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Creating Meaningful Customer Experiences is the Differentiator for Successful Businesses

While businesses are delighted to see that customers are becoming exponentially more comfortable with using lower-cost self-service methods and a plethora of new communication channels, it’s a two-edged sword. While many organizations provide access to such options, they are often not proactive about ensuring that all touchpoints along a customer journey are optimized. Although technology drives innovation and transformation, particularly in customer experience, it is also causing customers' expectations to continually reach new heights. If solutions are not thoughtfully implemented and integrated with other communication tools, they can cause more problems than they solve. The challenges ratchet up higher in live interactions: by the time customers make the decision to personally interact with an agent, whether on a call, chat, SMS exchange, or social media channel, they have already reached a higher level of frustration than any time in the recent past. 

In today’s business environment, providing a meaningful customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have.  If a brand is to succeed and compete with gold-standard customer-centric organizations such as Zappos or Amazon, they need to deliver memorable positive experiences on a consistent basis.  Consumers can search online for anything, at any time and brands need to make it easy and effective to interact with them in ways that require less customer effort. Many companies find the greatest obstacle to connecting with their customers is having to sift through fragmented or siloed data, making it difficult to get an accurate, integrated view of increasingly complex customer journeys.  Having access to comprehensive, accurate data is critical to designing and consistently deliver more intuitive customer journeys.

What is the best way for businesses to position themselves to build more positive and profitable customer relationships? According to the American Management Association, businesses that incorporate customer experience strategies “have 75% greater customer retention and 65% better customer satisfaction than the average company.” Once a company makes a commitment to creating a CX strategy, it often turns into a long and drawn out process that requires extensive research.

There are educational options available. In many cases these require travel and time away from the office to attend sessions in a broad seminar program that charges high conference fees. This usually translates into companies having the resources to send only one or two people to a live event who then must share their knowledge when they return.

There was a focused educational alternative that made it possible for a business’s entire CX planning team to benefit from the latest innovative thinking without ever having to leave their desks. CrmXchange’s March online virtual conference “Strategies and Best Practices for a Meaningful Customer Experience,” March 23-27, 2020 positioned companies in all sectors to build more profitable customer relationships by helping them design and consistently deliver more intuitive customer journeys. It offered four days of complimentary, information-intensive webcasts offering proven strategies presented by the industry’s leading minds.

The curriculum was structured to benefit contact center leaders at all levels - managers, director and C-level executives. The fully interactive event enabled attendees to meet with industry experts and colleagues who answered questions in real time while providing updated contact center solutions, without the cost and inconvenience of a traditional on-site conference.

Among the topics addressed were: 

• Learning how to reduce customer effort by making it simpler for consumers to do business with the company
• Managing the agent experiences through change management
• Exploring the deployment of customer support tools, including upgraded self-service options and building a knowledge foundation
• Integrate AI and machine learning to improve customer experience 

The event kicked off on Monday, March 23 with an incisive keynote address by John Goodman, Vice Chairman, CCMC, one of the pioneers of advanced customer care techniques. He was co-author of the noted 1970’s breakthrough study of consumer complaint behavior and customer service for the White House Office of Consumer Affairs. His research contributions helped to redefine the way businesses thought about the value of customer service and were instrumental to repositioning it as a potential profit center.

His session focused on “Going Beyond Surveys - Creating a VOC Process for Greater Impact.” The object is to encourage businesses to evolve beyond day-to-day firefighting to what he terms “Customer Experience 3.0”.

Additional webcasts included: “Infusing Digital CX with Human Intelligence,” “Meaningful Agent Training for Meaningful Customer Experiences,” “AI-Driven Modeling to Improve the Agent and Customer Experience,” “Seven Major Compliance Concerns for CX Professionals,” and more.