Today, tomorrow, and forever, the customer will always be the center of the business universe. All the power rests within the hands of the customer because the customer is the king.

When a customer chooses your brand over your competitors, they bring success to your company and all the efforts that you make to attract them. Keeping customers in mind, research suggests that improving CX has been a top priority for all businesses. Based on the facts; customers also prefer to pay more if a business is able to provide a better customer experience. Also, a recent study published by the Temkin group stated that companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience.

It’s quite obvious looking at all the market reports that improving CX has positive effects on businesses and investments made in improving CX strategies give profitable returns. The longer a customer sticks with a brand it indicates how happy a customer is with their choice and it also means that the brand is treating their customer base with the best customer experience, better than their competitors. On the other hand, brands that treat their customers poorly or ignore the customer signals tend to lose more business as customers stop doing business with these brands with poor CX quotient. This is the reason why brands that deliver better customer experience outperform their competitors and this should be the guiding factor for all the brands to improve their customer experience.

Let’s take a look at these examples as to why CX should be improved now more than ever:

Customer experience is set to be the number one brand differentiator in 2020 (and beyond)

• 86% of customers will pay a higher price (up to 18% more in some cases) for a better experience.
• 73% cite CX as a key factor in buying decisions.
• 65% report being influenced more by a positive experience with a brand than by advertising.
• 89% of companies will compete primarily on the basis of CX in the near future.

Building a successful CX strategy requires an in-depth understanding of what your customer expects from your brand. It is important to know their likes and is more important to know what they absolutely dislike about your brand or your services. According to a report, it’s just as important to study what customers don’t like as what they do. “If you don’t look at the data showing what you’re doing wrong in CX and UX, customers will leave your site, store, or app. There are simply too many other options available to accept a less-than-stellar experience.”

Improving CX has more benefits than just pleasing your customers; it also gives you a perspective to improve your products, services and it helps improve your overall market performance. CX helps brands personalize their services; More than 85% of marketers report success with personalization — higher engagement, revenue, conversions. A survey by Bloomberg Businessweek found that “delivering a great customer experience” has become a top strategic objective. And a recent Customer Management IQ survey found that 75% of customer experience management executives and leaders rated customer experience a ‘5’ on a scale of 1-5 (5 being of the highest importance).

Brands should readjust their focus on these points in order to improve their CX:

1. By building a clear customer experience vision that is communicated within the organization on each level.

2. Understand your customer base; who they are, what their demographics are, their background, their decision-making patterns. What are your customer's preferences, how much time do they take while completing their purchases? This can be done by creating different customer personas and naming each of them for better understanding.

3. Connect with your customers on an emotional level too, understand their needs and take care of them like a true friend. One of the best examples of creating an emotional connection comes from Zappos: When a customer was late on returning a pair of shoes due to her mother passing away. When Zappos found out what happened, they took care of the return shipping and had a courier pick up the shoes without cost. But, Zappos didn't stop there. The next day, the customer arrived home with a bouquet of flowers with a note from the Zappos Customer Success team who sent their condolences.

Isn’t that just the best example of building a great customer experience? Knowing what your customer needs and then taking actions to help them get access to all their needs is what a good brand does. In today’s world where market competition is at its peak, going above and beyond for your customers is something that can help beat the competition.

At DT we believe that to build a sustainable relationship with a customer, we must value their feedback. We believe in building a situation-based and feedback-centric client engagement plan that will not only help businesses to leverage the data collected abundantly but also if done right this can turn into a long-lasting opportunity to keep your customers intact and keep the revenue bar up and running.

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