Creating a great customer experience is key to your brand’s success

‘80% of brands think they deliver a superior customer experience; 8% of their customers agree.’ [1]

It goes without saying that if you’re serious about your business you want to provide the best possible ‘experience’ for your customers.

But what’s the actual reality of your customers’ experience? Research shows that most brands are falling significantly short in meeting consumer expectations and delivering a pleasantly memorable customer service experience.

So, what precisely is Customer Experience (CX), and how can you develop a customer experience strategy that fully enhances your brand?

Define great customer experience

At Bridge, our definition of outstanding consumer service is as follows:

Customer Experience is the delivery of the brand promise at every touch point with the customer. The purpose is to exceed expectations, and to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

In today’s world of fast-changing and fickle consumer demand, it’s vital that you as a marketer stay abreast of what your customers really want from your brand. Here are some key questions to ask yourself:

• Do we fully understand our customers’ needs?
• What does our customer journey look like?
• How do we best deliver our products to meet customer expectations?
• How do we retain and grow our customer base – profitably?
• What do our customers value?

Universal need for effective customer experience strategies

It’s not just Australian brands who are in dire need of client service improvement. In a recent international survey by Acquia [2], 66% of customers couldn’t remember the last time a brand experience exceeded their expectations. When presented with the statement ‘I don’t remember when a brand experience exceeded my expectations’, the breakdown by country of respondents who replied in the affirmative is as follows:

66% Australia          72% France         68% Germany         66% United Kingdom         59% United States                 Global average:  66%

Focus fully on your customer

A key starting point for creating a great customer experience is to take a good hard look at your brand from your customer’s perspective, and then establish your Single Customer View (SCV). In other words, designing outside-in customer experience strategies to develop value propositions that truly address your market’s underlying needs and desired outcomes. You can manage this 360° omni-channel marketing approach through platforms such as digital marketing and campaign management.

It’s also vital to deploy viable data and analytics platforms, to track and optimise all your  customer interactions. The insights provided by these technologies are crucial to enabling engagement-rich platforms at every customer touch point, in turn helping you achieve optimal brand delivery.

Known and unknown customers – the link

Although you’ll have known and unknown customers with various profiles, a key role of your current customers is sometimes overlooked. And that’s to influence others to become new customers. One way to measure this is through the net promoter score (NPS).

What is net promoter score (NPS)?

A consistent great customer experience is key to turning your consumers into advocates for your brand, in turn attracting new customers. A common way of measuring NPS starts with the question ‘On a scale of 1 – 10, how likely would you be to recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?’

However, although a net promoter survey is a good indicator of customer referral intention at the time, NPS alone can’t provide deeper insights into customer behaviour and needs. Your NPS information should be used as part of a more complete analysis of multiple data sets. This includes feedback data that’s collected over the entire customer lifecycle, including acquisition and retention. This process is ideally suited for you to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to gain insights into your customers’ journeys, needs, personalities etc.

Starting your CX process

So, how to get started on your CX management plan? We recommend as a first step that you conduct a full scoping of the customer experience roadmap, across every touch point and source. From this, leverage as much (clean) analytics data as you possibly can to identify the pain points and NPS feedback. Only then can you precisely pinpoint the most relevant questions, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), to ensure optimal CX and fulfil your brand promise.

Partner with the experts

At Bridge CX is an integral component of our outstanding digital transformation solutions for your organisation:We’ve successfully delivered numerous CX engagements for our clients.  To find out how we can help optimise your brand’s customer experience, get in touch with our professionals today.

Meraj Huda, Managing Consultant

[1] Accenture interactive customer experience statistic

[2]  Acquia Customer Experience Trends Report 2019