What will customer experiences look like in 2022 and the coming years? We recently addressed this topic in partnership with CIO Watercooler during the event Reinventing the customer experience: Building for the future. In this blog, we explore the event’s highlights.
Customer experiences go beyond fixing what is broken.
Companies are rethinking their customer journeys to adapt to the ever-changing demands of users. However, this practice goes beyond fixing the flaws. It is about creating moments of excitement that reinforce customer loyalty and brand affinity. A customer’s experience is defined by the perception and feelings resulting from encounters between them and a brand. How was the experience? How did it feel? Would a customer do it again? These are critical questions that CX aims to answer. Customer experience can bring new frameworks for innovation, be a catalyst for cultural change, and become a living expression of your brand. Here are five considerations for leaders to leverage CX.
Five steps for leaders to boost customer experience
- Technology leaders need to become CX leaders.
Even though CX is essential to achieve customer engagement and profitability, some companies still struggle to put customer experience at the core of their practices. Technology leaders need to get more involved in CX to better dialogue with senior managers and drive customer-centricity in their organization. Conversations between IT, marketing, and management can help the organization build a shared language around goals and KPIs and, as a result, create a better CX strategy.
- Explore sophisticated integrations with third-party data & platforms
Now companies are open to partnering with external organizations to leverage integrated products and ecosystems more than ever before. Working with third parties instead of building everything in-house is how industries connect with customers deeply.
For example, the automotive industry clearly illustrates how companies can leverage integrated ecosystems. Car manufacturers work with financial services providers and entertainment brands to make the connected vehicle an experience that compliments people’s lifestyles. From facilitating transactions to offering new mobility options, the automotive sector integrates services to build more powerful experiences that go beyond moving from point A to point B.
- Go from valuable services to insight-driven experiences
Part of building a great customer experience is to offer users insights to help them make informed decisions. In recent years, we have seen how wellness brands provide information about the customer’s physical activity and suggestions based on their preferences, which helps them track their health status and develop healthier habits.
Now, banks are adopting a similar approach. One of the speakers talked about how a major UK bank has recently introduced sustainability-oriented services through its mobile banking application. Through customer research, they uncovered that people care about the role of banks and financial institutions in driving climate change. They realized that it would be interesting to add a service that shows how much carbon they are generating in their monthly spending and gain more control over their carbon footprint. This new service helps customers better understand their consumption habits and creates a personalized experience.
- Build truly omni-directional journeys with seamless online & offline connections
Omnichannel experiences go beyond creating a large group of customer touchpoints. The user interaction should dictate how an organization manages its digital and physical channels.
A challenge that one of the speakers shared was the case of a company wanting to make a shift to omnichannel journeys. The challenge consisted of consolidating over a hundred websites into a single platform to enable the company to build and deliver experiences at scale. Once the company had created this single platform, it reorganized its teams around the new customer journey, not based on channels but on how customers interact with them. As the CX area gained maturity, it became a department that worked seamlessly with other areas such as marketing and IT.
Breaking down silos in exchange for a collaborative approach where CX is transversal across all areas makes it possible to create a truly omnichannel experience. Companies that orchestrate their operations and work hand in hand behind the scenes are the ones that can understand customer interactions and deliver truly omni-directional journeys.
- Personalized CX requires agile platforms.
How can companies create a responsive and personalized customer experience with an open architecture to trusted third parties? Building agile platforms to become a more client-centric organization requires addressing legacy code and modernization. Companies can use legacy code as an asset to pivot their business and enhance their CX strategy. Here are three steps companies can follow to make legacy code an ally:
- Examine existing products. Assess technical systems and general systems to find out capabilities and competencies you already have. What makes this particular capability different from the new one that you need?
- Discern capabilities. Ask yourself if you can separate those assets to re-purpose them for new products or markets.
- Re-purpose. Use your revised legacy software to enter adjacent markets and improve your CX management.
We want to extend a special thanks to our keynote speakers for taking the time and sharing their expertise and insights to help us understand how leaders can pivot their CX strategy in 2022:
Miles Hillier, Head of Digital Proposition Development, NatWest
Michael Lavigne, Head of Experience Strategy and Design, Nissan
Dean Parker, Consulting Partner, Globant
If you’d like to have a chat about your CX strategy, please reach out to us at globant-uk@globant.com.
