Digital Customer Experience Drives Bottom Line Results
Several years ago, Jake Sorofman, from Gartner, Inc. wrote that “Customer Experience is the new battleground.”
This has been requoted numerous times by companies including Forbes, Altimeter and, McKinsey, etc. And now it looks like FROM…
Not to beat a dead horse, but are CEO’s convinced? In our experience, clients whose leadership is on board with investing in a great experience report greater financial advantages vs. those companies who are not focused on Customer Experience (CX) or are dabbling in it.
In fact, the Aberdeen Group conducted a detailed study on Aligning the Business Around a Customer. In the report, the Best in Class (BIC: defined as the top 20% of participants by reported performance) reported significant financial advantages. For example, the Year over Year (YoY) change in Company revenue is 35.4% for the BIC and 7.7% for all rest.
Other interesting findings include Customer Retention Rate: BIC 85% the rest 40%. YoY change in Customer profitability: BIC 18.2% the rest 2.9%
How do companies get results like these? Our clients don’t just fix touchpoints but use Journey Management to Innovate Exceptional Experiences that Customers Love. A simple 6 step process works:
- Know your customers and their behaviors
- Map their journey and identify friction points, gaps and enabling systems
- Establish metrics and analytics based on your business strategy
- Ideate and innovate based on new technologies, analytics, and trends
- Blueprint the new experiences using a service design based method
- Deploy new capabilities and implement the new journeys
Of course, measurement against the metrics set up in step 3 allows us to optimize over time and keep the journey fresh. It also allows us to see potential new friction points that should be resolved. Many companies are looking at personalizing the experience, really understanding their customer behavior and building an environment for co-creation. Powered by ethnographic research, user-centered design can help to focus on what the customer wants to accomplish and how best to get the desired outcome.
So, this works for the rest of the companies, but what about the Best in Class group? Yep, the true innovation to deliver exceptional experiences is never really done. There will always be new tech, and of course, competitors and other companies are investing in their experiences and creating the next big thing.
Need more detail on the benefits of implementing a CX Operating Model and using journey management to deliver Exceptional Experiences? Here is another study that is about 15 months old, also by the Aberdeen group, that details some of the most common areas of value companies are reporting.
The Employee Engagement comparison is staggering. Companies that use Journey Management get almost 15% more employees engaged than companies who work on their journeys, but do not have a cross-silo mature management program. As you may know, engaged employees have a profound impact on the Customer experience. ROMI, Referrals and Sales Cycle Times are also areas that carry large financial rewards.