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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.