Leverage data to drive better customer experience outcomes …
Impact of accelerated digital adoption (mostly driven by COVID) across most industries and channels mean consumers are spoilt for choices when selecting a product or a service.
Consumers are fickle, more demanding, better informed, easily influenced by other’s opinion and make decisions based on what they see on social media.
Furthermore, an increasing shift towards personalised experience economy, convenience over loyalty, purchasing power parity, varied preferences, and behaviours across channels make it even more challenging for brands to win, grow and maintain customer loyalty.
Emotional and rational drivers for brand loyalty
“If there’s a bit of a speed loss, you can regain that speed. If there’s a bit of trust loss, you cannot gain the trust back.” – Sri Shivananda, SVP and CTO of PayPal
Building and maintaining trust with consumers requires establishing a personal one to one emotional connection and nurturing those relationships. Some brands have mastered this art by being transparent about their value, integrity, stance on social issues and how they run their business.
They do this by regularly listening to customer feedback, identifying their pain points, monitoring market trends, responding to customer issues and nurturing one-to one relationships. This is only possible if brands are omnipresent, build data driven strategies for improving engagement and building relevant value propositions.
Value for money and customer experience go hand in hand
While emotional connection matter for brand loyalty, it is hard to deny that there is no getting past the current economic conditions without a rational view on price, value for money and the myriad of value offers from competitors. Value is also derived from exceptional customer experience.
To win and sustain customer loyalty brands must create incentives beyond routine discounts and irrelevant offers. If brands can’t compete on price, they could distinguish themselves by providing exceptional customer experience. A recent poll on LinkedIn has also highlighted that, when it comes to the biggest turn-off for the respondents, 60% cited poor customer experience as the reason they wouldn’t purchase from a brand.
Why do some brands get this right and where do some miss the mark?
Customer experience must be convenient, consistent and render experiences that make consumers feel valued. Every interaction a customer has with a brand leaves and trail of data — that when turned into information and contextualised gives pretty good insights into consumer preferences and attitudes towards a brand. Customer analytics plays a key role in making sense of customer data, behavioural preferences, attitudes, and support brands to tailor personalised experiences.
Brands should build a complete picture of their consumers, deepen customer understanding by taking an outside in perspective of experience they offer to their consumers. Customer journey maps are a great place to start. But, instead of the journey maps being standalone they need to become living breathing artefacts which are refreshed regularly.
They need to be overlaid with emotions based on the perceived experience a consumer has when they interact with the brand. Accurate data (both quantitative and qualitative) at each touch point need to be captured and integrated to build a holistic picture of consumer experience. Baseline measures must be established to set benchmarks and trends monitored for continuous improvements.
To enable customer analytics, a robust data strategy needs to be in place to understand the data that needs to be collected with the end goal in mind. Organisation wide customer data need to be integrated to build a cohesive 360-degree view of customers enabled by technology to deliver analytics at scale.
Trust, value of money and exceptional customer experiences create long lasting term consumer value. Organisations that get this right are the ones who use data at the centre of decision making and create memorable experiences for their consumers.
