Define Customer Expectations
Investing in improved customer engagement simultaneously accomplishes three important objectives: it increases the lifetime value of existing customers, it enhances the quality of customer experiences and customer satisfaction, and it ultimately results in greater business growth. But where do you start?
The customer journey includes every interaction your customers have with your brand, across every channel and device. In analyzing the effectiveness of the customer journey, we need to first evaluate how that journey makes the customers feel. This is what we call the customer experience (CX)—how well the journey matched the customers’ expectations.
- Customer Journey: what customers do
- Customer Experience (CX): how customers feel
- CX Transformation: enhancing the journey to match customers’ expectations (Goal: creating a great overall customer experience)
Customers have sky-high expectations. And for almost every industry, those expectations involve a seamless and engaging omnichannel (which includes both digital and physical) journey. This is why digital transformation is key to driving CX.
Customer Expectations
Straightforward Content
Increasingly, customers don’t have time for, or interest in, spending excessive time in their journey. They want to quickly and easily understand what you offer, how it benefits them, and why they should choose you over a competitor. Content should be simple and direct, yet friendly and highly relevant to each specific customer.
Tip: Use predictive content. Predictive content uses machine learning to track the success of specific content pieces across audiences. It can then automatically send the most relevant content to each prospect based on their own unique customer profile.
Preferred Channels
Prospective customers aren’t willing to invest large amounts of time learning about your brand. They want your brand to come to them. This is why your marketing materials should be sent through each of your audiences’ preferred marketing channels in formats optimized for the channel.
Easy Path to Purchase
All barriers that add unnecessary time or difficulty to the buyer’s journey toward purchase should be eliminated. Improving load times, including easy-to-use search tools, restructuring your website and applications to have simple user paths, and ensuring the look and feel of all channels (both physical and digital) are cohesive measures to provide customers with a seamless experience. The ultimate goal is for your brand to have such a cohesive, omnichannel presence that your customers barely notice the channel through which they’re experiencing your brand.
A Cohesive & Personalized Experience
An essential quality your customers are looking for is an experience that feels unique to them. In a digital world, creating a cohesive experience means delivering the same message across all channels and leveraging technology to recall and recommend products in a personalized way both in real-time and through marketing messages.
Deliver on Customer Expectations
Given a customer base of thousands, or even tens of thousands, it is natural to question, “how is that possible?” With the right technology, infrastructure, and processes, this objective can be met for your organization in a manner which is scalable and sustainable. Here are four strategies that work effectively in delivering meaningful and profitable customer experiences.
Customer 360
When it comes to data, we like to say, “you don’t know what you know.” Most companies have the necessary data but simply don’t yet know what to do with it. Typically, data is fragmented and siloed across multiple Lines of Business and/or a range of focused interests. It’s also often unstructured, making it hard to integrate with legacy data storage and management systems. Alternatively, when data is centralized in a single place, with universal access, it ensures everyone has the same information and nothing is concealed in separate silos. We call this a single source of truth (SSOT). SSOTs are built for analytics, and offer unmatched flexibility, scalability, and extendibility. They enable automation and predictive analytics, allowing the personalization of each customer’s experience across all channels, leading to exceptional quality experiences and enhanced customer delight.
360° and RCG
Healthcare
At RCG, we recently helped a major healthcare client build an application to help improve the experience of both doctors and patients. For patients, the application recommends products based on their recent diagnoses. To bring this application to life, RCG had to first understand what data was available and then find a way to use that data in a way that would be useful to the end user. RCG brought this client from the strategy and business roadmapping phase, all the way through implementation.
Insurance
One of our clients, a specialized insurance company which provides exceptionally personalized service, came to us recently with the desire to update antiquated technology. For them, this was a critical transition, as they were looking to avoid inefficiencies and inaccuracies that could ultimately result in decreased customer satisfaction. By enabling a new claims system and migrating their mainframe claim data, we were able to free up time for their adjusters to focus on customer satisfaction. Through the automation of manual tasks, we were able to also help reduce the costs of claim paid as well as the costs of servicing the claims.
