The Customer Driven Experience

The Customer Driven Experience

THE CUSTOMER DRIVEN EXPERIENCE

By: Jason Redekopp – Marketing Consultant

In today’s highly competitive market superior customer experiences drive business growth and provide a competitive advantage.

Forrester Consulting was contracted by Adobe to evaluate the business impact of investing in customer experience across the customer life cycle. The study found that customer experience driven businesses (EDB’s) revenue grew 1.4x faster and increased customer lifetime value 1.6x more than other companies over a one-year period.

The study found that companies obsessed with customer experience (CX) almost always significantly outperform competitors on a variety of metrics across a customer life cycle - from greater returns on advertising, to greater average order values, to greater customer retention and word of mouth.

The study also found that EDB’s have the highest 'median' three-year growth in sales revenue, the highest levels of customer satisfaction, and the highest overall level of employee satisfaction, all significant indicators for long-term business success.

The study determined that very few organizations are implementing or taking serious CX best practices holistically across their people, processes and technologies.

In 2020 CX’s that should be prioritized are:
  1. Determine and manage a customer journey from acquisition to loyalty.
  2. Improve cross-channel customer experiences.
  3. Custom tailor, improve relevance & expand content marketing capabilities.
  4. Data driven content creativity. A strategic differentiator in the customer experience. One common denominator among today’s most innovative companies is a unified view of the customer, pulling data from across multiple sources.
  5. Implement or improve social media experience.
  6. Improve mobile customer experience.
  7. Real-time, online customer engagement/interaction.
  8. Improved collaboration of data and analytics. Many companies are too focused on bottom-of-the-funnel best practices that drive short-term conversion behavior that they sacrifice the practices that drive ongoing engagement and build longer-term brand equity.
  9. Organizational collaboration. Collaboration results in innovation. Studies show that companies that integrate data and creativity in their day-to-day practices actually drive two times the growth of companies that have those capabilities but manage them separately.
  10. Unified view of the customer. The single view of the customer is the most significant asset of any organization.
  11. Seamless flow of connected customer data—behavioral, transactional, financial, operational, and more—to get a true end-to-end view of their customers for immediate actionability.

To realize ROI, EDBs require dedicated budgets for specific CX and marketing initiatives. Most importantly investment in cross-channel experience design — with dedicated, growing budgets for mobile, web, and customer analytics and real-time interaction management (live chat, etc.)

The long-term results from a CX investment and priority are 2-fold: Increased customer retention (loyalty), increased average order value (increased sales revenue).

The Forrester study found that long-term investments in CX are paying huge dividends.

EDBs report driving faster topline growth, with an average revenue growth rate of 15%, compared to an average of 11% among other companies.

EDBs capture more mindshare than competitors, with a 1.6x higher growth in brand awareness metrics and 1.6x higher growth in new website visitors than competitors.

EDBs are more effective than competitors in converting prospects to customers — valuable customers. Their return on ad spend and number of newly acquired customers are growing at 1.9x the rate of other companies, and EDBs also report higher growth in total orders.

EDBs are great at delivering experiences that keep customers engaged. Customers download their apps, submit forms and requests for information, engage on social media, and visit their websites more than they do with other companies.

The bottom line is that companies and organizations willing to make broad long-term investments in CX will realize significant ROI from exponentially increasing their customer base and achieve longer customer life cycles.

STUDY:

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