The SAP Customer Experience LIVE (CX LIVE) event is almost here. Register now.
If you want a taste of what’s to come, tune into the “Champions Roundtable” hosted by yours truly, featuring three guest speakers participating in CX LIVE:
- Jeannie Walters, CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator, Experience Investigators
- Scott Luton, Founder and CEO, Supply Chain Now
- Denise Lee Yohn, Brand Leadership Expert, Author, and Speaker
CX in a time of change
One thing that you’ll hear at the roundtable – and at CX LIVE – is how things have changed in the past six months. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on how we interact and communicate with customers – and the sudden move to online ordering is only part of the story.
One of the core tenets of effective CX is that all parts of the company need to work in concert to deliver and reinforce positive experiences. The good news over the last months is that companies seem to be rising to the occasion.
Companies are innovating
According to Jeannie Walters, organizations have stepped up during the pandemic and figured out how to serve customers better in completely new ways. “This wasn’t just about creating online ordering,” Walters says. “This was about understanding what customers really need.”
And because delivering what customers need is so often tied to technology, many organizations have pushed forward with digital transformation even the in the face of the pandemic. “I actually have been really excited by the innovation that we’ve seen in 2020,” Walters says.
Supply chain is key
One area of innovation has focused on supply chain – where the idea of CX had been catching on even before the pandemic.
Scott Luton cites a 2019 survey by The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) in which 61% of respondents agreed with the following statement: “Over the next five years, customer experience will overtake price and product as the No. 1 brand differentiator.”
This illustrates the importance of the entire organization – even traditional “behind the scenes” functions such as supply chain – coming together to focus on the customer.
Luton cites a few areas within supply chain to make the point:
- Speed: Customers expect fast delivery, increasingly within just a two-hour window
- Options: Customers expect companies to offer various delivery options that require sophisticated logistics – options such as buy online, pick up in store (BOPUS)
- Visibility: Customers expect that they’ll be able to trace their order every step of the way from the warehouse to the front door
- Trust: Customers expect protection against counterfeiting (particularly important with PPE!), and to know that they can trust the provenance of whatever they’ve ordered
Managing expectations
That’s a lot of customer expectations to manage. According to Walters, one of the keys to success in this regard has been proactive communications.
As supply chains were disrupted early in the pandemic, for example, Walters remembers companies sending out “authentically humble communications.” Many companies were honest about the situations they faced and explained the path forward to resolve outstanding issues.
Ultimately, these communications were not simply about managing expectations. They also served as opportunities to build relationships with customers. Such opportunities don’t come along often, but companies that manage them adroitly stand to gain.
The employee experience is the customer experience
In the roundtable, Denise Lee Yohn emphasizes another key to successful CX – namely that the “employee experience feeds the customer experience.”
If your brand is all about “seamless and intuitive and tech enabled” experiences, it only stands to reason that your employees should have that experience themselves. If, on the other hand, “everything you do with your employees is bureaucratic and slow and on paper,” you’re already playing a losing hand. As “brand representatives,” your employees will be compelled to deliver positive experiences to your customers when they are empowered by similar experiences.
As employees work from home during the pandemic, this dynamic is playing more of a role than ever before.
Right now, enabling the remote workforce is a key success factor. Moving forward, companies that get the remote experience right will avail themselves of greater access to more talent. If your company feels comfortable and confident with a remote workforce, maybe you can expand your hiring to people who work beyond your immediate locality.
#SAPCXLIVE: See you there!
This blog, of course, is only a taste. There’s more to consume at the “Champions Roundtable – and much more than that at the 2-day CX Live event on October 14-15.
Learn about how you can serve customers better – today, in the midst of a pandemic, and tomorrow, where CX is becoming more and more important to the success of your company.
