The evolution from customer communications to the more comprehensive approach of customer experience management represents the sea change in how businesses view their approach to customer growth and retention. The common theme in customer experience trends is acceleration. It reflects not only new demands for digital agility and analytics but also a focus on implementation of customer journey mapping and other customer-centric tools. As a leader in CXM solutions, we’ve spoken with industry analysts, Quadient experts, and customers to deliver this series on the state of CX, which will explore each of the key customer experience trends across the CXM landscape.
Customer-centric is more than a change in P.O.V.
Customer experience is a customers' holistic perception of their experience with your business or brand. It's the result of every interaction that a customer has with your business and, throughout 2020, it's emerged as a powerful market differentiator. Customer-centric companies – those orchestrating sophisticated CX strategies measuring satisfaction at every touchpoint and providing personalized services for a customer-first experience - proved sustainable ROI as the balance of power definitively and permanently shifted to the customer.
The effect is profound. It's no longer enough for organizations to be customer-centric in practice. To realize growth potential, companies must accelerate their plans to integrate customer-centricity culturally to align and implement impactful CX strategies and practices and meet a new baseline of expectations in our transformed market.
The experts of CX weigh in on the benefits of becoming customer-centric
- Customer-centricity focuses on putting the customer at the heart of the business. This means that the culture must be deliberately designed to do just that. Incorporating this philosophy will serve everyone well in 2021. - Annette Franz, Chief Experience Officer, CX Journey, Inc.
- CX success had already been increasingly tied to an empathic, customer-centric mindset. The pandemic accelerated all aspects of CX with existing trends becoming table stakes overnight. A lot of companies responded by looking at playbooks of what was being done and similarly pivoting their strategy. But it is not a sustainable model for this new world, and they are likely to fail in 2021. A winning playbook won’t earn you the gold; it’s the culture and mindset driving the playbook that matters. You must copy the strategic mindset, leveraging tools in a way that is relevant for your company, employees and customers based on a deep understanding of the how and why. - James Dodkins, Rockstar CX
- Humanity is the new driver of CX success. You must pull the corporate veneer off how you are doing business. Growth will come to companies who behave admirably and enable their employees to work with that value set - this is the behavior that will help customers achieve their goals.” - Jeanne Bliss, CEO, Customer Bliss
- The trend is to humanize experiences as much as possible and create a channel-agnostic approach. So, in 2021, we must, more than ever, focus on customer needs and understand the lifecycle stage they are in and their vulnerability status. AI is not the quick answer! Technology is there as an enabler, not a savior. Never put technology in front of understanding human contact and the nuances of this. Understand the customer needs, map this and then choose the right technology to deliver this customer-centric approach. – Adam Firbank, Journey Practice Lead Customer Communications, British Gas
- B2C marketers strive to differentiate and add value to customer experiences through personalization. They often have a rough idea for how the final experience should materialize — but frequently fail to establish a customer obsession strategy that governs personalization investments. Marketers today must fully understand the value — and risks — of comprehensive personalization that aligns technology with defined business outcomes to deliver optimal customer experiences. – Brendan Witcher, Forrester, Align Strategy and technology to deliver next-gen personalization, Sept. 2020
The landscape of customer experience management is exciting, and the acceleration of change is driving new opportunities for growth. It’s crucial your business remains agile enough to adapt to not just what innovation and demands are coming, but those that have already arrived. The new normal is now, and the transformation to a customer-centric experience strategy is just one of the trends in CX. Explore the others in our eBook, the State of CX.
Read more about what’s trending in CX.
