11 important things brands should know to thrive in the Customer Experience (CX) age.
What is the world’s most effective competitive differentiator? Without a doubt, it is customer experience. In an always-on digital world where sophisticated humans want mobile-friendly service, getting the experience right is a sustainable competitive advantage. Here are eleven things to steer you in the right direction.
Experience is becoming one of the most significant brand differentiators in 2020.
The big shift in marketing is the movement of marketing investment to team culture and allied initiatives. This is because companies now increasingly understand that they must engage and empower employees to create happier, more meaningful memories when interacting with customers.
Experience is multidimensional and expands across a plethora of platforms. For this reason, it is important to take a latticed or networked approach to customer service and experience. See it as a whole that consists of a number of interconnected, dynamic parts.
To coin a cliche, customer experience is a journey. It is an expansive movement, which, when started, never ends.
How do you sell investments in customer experience to the C-Suite? “By framing the transformation effort in win-win terms (wherein the customer gets better service and the company gets fewer calls), the CX organization sets itself up for success,” Maxie Schmidt, Principal Analyst at Forrester says. Frame the savings that great experience brings with strong research.
Experiences are a lifeline, that a mid-gloom retail sector needs to lean into in order to invigorate sales.
A primary job or focus of CX is the removal of friction — to make things as easy as possible for customers to get exactly what they want.
Artificial intelligence is critical to the future of experience. There is just so much data in the future AI is what it will take to understand humans across diverse channels.
The history of the idea. The concept “Experience Economy” was coined by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, which describes the next big economy. The authors said it was the next big economic age, one that followed the agrarian, industrial and service economies. Pine and Gilmore’s big idea is that what brands must do is create more enjoyable memories for the humans they want to sell to.
Gartner declares that “2020 is the year when the technology-literate people are going to be replaced by people-literate technology.” This means experience technology is going to get easier and easier to use effectively, and that the playing fields are going to be democratised.
How to move forward? The best way to deal with the future is to invent it, as Bharti Maan writes in Digalist. Maan rightly says that data is becoming the new language for innovation. Understand the humans you serve, and use this understanding to make life better for them. That’s the real route to sustainable success.