Consumers will pay a 16% price premium for great customer experience (CX). If just one statistic could tell you all you need to know about the importance of CX, then this is it.
So why are brands still failing to meet customers’ ever-growing expectations across the customer journey? Christina Thompson, Client Relationship Director of Paragon Customer Communications, explores the strategies delivering optimal experiences, identifying and addressing critical customer pain points.
Irrespective of the industry in which they operate, the ultimate goal of any business is to deliver an experience that drives customer loyalty, repeat purchases and turns consumers into advocates for their brand. Yet, despite this, we continue to see significant failures in CX that lead to high churn rates that are costing corporations significantly.
In their future of CX report, PwC surveyed 15,000 consumers and found that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.
For industries such as retail (63%), banking (75%), telecoms (78%) and insurance (83%), in particular, whom regularly encounter lower than average customer retention rates, it is a downward trend that they must mitigate. Particularly given that reducing customer churn by as little as two percent a year can cut costs up to 10 percent.
So where are brands going wrong when it comes to delivering positive experiences? And how can they transform their CX models for the better?
Digital initiatives missing the mark with consumers
With a strong emphasis on the omnichannel experience, as modern consumers are increasingly attracted by the speed, convenience and the ability to self-serve through online tools, digital transformation is the natural next step in the evolution of business and CX.
The stark reality, however, is businesses are spending trillions of pounds on digital transformation, for negligible benefit. Kony’s Digital Experience Survey 2019 – which gauges the efficacy of global investment in digital transformation – revealed that despite £3.65 trillion having been spent by enterprises on digital transformation, the vast majority of these initiatives fall short of customer expectations.
As enterprises seek to boost their digital capabilities and improve customer communications, often there is a significant risk of them making short-sighted investment decisions. The misalignment of technological investment and customer needs, as well as the broader customer journey, means consumers are left feeling that businesses are not investing in the appropriate digital initiatives that result in meaningful outcomes.
The result is a deep-seated experience disconnect. Companies boast the latest intuitive technology or customer facing interface designs, but they haven’t focused on – or invested in – the aspects of CX that are the most important to their customer base and their communication preferences.
But all is not lost, by acknowledging the challenges of digital transformation; be that maturity levels, the complexity of the current IT environment, legacy systems or even a lack of direct control over data feeding out of multiple systems, organisations can set their CX strategies on the right path.
Enhancing CX through digital transformation
Enterprises are under no illusion that investment in digital transformation is required to drive such strategies – indeed, some 55% of companies without a digital transformation believe they have less than a year before they start to lose market share[5] – yet they’re unsure exactly where their investment would be best spent. This is often one of the reasons they might choose to retain and upgrade legacy rather than implement new technology into the business.
Of course, there is logic (albeit flawed) behind this type of thinking. Economically, legacy technology may be retained because there is no easily identifiable business case for an upgrade that meets return on investment guidelines. While a siloed approach to digital transformation, where individual departments have a say in what technology they integrate, backed by central funding support, can seem more efficient.
Nonetheless, such an uncoordinated approach can result in critical legacy problems down the line, leading to the loss of the benefits that a single, centralised customer communications management (CCM) delivery model can generate, including the creation of a unified viewpoint of all channels and the capabilities to facilitate transformation at pace.
That’s not to mention the often-unforeseen cost of maintaining legacy systems, be that renewing licenses, training users in system updates, migrating to the Cloud, upgrading data centres and server rooms – all of which can add up to somewhere near the cost of implementing a brand-new system.
A centralised strategy
A single, centralised, CCM system – such as Paragon Customer Communications’ One Platform solution – can enable enterprises to effectively keep pace with longer-term transitions in consumer behaviour and capitalise on digital transformation opportunities.
By providing the delivery infrastructure to align and centralise customer communications in a truly multichannel environment, customer interactions can be seamlessly delivered at any time, across multiple channels, and in any language, for a truly frictionless experience that exceeds customer expectations.
In instances where organisations are entrenched in complex “legacy” service models and IT infrastructures, adding an integration layer of this type delivers the cohesive benefits without touching the legacy systems, which can be especially beneficial when considering the speed of transformation.
To find out more visit: https://www.paragon-cc.com/en-gb/solutions/One-Platform
About the Author
Christina Thompson is Client Relationship Director of Paragon Customer Communications.
