New insights on building a superior customer experience

BUSINESSES that want to make a name for themselves in today’s crowded marketplace understand the importance of customer experience (CX) and how it can give them a unique competitive edge.

They’ve been trying to define and build their CX, piece by piece, for a few years now — and although happy with their progress, businesses know that the project will always be a work in progress as customer expectations gradually change.

Fortunately, even small improvements in CX have the potential to show massive results. Especially if they remediate challenges that customers face with your product or service and often complain about.

However, in order to be the best in the industry, it is important that leaders driving the CX project avoid the following myths that have recently been uncovered, as uncovered by Gartner Analyst Ed Thompson.

# 1 | Delight the customer

Gartner’s research shows that the return on investment (ROI) of meeting customer expectations, and making their interactions effortless, is high.

However, investing to further improve the CX in order to exceed expectations and delight the customer, usually doesn’t drive up customer loyalty and advocacy, and thus, lowers the chances of gaining a positive ROI.

“It’s not that investing to delight the customer doesn’t work, but its likelihood of working is lower,” said Thompson.

“Many organizations are inconsistent in the delivery of their customer experience strategy. While they are aiming to delight in one part of the organization, they still require effort from the customer in another part. We recommend that organizations don’t delight, but rather focus on being effortless.”

# 2 | Focus on innovation

Innovation is great — but it is also time-consuming and expensive. Success with CX doesn’t always require innovation.

Companies seeking to offer the ‘greatest’ CX needn’t re-invent the wheel. Instead, they should look at what successful organizations are doing in their industry, at home and aborad. That’s a great starting point for most CX projects.

Most innovation is just an imitation of an existing successful investment in a different geography or an adjacent industry. “

Too many companies are overlooking the benefits of imitation. You don’t need to come up with everything yourself. We recommend organizations don’t only focus on innovation, but rather consider the benefits of imitation,” said Mr. Thompson.

# 3 | Correlate data

Businesses can now collect data quickly and effectively — about their customers and the competition — no matter where they are. As a result, companies are keen on analyzing data to spot trends and patterns and using those insights to make investment decisions.

Gartner’s research, however, shows that adding numerous channels and options to make things better for customers has the opposite effect — it makes the customer experience worse.

Therefore, organizations must look more closely at what causes customers to make choices, and focusing on what jobs the customer is trying to get done.

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