Customer experience optimization: How to get CX right

Customers used to base their purchase decisions primarily on quality and price, but now include their experience with a brand when buying. This has made customer experience optimization a business priority.

49% of companies believe that if they improve customer experience it will improve brand loyalty and 43% believe it will improve brand awareness and visibility, according to IDC’s Future of Customer Experience Survey.

However, with customer expectations for their experience with a brand changing all the time, getting CX right isn’t easy.

Making things more challenging is the fact that experience itself is nebulous. It stretches from a personal interaction with a front-line worker at a store to the ability to find the right information about a product and purchase it on a website, in an app, or through a social media channel all the way to how longs it takes to show up at the customer’s front door.

How can companies tackle the CX challenge?

Core elements of customer experience

To master this new era and meet the expectations of customers, companies need to focus on building a trusted nexus of data, technology, and business processes.

Data is the foundation, but it isn’t just customer data. It’s also operational data, production data, supply chain data, financial data, and more. Almost every piece of data in the enterprise can impact customer experience.

It’s the same with technology. The experience a customer receives is dependent on more than just a marketing stack, or a CRM system, or even an e-commerce solution. For example, a staffing application snafu can result in a customer waiting in line for an extended period.

Last, business processes play a big role in CX. Is there alignment between how the business operates and its underlying workflows and what the customer expects?

All three of these pieces are critical and provide their own sets of challenges in optimizing the customer experience.

Here are four ways to optimize the customer experience your business delivers:

1. Make data the cornerstone
2. Select technologies and partners who are committed to CX
3. Strive to align business processes with the customer journey
4. Don’t lose sight of security and customer trust 

Best customer service brands 2024: Ignore CX at your own peril

Find out which brands are getting customer service right and what you can do to improve yours.

1. Customer experience optimization: Data analysis

Data is the foundation of every customer engagement, but companies are awash in data, much of which never gets used. For effective CX, companies need to ask three questions about every piece of data:

• Is it important to helping the customer succeed and thereby us succeed?
• Is it absolutely necessary for running the business?
• How long is the data valuable or necessary?

50% of companies have deployed data analysis to improve CX, but only 25% of companies have a centralized customer data service across all functions, including partners and suppliers.

Gathering necessary data can be costly, but gathering unnecessary and never used data is a needless waste of money.

2. Teaming up with the right technology partners

Is the technology partner you’re considering committed to the experience they provide you? How committed are they to supporting the experience you provide to your customers?

There are a plethora of solutions available for every business issue, including customer experience, and there are a lot of very important criteria such as cost, ROI, cost, complexity to deploy, interoperability, and more. But CX must be a key qualitative measure when selecting technology solutions and implementation partners.

28% of companies say that their most strategic partner when it comes to customer experience is their primary CRM/CS provider.

Best in suite CX: Minding margins without sacrificing CX

Unstable economic headwinds mean businesses must tighten budgets. Best-in-suite CX maximizes operational efficiency without sacrificing customer experience.

3. Aligning business processes with the customer journey

Many companies don’t always think about business processes as being a key component to a customer experience, but broken business processes and workflows are often a barrier to a good experience.

40% of companies say that their top challenge in improving the customer experience is integration with other key business processes like ERP, supply chain, and HR.

It can be as simple (or maddening) as a broken process where a customer is handed off to the wrong department once or multiple times. Or it can be as complicated as determining why a customer service representative doesn’t have the appropriate data and information to handle the issues of key customers.

Whether it’s simple or complicated, business processes and workflows must align to the customer journey to get the right information in the right process to the right person at the right time.

4. The role of security + trust in optimizing customer experience 

Security and trust might seem out of place in a discussion of CX, but security is actually integral to better CX. In 2022, consumers in the United States lost $8.8 billion to fraud. In the UK, during that same time period, consumers lost an estimated £4 billion to fraudsters.

It’s no wonder that customers are concerned about the security of any transaction and the protection of their data, and companies are responding.

51% of businesses said they deployed security technologies specifically to improve the customer experience.

Employing security technologies is only part of the solution; companies need to talk about and customers need to understand what you’re doing to protect their data so that they don’t fall prey to fraud and other scams.

Strive to serve up stand-out CX

Things aren’t going to get easier for brands. The marketplace will only become more and more competitive as technologies like AI and 3D printing open up markets to new competitors, from the small one-person shop finding a niche to the multi-national company identifying a tangential market.

Without focusing on providing a differentiated customer experience that drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, companies simply won’t survive.

Editor’s Note: This content is a guest post written by IDC Analyst Alan Webber and is sponsored by SAP. – JVZ