its average customer contribution is $19 per month. Now, if the customer stays with the organization for 24 months before churning out, then the CLV for that customer is $456 ($19 x 24 Mt.)

This calculation takes into consideration, the Customer Retention Rate (or in a reverse way the Customer Churn Rate) and average contribution per customer.

We all know that the future value of cash flow is at all times less than its present value, therefore, this formula can be improved or adjusted also to include this aspect.

As Customer Lifetime Value engages an economic value to Customer Relationship strategy, CLV is considered as an excellent metric for the following:

  • Evaluate if your delivery model is viable
  • Helps to refine your customer support strategies, so as to increase your CLV
  • Sensitize your team members about economic value and inculcate ownership into their actions

Apart from this, evaluating each customer individually as against average CLV, to find out whose relationship is more precious for your brand can also help in customer segmentation for up-selling and cross-selling your other offerings.

What is the Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC)?

CLV alone may aid you to a certain extent to refine your organization’s operations and service delivery models; however, we all know that Customer Experience (CX) begins right from Marketing.
Therefore, now you need a metric that considers an end-to-end impact, and that can only be measured by considering the Cost of Acquisition of Customer for your brand.

Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC) is the average cost of acquiring a customer which can include right from marketing and sales expenses to offers and discounts that your organization (if required) provides to its customers.

CLV/CAC

The ratio of CLV to CAC is extremely important and useful to evaluate the complete business model and its viability for any organization.

We say this because, when the CAC is greater than CLV, it clearly indicates that the business model is not a viable proposition at all.

Therefore, as a thumb rule, your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) must be 3 to 4 times more than your Cost of Acquisition of Customer (CAC).

There are several factors which drive this; however, CX professionals can play a significant role in optimizing this ratio using different levels of Customer Experience strategies to the purchasers of your offerings.

Apart from this tacking the trends of CLV and CLV/CAC ratio can also aid CX professionals to gauge the impact of CX initiatives that have been implemented in your organization.

  1. Customer-Retention or Customer-Churn

Over the course of time, Customer Churn rate has become one of the other most popular metrics as most CX professionals talk about it while assessing ‘Customer Experience management’ of any organization.

Nevertheless, according to the NPX and CX benchmark report published in 2018, it states that:

Only one-third of companies proactively track their Customer Retention Rate (CRR) in their organization.

In simple language Customer Churn is the percentage or proportion of customers those who have discontinued or left after using a brand as against the total base of its active customers in the list.

In fact, the Customer Retention rate is just the inverse of Customer Churn rate, for which the math is:

1/Customer Churn Rate

Although apparently, it might look extremely easy, however, in reality, there are several scenarios such as non-recurring business models, pure subscription models, businesses with lock-in periods and without lock-in periods, and others that needs to be taken into consideration while measuring CCR. Therefore calculating CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for a brand is actually a very tricky process, which is one of the major reasons as to why businesses do not most often like to calculate their Customer Churn.

Nevertheless, we have found that base-lining an organization or brand’s historic churn rate is a far superior way to access the efficacy of that company’s Customer Experience initiatives as even lack of accurate data for benchmarking across industries is not a matter of concern to perform this calculation, which is a good metric to know the effectiveness of an organization’s Customer Experience strategy.

Revenue Churn Rate

Revenue Churn Rate is a variation of Customer Churn Rate since this metric portrays how much revenue got lost within a given period of time.

In other words, Revenue Churn Rate as the name suggests is a very pertinent economic and financial indicator of customer loyalty in ‘subscription-based business models’.

The math over here is, if $100 K is the recurring revenue of last month and if that has decreased to $90 K in the present month, there is a revenue churn of $10 K this month. Which means the Revenue Churn Rate is 10% [=100-90/100].

However, it must be most essentially remembered over here that you should take only into consideration the base of installed customers and should never add new acquisitions to the current month. Moreover, another simple version of the Revenue Churn Rate also ignores customers who have upgraded their subscriptions (a refinement that is not cover in this article).
Therefore RCR (Revenue Churn Rate) is as good as CCR (Customer Churn Rate) for all types of subscription-based business like Cloud Based CRM software solutions, except that downgrading a subscription would impact the RCR but not CCR.