CxDNA
Customer xDNA is both a framework and a platform that will help organize and segment your customer base. This enables enhanced decision making, thus providing a more customer-focused experience.
Since DNA occurs as a double helix structure, we use this analogy to represent two interwoven strands of intelligent action.
Customer
Along the customer journey, there are many actions to be completed by the customer. These include:
- Discovery
- Learning about the problem they have
- Looking at solutions or products
- Making a purchase decision
- Using and engaging with (and sometimes advocating for) the product and company
Organizational
In parallel, organizations must consider their role in this journey. For an organization, marketer, or business, these jobs include:
- Reaching customers
- Making them aware of products and services
- Getting customers to try products, services, and solutions
- Getting customers to purchase products, services, and solutions
- Developing customer relationships to encourage repeat business
- Fostering brand loyalty
So how do you accomplish this? It all starts with audience segmentation.
Simplified, the segmentation process can be accomplished in four steps:
- Group customers into four to six segments based on common characteristics
- Create targeted marketing messages for each segment
- Identify appropriate communication channels to attract each segment
- Design experiences that offer differentiated value across the customer experience journey
Zooming in and understanding the buying patterns and behaviors of specific segments this way allows you to better manage campaigns, serve-up targeted offers, cross-sell, and up-sell—all in a personalized way. The use of AI, advanced analytics, data science, and machine learning create limitless opportunities for advancing and scaling this process.
Customer Data Platforms
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is one way to enable CxDNA. While some CDPs provide only data management and analytics, other systems continue to evolve with entire suites that bundle marketing functions with CRM or other applications. At the core, CDPs serve to help you turn your data into insight through helping you answer key marketing analytics questions such as:
- What product did this customer buy before their current purchase?
- In which segments/target groups does this customer belong?
- Is this customer likely to churn?
- What interest or intent has this customer demonstrated lately?
- What is the probability this customer will purchase? In what time frame?
- What is the value and predicted future value of this customer?
- What are this customer’s preferences and where are they in the customer journey?
The most important aspect of a CDP is the creation of a single unified customer profile for each customer that combines profile, transactional, and behavioral data from across the business. This data can then be used across all channels and devices, delivering hyper-personalized experiences in a cohesive way.
Quality of Experience
Quality of Experience (QoE or QoX) is an emerging topic in the world of business. QoE is a way to measure customer satisfaction more holistically, using both objective and subjective information. The goal of QoE is to better understand what’s working and what’s not, so you can make more informed decisions and further optimize your customers’ journeys. QoE takes into account three main factors:
- System (speed of operation and correctness of transmission)
- Human (gender, age, and education)
- Contextual influence factors (location, mobility, and costs)
Evaluations of QoE are typically made through polling or sampling.
Customer 360º, CxDNA, and Customer Data Platforms can each help enable a positive QoE for your customers.
- First, centralize data and build out real-time analytics.
- Next, use the CxDNA segments to understand specific buying patterns.
- Lastly, enable a CDP which allows you to provide predictive recommendations and seamless, personalized experiences to each audience.
Transform your CX Strategy for Business Growth
Once the foundation is set, maintenance and improvement come easy, allowing you to stay agile and optimize quickly. At RCG, we help businesses improve customer engagement and experience. From the initial strategy phase through optimization, RCG applies a systematic approach to drive customer experience with purposeful digital enablement:
- Establish an actionable strategic roadmap
- Define a modern, enterprise architecture
- Create an immersive, interactive customer app
- Integrate disparate customer data across silos
- Maintain and evolve legacy applications
- Innovate with RPA, machine learning, and AI
For your customers, experience is everything. Finding a way to make that experience positive is the core of a strong business model. Wherever you are in your journey, RCG can help.
