Seamless customer experience: CX can make or break a brand
A seamless customer experience is a priority for brands today, with 84% of companies that improve their CX seeing increased revenue.
The days when a business could succeed by simply focusing on producing a great product or service are long gone. Delivering top-flight customer experience has become table stakes across all industries.
Done well, CX increases customer satisfaction, drives loyalty, and ultimately, boosts the bottom line. Get it wrong and you’ll send customers to the competition.
So it’s no wonder that managing customer experience can be such anxiety-inducing business. When customer needs and market conditions change so fast, how can you keep up?
It all comes down to CX agility.
What is agile CX?
CX agility is a company’s ability to move fast, adapt tactics quickly, and respond to evolving customer needs and market conditions.
Agility has become a mantra for businesses today as they navigate constantly changing customer demands and economic trends. The global pandemic, of course, ramped up the focus on agility across every industry.
Brands with CX agility diligently watch for changes in customer preferences and expectations, adapt and innovate rapidly, and seize new opportunities to drive growth.
They provide consistent customer experiences across multiple touchpoints to stay a step ahead of the competition.
Across marketing, sales, and service, employees work together from a unified view of the customer to provide personalized CX across the buyer journey. They make it easy for customers to do business with a brand, and build customer relationships that last.
Lessons learned: How B2B industries tackled COVID challenges and won
Find out how B2B industries like manufacturing and high tech transformed amid the pandemic. Manufacturers had an important realization: Your buying experience should be simple, even if your products aren’t. This is a valuable takeaway for every industry.
CX agility stats: By the numbers
Agile CX pays massive dividends when focusing on the customer. Aberdeen Strategy and Research surveyed 405 businesses around the world to uncover the benefits.
“Businesses are not only creating happier customers, but generating operational efficiency and driving better financial outcomes,” says Omer Minkara, Aberdeen vice president and principal analyst.
Aberdeen’s research revealed stunning results for organizations with agile CX:
- 2.2x greater annual increase in satisfaction rating
- 3.6x greater annual increase in customer retention rates
- 3.3 greater YoY increase in cross-sell/upsell revenue
- 2x greater YoY improvement (decrease) in service costs
- 48% more YoY growth in annual revenue
- 2.4x greater YoY increase in customer lifetime value
- 80% greater YoY increase in profit margins by lowering operational costs and increasing revenue
Agile CX: Quick pivots, exceptional results
Staying ahead of the pack in CX isn’t easy. Competition is fierce, and brands have so many ways to engage with customers that consistency can be a struggle.
But some companies have figured out the winning formula and provide excellent examples of the power of CX agility.
One is Moen, a leading faucet brand in North America. The company realized a reliance on paper-based processes were getting in the way of delivering smooth customer experiences, and took action. Moen streamlined its sales and service processes with a cloud-based CX technology from SAP.
The changes produced quick results: Sellers improved their close rates, customer service agents resolved issues faster, and customer lifetime value increased.
The pandemic put brands’ CX agility to the test. Among those that rose to the occasion is Brakes, a UK-based food delivery service.
COVID hit the company’s B2B business hard. Shelter-in-place orders shut down many of its customers, including schools, hotels, and restaurant chains. Brakes shifted its business model in lightning speed, setting up a direct-to-consumer website in just seven days using SAP Commerce Cloud.
The company put customer needs first, enabling consumers to buy goods online, keeping healthcare facilities supplied, and delivering 1.2 million care package to vulnerable citizens.
Casey’s also made a quick pivot when COVID hit. The US-based chain of convenience stores invested in technology in order to meet customer need for easy, digital shopping and launched a mobile app that was an immediate hit and revenue generator. With SAP technology, Casey’s has a unified view of customer data that helps it deliver personalized CX to drive loyalty over the long haul.
The future of customer experience is agile
What’s clear is that even brands with happy customers can’t rest on their laurels. Keeping customers satisfied requires diligence and constant adaption and innovation. Only the brands that stay ahead of the curve will succeed.
With an agile CX strategy and the right technology, companies can address customer needs of today as well as tomorrow to remain profitable for years to come.