  1. Customer Effort Score (CES)

This is a CX metric that is mostly neglected by several organizations across the globe. According to an NPX & CX Benchmark report published in 2018, only 15% of businesses use CES and hence it is one of the most under-utilized metrics by the CX Management fraternity.

However, it must be acknowledged that Customer Effort Score has a greater statistical correlation with both repurchase and enhanced spending rates than NPS.
That implies CES is a better metric to predictive repurchase and spending behaviors of your customers than Net Promoter Score.

For example, most of us would cherish to use a web-based check-in facility rather than stand in a check-in queue while boarding flights in an airport. This reduction in the customer’s effort by helping the customer to “get their job done” can radically increase brand preferences.

Much like NPS, Customer Effort Score (CES) is also measured through a single question but with a 5 point scale.

Another advantage for measuring CES is that the same question can be asked to the same customer times and again after every transaction as it obviously makes sense to find out if the customer has found it effortless to transact after each and every deal.

 Conclusion

There are also many more metrics such as Turnaround Time, Service Levels, Compliance Percentage, and others that can also be tracked to measure CX of a brand, which we shall discuss later on.
So subscribe to our blogs for learning more or read our Business Growth Manifesto, which is a definitive guide on how to use technology to fuel massive business growth.

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This Is How We Show Our Love This Valentine’s Day

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers. With this tool, which presently according to SmallBizTech ranks as one of the top 20 Google Chrome extension will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms.

There is no denying of the fact that Valentine’s Day is globally a Hallmark holiday. Hence, every year on February 14, brands use this day as a catalyst for email campaigns aimed to woo their customers. Nevertheless, whether your brand’s strategy in 2018 is as simple as resending previous year’s e-card or sending wine and rose, this time of the year is a good time to remind your customers that you love their unflinching support and presence and care for their engagement with your brand throughout the year.

Below are a few unique ways to cultivate meaningful customer relationship, and show your prospects and customers some gratitude on this year’s Valentine’s Day:

Listen

It may sound extremely simple- that actually it is. Your CRM platform can track your customer’s social media presence, and therefore by tuning into your customer’s daily activities, you can easily recognize which channels they prioritize, which customers are acquainted with another, or which are planning to attend certain business-related events. This intelligent flow of information through your CRM can aid your sales, marketing, and support teams to tailor their customer outreach strategy, send messages that reach the users on their preferred channels or set up in-person meetings for fostering a more better than before relationships.

Diagnose and find the trends in your customer service

When a marketing initiative or a sales process is not paying off, either you can scrap it as a tough luck or use the available data in your CRM system to better understand the behaviors of your customers.  By using keywords to sort out through your customer support requests, you can find recognizable patterns, identify common customer complaints, and deal with them proactively, rather than holding back and wait for the customers to bring the problems to your attention.

Automate your ‘To-Do’ list

In every business verticals and in all departments and positions there are always certain tasks which are more repetitive than others. Regrettably, these monotonous tasks many times lead to errors, which in turn send unfortunate messages to your prospects and customers that you do not seem to appreciate their businesses. Nevertheless, there is help at hand.  Automating a workflow in your CRM platform can trigger of a set of actions whenever you add a new customer to your CRM system, like a welcome email, or special offers for new users, or dictate automated reminders to aid your team to customize the user experience for weeks and months to come.

Present a gift

Think out of the box on this Valentine’s Day. No more stale chocolates, offer your customers a time-sensitive deal, a gift card, or bonus points that enhance your customer loyalty program.

Valentine’s Day- Takeaway

On this Hallmark holiday this year, we from ConvergeHub have chosen to present our customers with an awesome FREE LEAD GENERATION TOOL, which we hope will make you feel happy and fulfill our goal of sharing our love with the customers.

With this tool, which according to SmallBizTrends ranks as one of the 20 Best Chrome extensions for Small Businesses, will help you to extract information about the leads of your choice from websites and social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Yelp, and others. You can even use this tool to grab email addresses from Gmail and store them straight into your ConvergeHub CRM platform seamlessly.

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5 Customer Service Experience And CX Predictions For 2018

In this Era-of-the-Customer, all business establishments understand that it is the customers who call the shots. Customers are better informed and smarter nowadays, as they have recognized that they have more options and so are more stringently demanding about the customer service experience they receive, which they expect to be right the first time and every time. The following are 5 predictions that you cannot ignore. For the most part, these are certain customer experience management trends that keep tending, and which, smart companies follow and react accordingly.

