Happy Customers Key to Improving a Business’ Bottom Line

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” said Steve Jobs. And as more and more customers interact with businesses over a variety of touchpoints and channels, it has become essential for businesses to offer a consistently seamless experience. But while everyone is rushing to launch customer experience (CX) programs, it is not easy to know where to focus to drive the most value and change.

CX management has increasingly become a key differentiator for top Asia Pacific brands in today’s increasingly competitive market. According to Forrester’s “2016 Predictions for Business Leaders In Asia Pacific” report, more businesses in the region will recognise the need to improve their customer experience across all customer touchpoints and will thus put pressure on international companies that do not seek to localize their CX initiatives.

A well-designed CX program will deliver real-time, actionable feedback from customers about their experiences and expectations, as well as their future intentions to recommend or purchase and connect multiple types of feedback across all customer touchpoints, helping organisations to focus on the areas of greatest impact. By using appropriate customer measures, both lead and lag, organisations can then understand their performance by leveraging real-time stakeholder dashboards and comprehensive reports that need to be fully adaptable as customer priorities and business needs change.

Volkswagen Australia is a prime example as its customer insights dashboard are made available for dealerships on mobile devices and desktop. Its dynamic closed-loop follow up effectively enables allof its dealerships to resolve customer issues using automated ticketing and customized, role=based dashboards.

Here are three key methods in which organisations can more effectively manage the customer experience:

1. Employees drive experience: Many organisations forget about the impact employee engagement has on the customer experience. At the end of the day people drive change and an engaged workforce is essential for long term success of a customer-centric brand. 

2. Customer feedback is key: Managing the customer experience depends on the ability to build a stable, repeatable process for capturing customer feedback and helping people learn from that feedback so that it is embedded into the way teams work and make decisions every day.
3. Map the journey, not the moments: Businesses who map the customer journey by segment better understand the unique paths their customers take. This lets them measure things like barriers in the journey, what drives satisfaction, what drives purchase decisions, the relative importance of each stage in the customer journey and more.

Organisations that can tie journey performance metrics to actions can deliver customer experiences that are tailor-made to encourage loyalty and repeat purchases. It is important for businesses to measure journeys, and not simply one-off interactions. Organising teams around key journeys will also allow businesses to connect their functional silo teams, encouraging them work together to innovate and deliver customer value and find ways to improve efficiency, which in turn reduces cost.

Organisations that use a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use platform can gather real-time snapshots of their customers’ experiences and determine where they can make operational and strategic improvements. By gathering this kind of feedback and analysing it for insights, businesses can continuously improve their customer’s experience. This will in turn help companies improve revenue, and gain competitive advantage in the market.