Albert Nel argues in this piece that the businesses that want to excel in the current challenging climate need to adopt a big-picture approach to CX that cuts across all business functions and departments.
Businesses are facing several acute challenges in the current economic climate, including rising operating costs, decreased margins and lower consumer confidence.
As the competition for clicks and conversions become fiercer, getting the Customer Experience (CX) right and positively influencing how customers perceive your business is an absolute necessity. Businesses that want to excel in this ever-changing digital era need to adopt a big-picture approach to CX that encompasses all departments.
Every decision you make should centre around CX
Customer experience goes beyond the customer service or UX team. Every decision related to product, brand, HR or IT impacts customer experience at some point. In an environment where consumers are re-assessing how they spend and looking to connect with brands that meet their growing expectations, businesses need a new approach to serving and supporting their customers.
The entire company needs to understand what their customers are looking to achieve, how they want to go about it, and what their pain points are, in order to develop solutions that will make their lives easier.
Recently, Contentsquare’s CX Supper Club spoke to Taimoor Khan, Head of Customer Experience at Mad Paws, Australia’s largest pet service marketplace connecting Pet Owners and Pet Sitters . “CX ultimately boils down to solving customer pain points through a business lens. The biggest failing that I see in the CX industry is that we only look at the customer pain point, and all we focus on is solving it as an isolated incident. We neglect to look at what the effect on the business is – ultimately, if your business doesn’t survive, then you’re not going to be around to solve any customer pain points.”
Every team member can add unique value to the solution development process, and if each person performs their job function with a shared understanding of customer needs, the entire business performs better. It’s everyone’s responsibility to make the customer experience as good as possible, but it’s leadership’s job to take great ideas and design a way for the business to deliver on them.
CX and Customer Service as one
Taimoor set up the CX function for Mad Paws from Day Zero, with CX and customer service becoming a holistic function.
“Customer service is reactive, and customer experience is proactive – and ideally the two should come together to generate revenue because you’re proactively solving problems.”
Taimoor cautioned that businesses should be aware early on of the difference between reactive and proactive problem solving and research, and they should instill this into the culture early on.
“CX results require a certain mindset. Skills can be acquired, but not mindset. A business looking to get CX off the ground fast should combine CX with your customer service function and hire passionate people who have a mindset for actively wanting to solve problems.”
Understand the entire customer journey
The commitment to a great customer journey is the secret to the success of global sporting retailer Decathlon. The digital team at Decathlon is underpinned by the user experience (UX and Product Owners) pillar and required a modern tech stack to maximise their CRO strategy, reinforce a product mindset, improve customer journeys and provide relevant content to their customers.
They turned to digital experience analytics to integrate with their existing tools to provide a holistic view.
Digital customer experience analytics can help brands gain insight into customer journeys by measuring and analysing customer engagement across each of these different touchpoints, enabling brands to map out the right steps to achieve their CX goals.
Advanced digital customer experience analytics can provide more insight into metrics including click repetition, activity rate, engagement rate and time before the first click, empowering marketers with a new generation of KPIs that show how users really behave while browsing, leaving intuition aside and allowing data-driven optimisation.
Roanna Zheng, Product Owner at Decathlon explained, “With digital analytics, we have been able to unlock critical insights of their different user journeys and potential areas to improve, including their content strategy based on which displays led to the most conversions.”
Similarly, Aussie wine retailer Naked Wines turned to digital analytic tools for their 10th year anniversary campaign featuring 10 new winemakers who would create wines at competitive prices, offering greater value for their customers. Using data that showed how their content was performing, they were able identify opportunities to re-prioritise content, increase exposure and increase conversion.
Data enables a successful CX culture
Businesses looking to create a successful CX culture need to ensure their team members have access to what that entire customer journey looks like for each individual visitor and which pain points they may be experiencing.
For Decathlon, the next phase will involve democratising data amongst different teams by tailoring the digital analytics solution based on the specific needs of teams across the organisation.
Roanna shared, “The solution enabled us to gather complex data and showcase it simply, allowing different teams such as marketing, digital, IT and more to use behavioral data to inform their decisions.”
With digital customer experience analytics, brands like Decathlon and Naked Wines can lift the lid on consumer behaviour and see precisely where customer journeys are being impacted so that they can quickly and efficiently make the necessary changes to ensure they are providing customers with the most stellar experiences.
As we strap in for more challenging conditions ahead, businesses will have to work harder to provide the best digital experiences to consumers. By making sure they build the foundation for CX with the right mindset and tapping into advanced analytics to understand consumers, they are well-positioned to offer digital experiences that are seamless and rewarding.