In this Era-of-the-Customer, all business establishments understand that it is the customers who call the shots. Customers are better informed and smarter nowadays, as they have recognized that they have more options and so are more stringently demanding about the customer service experience they receive, which they expect to be right the first time and every time. The new age customers expect business houses to take care of their issues in a way that not only keeps them happy but also help restore their faith and confidence in the company.

While many companies see this as a big burden on their shoulders, there are others who view this as a golden window of opportunity to meet their customers, exceed the customer expectations, and so win over new customers by creating loyalty with their existing ones.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends. - Jeff Bezos Click To Tweet

The following are 5 predictions that you cannot ignore.
For the most part, these are certain customer experience management trends that keep tending, and which, smart companies follow and react accordingly.

Self-service customer support is growing in popularity

Customers expect companies they do business with to provide them support in a way that is easy and convenient for the customers. It has been noticed in numerous studies that customers visit the company websites not to look for telephone numbers but to look for an answer to their problems or questions in hand. In the recent times, videos have become a powerful means to answer frequently asked questions. These “how-to” type videos not only offer answers to questions but they also show the customers and visitors how to properly use the company’s products or services. Hence, this video-based support also doubles up as a marketing tool, since enhancing customer service experience is the new approach to marketing.

AI continues to be the hottest topic in customer experience management

Computers now effectively handle low-level customer support questions and its capabilities are increasing. Much like, what reminds us of the Moor’s Law, which says that the power and capacity of the microchip (the number of transistors on a chip) will be doubled every passing year. This is exactly what is happening with Artificial Intelligence. The power and capability of Artificial Intelligence is growing at a stellar pace. The good news is, while in the past using AI for enhancing customer support experience, was prohibitively high for most companies, the modern day AI solutions that are now being developed for SMB (Small and Medium Business) can be found at an affordable price.

AI will also support the employee apart from the customers

While the majority of people are focusing on how AI can be used for communicating with their customers, there are some organizations those who are also using Artificial Intelligence to support the agents. In this case, the “machine” listening to the discussion between the customer and the agent, is capable of providing the agent with up-to-date information and data needed to respond to the customer’s questions. According to the words of Ginni Rometty (CEO of IBM) – when you turn around the letter in Artificial Intelligence, ‘AI’ reverses to ‘IA’, which means for ‘Intelligent Assistant’, and over here, the machine “assistant” extends help and support the agents instead of the customers.

Amazon will shift into Brick-and-mortar retail

We have already seen as more and more Brick-and-mortar retailers are gaining grounds online, giants like Amazon has similarly moved into the retail brick-and-mortar store business on grocery items by recognizing the delicate sense of balance between the traditional and the digital retail worlds. And, this is just the start, for this shifting economy fueled by customer service is a convenience that will eventually benefit the customers.

Convenience is the new CX and customer service strategy

The next wave of disruptors to any industry is going to include the concept of convenience in 2018. We all have seen how the conveniences of Uber cabs have disrupted the whole taxicab industry. Moreover, Amazon has also paved the path of convenience and has become one of the most convenient companies on the planet to do business with. Hence, convenience is the newest service weapon to enhance customer service experience, and customer experience management this year.

Conclusion

So make sure that you are keeping up with the trends to follow in 2018, by offering your customers the service and customer experience that are engaging, easy, and convenient, to make this year a great time for both your customers and your company.

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5 Ideas That Will Redefine Customer Experience Management In 2018

Customer Experience Management or CEM is a compilation of processes that a business establishment uses to track, manage, and organize the interactions between the organization and a customer, throughout the customer lifecycle. The objective of Customer Experience Management is to optimize interactions based on the customer’s perspective and to increase customer loyalty. As we live in the age of the customer, to explain this buzz-worthy concept, it is the time that we must know what CEM really means. Precisely stating, CEM is not just collecting or responding to customer feedbacks, or tacking your NPS (Net Promoter Score), but it is a methodology and the complete ideology that makes your business enjoyable to work for customers. So how do you triumph the CX (Customer Experience) race in 2018?

What is Customer Experience Management?

Customer Experience Management or CEM is a compilation of processes that a business establishment uses to track, manage, and organize the interactions between the organization and a customer, throughout the customer lifecycle. The objective of Customer Experience Management is to optimize interactions based on the customer’s perspective and to increase customer loyalty.

