Technology is in a constant state of flux. It is continually reshaping our professional world. It is changing the way we interact. It is shaping the way we think about our customer. It is enabling us to process data at a pace that was not possible as recently as five years ago. These changes—coupled with regulatory decisions, social trends and converging markets—are shaping the competitive landscape quickly and dramatically.
To compete in this ever-changing world, companies should invest in the development and delivery of a differentiating customer experience—one that can evolve over time to stay ahead of the competition. This customer-centric model should be structured for monitoring, measuring, and improving the customer experience across the customer lifecycle or touch points to achieve your business objectives and capitalize off of your investment. This can be accomplished by listening to and working with your customer, utilizing your customer data (data analytics), constant evaluation and reinvention of your customer experience program and focused program management.
A core tenet of long-term competitiveness is the ability to proactively harvest and interpret feedback from your existing customer base; this is often referred to as the “voice of the customer (VoC).” This critical component of any customer experience program involves mining data from multiple sources including unsolicited feedback (comments on social media sites), as well as solicited feedback (formal surveys), structured data (choice of standardized responses to survey questions) and unstructured data (customer correspondence). Working to understand the customer’s voice allows companies to reach beyond more traditional customer experience KPIs like NPS (net promoter score).
A second tenet is the analysis of customer data. Companies today have access to more customer data than ever before. This is both good and bad. It is bad in the sense that you have to understand how to process and what to look for in the reams of data presented monthly, sometimes daily or even hourly; it can be overwhelming. It is good in the sense that, with focus, you can use this data to understand you customer – sometimes better than they understand themselves. To achieve this result, it is imperative to take a pragmatic approach supported with an analytics tool, like Greenplum.
As companies leverage VoC and analytics to better understand their customer base, it is also important to continually monitor customer experience-focused KPIs. This will allow companies to drive incremental improvements that keep customer experience programs on track and meet organizational customer experience objectives. This also allows companies to refine their customer experience programs to achieve the desired results; driving lasting differentiation to propel your organization past the competition.
To bring these concepts together, companies should establish a program structure to assess, plan, coordinate, and improve how all functions across the organization interact with the customer across all channels and touch points. This allows organizations to guide ongoing investment in the customer experience program and oversee all aspects of planning and implementation of the customer experience program to ensure a standardized approach and consistent messaging across the enterprise. Without this cross-organization coordination, many companies will have disjointed customer-focused initiatives and inconsistent messaging across customer touch points; often resulting in failed customer initiatives.
Irrespective of your industry, technology is changing (or evolving) at a blistering pace. Companies that adapt to this change and establish programs to keep them in touch with their customers will often edge out the competition with a differentiated customer experience.
Look in the mirror. Are you different?
We explore these concepts in more detail in our recently published whitepaper around these concepts–Sustaining Competitive Differentiation—the second in a series of articles on this topic.
