The pandemic has significantly accelerated the move to digital, forcing certain businesses to adjust. At the same time, buyers still want businesses to be simple to order from, engage with, and get service from.
What is the difference between an exceptional customer experience and a good one? What are the steps you can take to ensure you provide your customers with both an excellent and pleasant encounter? Customer Experience (CX) needs redefining to be seen as more than simply a business practice. And in order to do so, businesses must change their perspective on CX through a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) strategy integrated into a modern CMS platform, with buy-in from all team members.
How have customer expectations changed, and which of these new behaviors are likely to endure?
Customers are curious as to why a business that provided a fantastic digital experience during the lockdown would not be able to maintain it in a post-pandemic world.
For today's customers, being happy is no longer an added value to their experience; it's the fundamental foundation on which your connection is founded. Consumers will pay more attention to a moment of friction than to a moment of flawless performance. Buyers are now more independent, expecting more intuitive experiences, and are stronger in their ability to change service if the experience does not fulfill their expectations.
Only those businesses that recognize their customers' requirements, wants and most importantly needs, focus on them first, and provide seamless, contextual experiences across all touch points will survive in today's extremely competitive market.
What's the best way for a business to offer a seamless customer experience in 2022?
It's critical to unify marketing, sales, and customer service under one department, then create a decision-making group that owns the end-to-end client experience and has a winning aspiration centered on consumers rather than functions. This will allow any business to operate quicker while staying focused on its customers.
The funnel approach has previously dominated CX. Different functions focus only on fulfilling their part of the funnel before passing the customer on to be someone else’s problem once the sale is made. Instead, making use of an approach that puts the customer at the heart of a continuous process to attract, engage and delight customers will result in all functions having an ongoing responsibility to support one another in fulfilling goals for the overall business.
What is the role of technology and what obstacles should businesses overcome?
The 2020 survival mentality resulted in procedures and operations that were ill-suited for scale. As CX has become more complicated, most businesses have employed a patchwork of disparate technologies from various vendors, each with its own distinct underlying technology stack: a CRM to handle consumer data, a customer management system (CMS) to develop their website, and marketing automation to increase their activity.
When two completely distinct platforms are assembled together, the burden of employing them successfully is placed on the customer. This method is preventing businesses from flourishing, slowing them down, and depriving them of a complete perspective on their clients. It's also difficult to reconcile these differences without generating friction for customers.
Today's businesses need a strong and easy-to-use CRM solution that enables them to establish a "single point of consumer truth" that customer-facing staff can consume, allowing them to eliminate friction in client interactions and deliver delightful digital experiences in 2022.
Where should businesses be concentrating their resources?
To get the digital experience right, good data is required: dependable, organized, and actionable data with insights into each customer's experience. ‘Who are your customers?’ isn't a useful question anymore. Instead, you need to be able to see the whole picture of this and other individuals in order for it to make sense. What does a customer's digital path look like? When, where, and how have they engaged with your business? What do they require and desire from you now, as well as what will they anticipate from you in the future?
It's also critical to guarantee that businesses provide all parts of the digital journey online. We've seen greater website traffic than ever before since the epidemic, and consumers will expect the same accessibility and convenience that they have come to expect from businesses over the last year.
Today, connecting what's going on on your website, the front door of your business, to the rest of the customer experience is a must. This may be a significant issue for businesses that don't use CRM systems. There will be businesses who have reached the maximum capacity of their present set-up and believe they are stuck. It's time for businesses to consider CMS as part of CRM in light of how closely linked customer experience is to websites today. The bar for customer experience has been raised; similarly, yours should be too.