As we live in the age of the customer, to explain this buzz-worthy concept, it is the time that we must know what CEM really means. Precisely stating, CEM is not just collecting or responding to customer feedbacks, or tacking your NPS (Net Promoter Score), but it is a methodology and the complete ideology that makes your business enjoyable to work for customers.

How do you triumph the CX (Customer Experience) race in 2018?

  1. Mapping and Studying the Complete Customer Journey
  2. Becoming Truly Omni-Channel
  3. Create Intelligent Loop Closure by Seamless Integrations
  4. Deploy Real-Time CX Systems and Personalized Insights
  5. Use Advanced Analytics to Help Prioritize Investments

Gartner predicts that by 2018, more than 50% of organizations will redirect their investments to customer experience innovations. Click To Tweet

In the race for delighting the customer, here we elaborate on the above-mentioned 5 things that we expect will shape Customer Experience in the coming year:

Mapping and Studying the Complete Customer Journey

The main objective of Customer Experience Management is to convey delight, but for that, you must first get your customer engaged. Engaging the customer can be either ad-hoc or part of a larger plan, but at the end, business establishments should understand the entire customer journey.
It is not just enough to take an individual point on the customer journey to understand or survey your customer, for doing this you will most likely be ineffective, as you will not have enough contexts to understand the needs of your customer.

The customer journey is the only means that is capable of providing context around the buyer’s experience with a brand. It helps you to ask the right questions at the most opportune moment, and so build brand engagement and trust that help guide the customer journey to the point of purchase.

Hence, for a total understanding of the customer journey spending money in advanced analytics to spot the drivers in Customer Experience is going to be vital for customer success in 2018.

Becoming Truly Omni-Channel

In the present times, customer interactions include a wide range of touch points, such as web, mobile, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), social media, in-store, chat-bots and more.  This brings us to the modern-day concept of Omni-Channel. Customers nowadays switch between different channels frequently, that too in the middle of a purchase or even during discovery. Hence, our prediction is that Omni-Channel customer experience management will get bigger with the propagation of channels, and naturally, customer journey mapping has to encompass every touch-points and channels where you can find your customer’s presence.

So having these channels up and running, and to make the work seamlessly as a part of the overall customer journey is another thing that we predict will be critical for CEM in 2018.

Intelligent Loop Closure by Seamless Integrations

Brands are obliged to resolve customer queries. However, according to Esteban Kolsky (CEO of ThinkJar), only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers do actually complain. Hence, creating Omni-Channel strategies and mapping customer journeys, drives customer engagement and aids organizations to proactively engage the customer across multiple touch-points, thereby ensuring that they are listening.

When it comes to business, different brands have different systems for support. CEM ensures that poor feedbacks from the customers become a support ticket automatically, in order to proactively resolve the issue. Hence, regardless of your industry, support ticket management is a priority for all businesses.

The only way to access these insights and precisely prioritize these customer support tickets is to completely integrate your business with systems of records that are capable of providing customer contexts.

These systems of records include CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, Loyalty platforms, Point of Sale systems, and others.

Therefore, seamless flow of information and ease of integration between these various kinds of systems will necessarily be a prior requirement for a Customer Experience Management program to allow smart loop closure in 2018.

Customer Experience Management

Real-Time CX Systems and Personalized Insights

In the year ahead, customer experience strategy will require alignment and coordination between various teams. Customers want holistic, all comprising brand experience, which suggests that your workforce need the right kind of equipment with the correct insights that are required for their roles. For example, while a Chief Executive Officer of a company should be able to view Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), organization-encompassing NPS and other holistic metrics, store managers should only view metrics of their store-NPS and ambiance of the store.

The customer needs are evolving at an unprecedented rate. Hence, by 2018 one of the primary pre-requisites of a great Customer Experience will be the ability to monitor feedbacks and then offer actionable insights in real-time. Therefore, Customer Experience Management platforms will need to be real-time, from driving integrations to making changes to configuring the whole CEM system, which can provide a clearer picture of what your customers are thinking of your business and how to manage their expectations from your brand.

Advanced Analytics to Help Prioritize Investments

Although most organizations are capable of collecting raw data about their customers, extracting the right insights from this cascading information is the real challenge.

