After attending CMSWire's Digital Experience (DX) Summit, we came away with some valuable insights about the future of customer experience (CX).
Last month, I attended the Digital Experience (DX) Summit, a conference in Chicago presented by CMSWire that brought together a wide variety of organizations involved in the digital customer experience and marketing technology space. It was an informative and enlightening experience, focusing on the continuing evolution of the experiences we create for users in the websites and apps that we build, and I wanted to share some of the insights I gained from attending:
Moving Beyond UX
One of my biggest takeaways from the DX Summit was that organizations are moving beyond the concept of user experience (UX) toward a more complete customer experience (CX). While creating a good experience for your organization’s users is still very important, and you still want to track metrics like click through rate (CTR) and conversions to see how people interact with you online, the concept of CX goes even further and gives a more complete picture of customer interactions.
Basically, CX is the sum of all the engagements a customer has with your business throughout the entire customer lifecycle. CX includes everything from how a customer is treated in the sales process to how they interact with support, but unfortunately, you don’t control the subjective nature of how a customer or prospective customer evaluates their CX with your organization. That's why it's so important to create the best possible experience and demonstrate that you care about your customers.
The Increasing Importance of CX
Understanding that CX encompasses every interaction a customer has with your organization can take some adjustment of expectations, but understanding this is more important now than ever. That’s because people have come to expect a great experience, and with so many options available for any task people want to accomplish or product or service they want to purchase, the organization that offers them the best experience will rise to the top.
The thing to remember is that once people get a taste of a good experience, this will become their standard for all future experiences. For example, imagine having a dinner at a good steakhouse restaurant in which you ate a delicious steak and had excellent service. This experience was so good, you now expect this at every restaurant, if you don't get it, your perceived CX with that particular restaurant will be less favorable. This might mean that you won't recommend this restaurant to your friends or that you place a less favorable review on a social review website.
This type of experience translates to every interaction people have with an organization. When people come to you to learn how your organization can solve their problems and meet their needs, they have an expectation of a great experience, especially if they’ve already had a good experience from a similar company. Ensuring that you’re able to provide the best experience across every channel is not just important, it is what people demand.
Focus on the Customer
In order to provide the best CX, organizations need to make sure everything they do is customer-centric. This isn’t just limited to external channels like websites and social media; they’ll also need to look at their internal processes to see what might need to be revamped to focus on the customer.
Making things customer-centric often requires organizations to unlearn habits and adjust the way they do things, but taking the time to examine your processes and be sure you are always focusing on your customers will pay off. Maintaining a customer-centric focus in everything you do will ensure that you are able to provide the quality experience that customers expect, and that can make all the difference when it comes to standing out in a crowded digital marketplace.
As people focus on improving their digital strategies in the year to come, it’s important to realize that while we have some amazing tools like machine learning and autonomous personalization at our beck and call, at the end of the day, the customer experience needs to be humanized. People want to talk to a person, not a robot, and maintaining a personal touch as you focus on meeting your customers’ needs will be what separates you from the pack.
Do you have any questions about how to improve your organization’s customer experience? Do you want to know how to combine the available tools with a human touch to create the ideal digital strategy? Please contact us, and we’ll work with you to build the strategy that brings you success in today’s digital marketplace. We look forward to helping you create a great CX!
While there are many reasons why companies should focus on customer experience, here are three timely reasons that should be top of mind for any marketer.
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