By now, we must sound like a broken record, shouting out the top of our voices over and over again that customer experience (CX) is the future. And it is not just us! Companies around the globe, who have realised, tried and tested the significance of caring about and investing in customer experience, are doing the same. Creating a strong and solid CX culture and practice is a strategic priority for companies looking to grow and sustain their business. Companies are leveraging new technologies such as IoT devices, analytics, mobile versions, self service portals etc. to enable seamless services to their customers and thereby ensure fantastic and memorable experiences.
CX – A never ending practice
A great CX practice needs to be refined constantly. And it is not something you can talk about, strategize, define and assign to a team and expect it to run on its own for the next couple of years.
Why?
Because customers, their expectations, needs, wants, preferences and behaviours are changing every single day. As long as customers keep changing and evolving, so should your customer experience practice. Customers are dynamic. So should your customer experience practices.
READ : Tips & Tricks of CRM for Fluid CX
So what exactly is Dynamic Customer Experience Practices?
Because customers, their expectations, needs, wants, preferences and behaviours are changing every single day. As long as customers keep changing and evolving, so should your customer experience practice. Customers are dynamic. So should your customer experience practices.
1. Age Old Mantra – Know your customers
First things first. To create dynamic experiences, let your customer behaviours act as your Bible for setting up and running your CX practices. It is not your convenience, but their preferences and behaviours that should define what change is needed. For example, consider an ecommerce company whose customers buy their products after office hours, say between 6 pm and 9 pm. Therefore most of the customer service agents have been deployed between 6 pm to 9 pm. But with the onset of covid and blurred working hours, the customers have started purchasing at all hours. Unless the company can anticipate this change and deploy more service agents across the day, a significant number of customers will not receive the help they require and might even switch to competitors. This is a miniscule example of the potential issues that can come up from not being dynamic. To understand your customer behaviours, there are three methods:
> 24*7 Customer Hotline
The first and most basic change you can bring about is to set up an open, fuss-free, consistent and reliable communication channel through which you can actually get information on what your customers need or what is wrong. Some methods are easy – messaging options like Whatsapp, a Facebook customer service group or a chatbot on the website. For B2B services, companies often can achieve this by assigning an efficient and dedicated customer executive for each customer. Having this dedicated channel will help the customers talk to you, which is the easiest method to find out what the customer needs and how their preferences are changing.
CX in Action: Sometimes you may not even need to set up a dedicated channel to listen to the customers. You can create wonderful customer experiences just by listening on social media. Tommee Tippee cups does this wonderfully. With the help of social listening on Twitter, they found a father who needed to replace a limited edition cup for his son who was diagnosed with severe autism. Tommee Tippee cups were the only cups his son Ben would drink from. To make himself heard, the father created the hashtag #cupsforBen. To his delight, the tweet went viral and got shared, retweeted and liked more than hundreds of thousands of times. The company decided to create a limited run of 500 of the cups, which they had stopped producing. Tommee Tippee created wonderful meaningful experiences using such simple efforts and tools, and gained at least a thousand followers for life.
> Periodic Check-ups
You also need to check up with your customer and get their feedback on their experience with you. There will certainly be instances when your customer is not happy with you, but either they are too busy to complain or the experience isn’t bad enough to make a big deal out of it. Periodic gathering of feedback (with the right questions) will help unearth issues and behavioural changes in customers from such scenarios. Performing a trend analysis on the feedback gathered is great for understanding the change in customer behaviour.
Infographic : How CRM and Data can Elevate Your Customer Experience
CX in Action: The founder of SuperValu, an Irish food distributor, makes it a point to personally invite 12 of his customers to join him for an impromptu discussion twice a month. He spends the time listening to what they have to say about his products, understanding what they feel about things like quality, price, service quality and even gets their feedback on upcoming advertising promotions. He then uses this data as inputs for strategic planning.
> For the “I don’t know what I want” needs
This is critical when creating dynamic customer experience practices. Consumers may be blissfully unaware of the behavioural and preference changes they make during a purchase. The only thing that can unearth the bulk of such insights is analytics. Deep and detailed insights from running analytics on the operational and customer engagement data can unearth everything your business needs to create truly dynamic customer experience processes. Analytics can tell you what their past behaviour, needs and preferences were, what they are now, and sometimes with enough data, why it changed and even how it might change in the future. These insights can be used to guide the “dynamic” factor of CX practices.
CX in Action: Analytics can be used to identify even the simplest of changes required. Casper, a mattress company, designed a free chatbot for people who couldn’t sleep. Sleepless customers could just text “Insomnobot3000” and have a real conversation with the bot about anything. With the help of the bot, the company got access to the users and were able to send personalised offers and discounts for mattresses. Casper brought $100 million in sales in a year. Other examples include Netflix, who uses predictive analytics to provide show recommendations to their subscribers, and Google, who uses AI to help redirect drivers around traffic jams.
2. An attitude to embrace change
Of course, all the information about your customer is useless if your business is not ready to accept the change coming your way and to act on it. Your customer experience practices need to be refined and adapted in a timely manner based on proper analysis of the information gathered. As consumer’s needs shift, your business needs to be all the more ready and excited to shift with them. When your customers are talking to you, the speed and attitude with which you respond is all that matters at the end.
3. Practice. Often.
It is sometimes useless to refine your CX practice after the behavioural change has happened! The value is realised when your business is able to anticipate the change coming, and refine your practice accordingly before the impact of the behavioural change actually reaches you. Unfortunately, this can be achieved only through a lot of consistent tries. There is no magic formula which will tell you when you need to move. Keeping at it can help make your CX practices dynamic.
Key Takeaways
Your CX Practices need to be as dynamic and agile as your consumers’ changing behaviours. Here is a quick glance at the key takeaways –
- Let your customer behaviour be your Bible
- Embrace change
- Practice, practice, practice!
Is there anything else that has helped your business dynamically change and adapt to changing customer preferences? We would love to know!
