How IT and Business Can Partner to Transform Customer Experiences
Satisfied, happy, and loyal customers that will stay with you long-term is the ultimate goal for any business. You want to make sure that your company delivers a superior customer experience and meets your customers’ expectations every step of the way.
The problem is that customers’ expectations change and evolve over time. Today’s customers want personalized service and tailored experiences, yet many businesses struggle to close the gap between what customers expect and what they actually get.
In a research report by Harvard Business Review, they discuss how leaders use data integration as the key to providing great customer experience. The findings reveal that a digital transformation helps businesses place the customer experience at the forefront.
Here are 5 ways on how your company can learn to identify, meet, and effectively exceed customer expectations.
Create a customer-centric culture
In many companies, the culture remains sales-driven or product-focused when customer centricity should be considered a priority in order to deliver superior experience. Customer experience has to be built into the organizational culture.
It has to be the anchor in every department, process and decision. Over 80% of respondents said that having management and leadership visibility, a clearly communicated strategy, and understanding the end-customer experience, were critical components of delivering a winning customer experience.
Speed and agility
The rapid change in customers’ expectations and demands are today some of the biggest challenges. Being quick to respond to changes in your customers as well as market dynamics can either make or break your company.
86% of customer experience leaders said that their companies are able to quickly build new and innovative customer experiences in response to market dynamics. By investing in new technologies, you will be capable of analyzing key customer data to quickly act on customer insights.
Leverage your data
Most companies are failing to leverage the growing amount of data they have on their customers. 23% of respondents said they act on most or all of the customer data they collect, while 23% said that they act on very little or none of it. Make sure to leverage your data from social media, mobile, website, and e-commerce.
Meeting the right customer at the right time is all about analyzing and acting on the data and the customer behavior. It will help you predict purchases and gain a better understanding of who your customers are and what they want.
A single customer intelligence source
Because of the new and expanding data sources – data that lives in different locations and comes from different providers – companies are struggling to create a single source of customer intelligence. Only 13% of 680 executives said they had a single source of customer intelligence capable of integrating every data in a single view.
Eliminating silos and giving your employees a single customer intelligence source will ensure a single source of truth. Turning the data into something valuable to the customer can have a huge impact on the customer lifetime.
Advanced predictive analytics
Advanced predictive analytics will be the biggest and most significant shifts to drive data-driven customer experience decisions. Based on the intelligence collected over time, it makes predictions on what step to take next.
Some examples of such steps are prioritizing one lead over the other, uncovering new opportunities, and so on. Advanced predictive analytics allows for a better understanding of customers’ expectations in their journey.
In this rapidly evolving world, companies need to reconsider their customers’ needs and restructure their services to deliver a superior customer experience. With Salesforce, you will be able to engage with your customers at every touchpoint with an end-to-end experience tailored to their needs and expectations.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your customer experience for your company, click here to get in touch with our team.