12 September 2019

Customer Experience

According to Frost & Sullivan, by 2020 customer experience will have replaced price and product as the greatest distinguishing factor. The customer has been king for a long time, but in today's digital age customers also like to be addressed personally as emperor and admiral. No ranking is high enough, which means the focus on customer experience is a top priority at every business table. How do you create a majestic customer experience?

Today's customers have certain characteristics that reveal what they are looking for and what they need to make a valuable connection with your company. Once you understand and incorporate these characteristics into your business model, your chances of successfully guiding customers through their buyer journey will increase significantly.

Hyperconnected at any time of day

By 2014, there were already more mobile devices connected to the Internet than there are people in the world. Today, all kinds of devices continue to arrive on the market, while the rise of wearables and voice assistants is leading to a huge shift in the way customers approach products and businesses. Services and products have to be available anywhere, anytime and preferably accompanied by a seamless experience. Take, for example, a streaming service: you start playing a song from your PC at home and switch to a Bluetooth device for better quality. You walk to your car and continue to listen via a headset. Your media player takes over from the moment you get in the car, ensuring that your favorite music accompanies you on your journey. On arriving at work, your smartwatch suggests some similar tracks that you might like – you might decide to listen to them during your coffee break later. For many consumers, this is the new normal. By being aware of this evolution and taking it into account when designing products and services, you can respond to customer expectations. It's no longer just about responsive design and mobile first; we're entering the era of journey-driven design.

Hyperaware

Your customer is hyperaware and you should be too

Thanks to an enormous amount of data, reviews and Facebook friends, consumers have all the knowledge in their hands. Did your customer service department slip up? This will probably be posted all over the Internet. Customers seek out information on every channel before making a purchase. They visit your physical store for a look, scroll through your Instagram page, and fill their shopping basket up to five times. It's important that you provide a consistent experience. You need an omnichannel approach in which each channel tells the same story. The customer is the starting point and each channel is built around them as they see fit. Have a full online shopping basket? In the near future, the advertising that the customer sees when entering a physical store will be tailored exactly to this.

An omnichannel customer experience of this kind is not possible without data. The needs of your customers have to be monitored in order to find the perfect moment to reach them with tailored messages. This means that companies need to identify every opportunity and be proactive in order to take advantage of it. If done properly, the customer experience feels cohesive, rich and rewarding. You, too, should not allow any piece of information to slip through your fingers. Be careful, though, because there's a downside: multiple studies have also shown that about 35% of customers do not always like personalized messages from brands, as it often feels like an invasion of their privacy. The challenge, then, is not only to implement a framework to reach customers in a personal way, but more importantly to do so in the right way.

hyperadoption

Hyperadoption makes customers say yes

There is a huge willingness to try out new things. The adoption cycle peaks earlier than ever. A successful new development on the market will effortlessly get all interested parties on board. James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, describes this as 'hyperadoption'. He has a two-fold explanation for this tendency. First, adopting new things doesn't cost as much as it did in the past. Second, today's businesses can offer benefits that easily overshadow any form of loss aversion.

Walking out of a shop with bags full of groceries without passing by a cash register: would customers really do that? Both the hyperadoption trait and Albert Heijn say yes. The retail chain is busy testing a cashless store that relies entirely on smart technology in cameras and weight sensors (source: De Tijd). While it may feel unnatural and there are some risks for both the customer and the company, the benefits are so great (huge time savings) that every customer would willingly shop there. Don't be afraid, then, to constantly offer new things and try out innovations. There is a good chance that your customer experience will be greatly boosted by this.

Is your customer experience ready for the future?

Together we can expose your current customer journey and build a future-proof experience.

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