Customer Experience in the Digital Age: Insights from IDC

Have you ever wondered what drives businesses to keep customers coming back to them? Well, the answer lies in the customer experience they provide. In fact, it's no secret that customer experience is the key to retaining customers and driving sales growth. Across industries, businesses are competing to win repeat sales from customers by fostering a healthy relationship with them. To achieve this, they rely on customer experience as the key influential factor to retain customers.

In fact, nearly 83% of business executives agree that failing to constantly improve their customer experience can result in their revenues and market shares being negatively impacted and put at risk. 

Over time modern customer experience has transitioned into a paradigm largely driven by technology in most cases. Initially, enterprises focused on buying or building their own core software to meet customer experience goals. However, today, most enterprises leverage a productized approach for technology solutions that power their offerings.

In other words, every software that the business utilizes to serve customers is perceived as a product with dedicated product owners and teams to design, build, operate, and maintain it continuously. As businesses navigate the customer experience dilemma through productized technology, it is important that they identify the specific areas that need attention. 

This is where IDC's latest Future of Customer Experience findings become a framework that modern enterprise product owners can follow to build a superior customer experience across their line of businesses. Let’s explore the key takeaways from IDC's report that will enable businesses to successfully build lasting customer relationships through technology.

Seamless Engagement: The Key to Building Lasting Customer Experience

Be it through mobile apps, desktop applications, or a website, enterprises need to take steps to ensure guaranteed frictionless engagement across all digital touchpoints. For this to happen, the digital channels and technologies organizations leverage must ensure smooth data exchange between customers and the core business workflows. The better the clarity on either side, the smoother will be the experiences delivered. 

For example, in a shopping app, customers would love to find and buy their favorite products within just a few clicks. The biggest goal that enterprises must have from a customer experience perspective, in this case, is to ensure that they provide a medium to extract information from customers on what they want and, within minimal time, provide them with the exact answer they were looking for. 

This usually happens on the search bar within the app. Showing up the right recommendations as customers key in their search terms, providing a one-click cart checkout option, etc., are steps that businesses can take to ensure to convert website visitors into paying customers by providing a fast and logical customer experience. Drive more organic traffic to digital touchpoints with SEO Content Optimization that aligns product pages, blogs, and support articles with high-intent search queries, boosting visibility and conversions.

Progressive Learning: Making a Learning-Enabled Digital Ecosystem

Customer habits, market trends, and digital preferences are all elements that constantly change. So, meeting the dynamics of customer experience expectations will require enterprises to invest in making a learning-enabled digital ecosystem. They need to leverage powerful analytics solutions or AI and machine learning tech to empower business systems with the ability to constantly learn about the potential revenue opportunities that the business can capitalize on over time. 

Read Blog: The Role of Customer Lifetime Value in Retail

This will further involve data management, quality transformation, and scalability initiatives to ensure that enterprises have constant access to technology that helps in progressively meeting consumer dynamics through self-learning.

Constantly Measure Sentiments: The Critical Element of Customer Experience

We have seen the importance of constantly updating business processes and systems with the latest knowledge about consumers and the market. But then there comes the question of how they can ensure that their endeavors work and that customers love the brand. This is where the importance of measuring brand sentiments, across different digital channels becomes a critical element of customer experience. 

From measures as simple as surveys to highly intelligent real-time sentiment analysis through facial recognition, the possibilities are limitless. Just as banks evaluate customers' financial creditworthiness via a credit score, enterprises can use a similar value score to gauge customer loyalty based on their sentiments expressed in previous interactions. In this case, it is the business that must use the score to decide on steps to always improve and maintain a high score.

Deepen Relationships: Contextual Awareness in Customer Experience

Data about customer relations can be easily obtained from transactional systems and feedback approaches that brands deploy. But simply having this data, doesn't ensure that they can deliver a superior customer experience based on it. Brands must develop the ability to sense the context behind every consumer's behavioral trait in real-time. They need to know what exactly triggers a decision-making event and ensure that the experience offered is hyper-personalized based on this contextual awareness. 

This, again, would necessitate the use of AI and analytical processing on customer data acquired from across the business landscape.

Wrapping Up

IDC's Future of Customer Experience findings outline how modern businesses can leverage technology to do what matters the most for their customers, i.e., learn about them, build for them, constantly listen to them, and grow with them. 

What they now need is to select the right technologies to power these initiatives across their business. This is where an experienced technology partner, like Xoriant can help make a difference. Get in touch with us to learn more.

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