As we move into 2018, remember that you make sure your analytic engine is a step ahead than your brand’s competitors.  Therefore, leveraging on AI and deep learning can help in precisely gauging your customer’s sentiments. Powering your CX analytic platforms with cutting-edge techs such as predictive analysis, churn predictor, and path analysis helps in diving deep into customer behavior and their purchasing patterns, that can help drive hands-on improvement strategies.

While path analysis metrics helps in identifying the underlying influences of CX, predictive analysis make use of this data to run ‘what-if’ scenarios.

Therefore, briefly, truly understanding the customers and addressing their pain-points proactively is what that will set your business and brand apart in 2018.

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Role of CRM and Customer Experience in the wake of Retail Apocalypse

The so-called retail apocalypse 2017 has become so ingrained in the U.S markets, that now the fear-evoking term has found its own space in the Wikipedia entry. However, many have criticized this type of doomsday description, blaming media for exaggerating the trouble, as U.S retailers also announced more than 3,000 store openings in the first quarter of FY 2017. However, retailer chains have also said that 6,800 retail brick and mortar establishments would close this year, in spite of believed we have stepped on a time when there is sky-high consumer confidence and unemployment is historically low as the U.S economy is keeping on growing, and so has all the ingredients needed for a retail boom.

The so-called still continuing retail apocalypse has become so ingrained in the U.S markets, that now the fear-evoking term has found its own space in the Wikipedia entry.

However, many have criticized this type of doomsday description,  as U.S retailers also announced more than 3,000 store openings in the first quarter of FY 2018.

Since we have stepped on a time when there is sky-high consumer confidence and unemployment is historically low as the U.S economy is keeping on growing, so normally stating, USA has all the right ingredients needed for a retail boom.

According to a report by Frost & Sullivan’s Stratecast, in the wake of retail apocalypse 2017, it has been projected that E-commerce will account for nearly 18% of the total retail market in the U.S by 2025.

Comparing E-Commerce stores and Brick and Mortar retailers, it has also been discussed in the said report that Brick and Mortar retailers have an advantage over the online stores, which lies in their ability to offer customers a personalized experience. However, for this, Brick and Mortar retailers should immediately adopt an end-to-end solution that uses state-of-art and cutting-edge technology like CRM platform to make personalized services cost-effective and more focused on customer experiences.

The report also advised that this cannot be attained with erratic and unconsolidated point-solutions, where dissimilar technologies are enforced to fit together. But, what Brick and Mortar retailers need now is a well-integrated solution like a converged CRM platform, which provides a 360-degree view of the customers to encompass all aspects of the shopper continuum, which can only enable Brick and Mortar retailers to compete and dominate the retail space.

Moreover, when big retail chains close stores, this apparent blow can also be a blessing for small business owners, as many shoppers will gravitate to a smaller store, which will enhance the small and medium retailer’s skills for providing far superior personalized customer experience.

Using a converged CRM for small business, retailers can now easily integrate marketing, sales, billing and support related activities inside a single platform.

While states like West Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan is facing the hardest hit, as retail employment are going down, many states such as Arkansas, Nevada and, Florida, those who has only relied on the retail industry for their job growth, will feel more pain as the fallout deepens in the years to come.

So what is it that small business owners of Brick and Mortar stores need to do in order to create an exceptional experience for their customer?

All you need to do for this is to be proactive, put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and walk a purchase mile with them.

In a research study done by inContact, it has been revealed that more than 87 percent of adults in the U.S want to be contacted proactively by any business establishment or a company.

Here are 7 key points to get started with CRM and customer experience for small business brick and mortar store owners those who are keen on adopting CRM for small business (like ConvergeHub), to wade through this turbulent times.

  1. Keeping in touch.
  2. Listening to customers’ needs.
  3. Creating personal relationships.
  4. Offering what customers really want.
  5. Providing attentive and quick support.
  6. Maintaining an ongoing dialogue.
  7. Keeping up with the customer needs.

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Conclusion

In a gist, in the technology-dominated today’s’ world, just stop thinking that you control your retail shop’s customers, but believe that it is your customers who control you.


Therefore, the call of this hour is to adapt yourself quickly and provide exceptional customer experience with the help of CRM software, before the retail apocalypse digs deeper and it gets too late.