Magazine : 
Are You Ready to Press the CX-Reset Button?
Business is all about customer experience today. This is why the customer experience management market is expected to reach $14.9 billion by 2025 from $8.5 billion in 2020, growing at a CAGR of 11.8 percent during the forecast period. What is going to drive the industry? It is the need to better understanding customers, customer-related scores helping organizations to plan better customer engagement strategy. Customer experience management solutions help achieve this whilst reducing customer churn rates (MarketsandMarkets).
But how prepared are we in this digital era to offer the most exotic CX? Zendesk in partnership with Enterprise Strategy Group conducted a research where it surveyed 250 Asia Pacific CX Leaders to learn about their organizations’ CX maturity and success and divided them into three categories – Champions, Risers and Starters. The research found that Asia Pacific region lags the rest of the world in terms of maturity in CX, where 27 percent of surveyed organizations were Champions, 34 percent were Risers and 39 percent were Starters. However, the good news is that India businesses leads in maturity. 43 percent of the surveyed organizations were categories as Champions when compared to Australia (25 percent), Singapore (13 percent) and Japan (0 percent).
These champions are more advanced in CX maturity and offer positive customer experiences and greater agility to respond to customers’ needs. They also tend to be 3.6 percent more likely than Starters to not experience turnover issues in their customer service function, while the agents at Champion organizations are 2.3 times more productive than those at Starters.
What Lies Ahead?
T Richard Edelman’s, the CEO of Edelman, special report titled Edelman Trust Barometer, published this March said, “71 percent of the respondents say if they perceive that a brand is putting profit over people, they will lose trust in that brand forever”. The pandemic has indeed forced us to add this missing ‘silver lining’ lesson in the customer experience book. It is the fact that human beings are our target audience and hence all our measure when it comes to CX should be targeted towards them. While for the old-age businesses, customer experience meant focusing on selling and marketing to build stronger customer relationships, the new-age digital world’s CX start just beyond this wall. As India emerges as the biggest digital market for the world, it is quite pertinent for the organizations to have digital inclusivity for all users, whether they are less tech-savvy or otherwise physically challenged. Hence providing customer experience that reflects care, safety, and trust will be of paramount importance for brands.
With the pandemic still looming all across the globe, businesses have learnt to provide low-touch or no-touch experience to customers to better manage safety guidelines. Some such initiatives are Tap to Pay cards, optical character recognition, chatbot-based interaction, facial recognition and more. Such initiatives not just add safety but also convenience, but they should also ensure security in this digital work where hackers and cyberattackers are preying for any leakage to hound them. Hence protecting customer data by identifying vulnerabilities and fixing them is equally important for organizations as any such breach has the potential to wreak irrevocable damage to the brand reputation and the customers as they break the element of trust between the two.
There are significant changes the pandemic brought to the fore apart from emphasizing more on health. It is the fact that the brands that served customers during these tough times have earned new customer base, but will they stay with them forever? A survey by McKinsey found that 75 percent of US consumers tried a new store, brand or different way of shopping during the pandemic, with over 50 percent of consumers willing to stick with new brands and new digital journeys post the crisis. Another research by Accenture sheds lights deeper into this aspect, mentioning that new habits formed during the pandemic will stay beyond this crisis, permanently changing what we value, how and where we shop and how we live & work. This means, changed behavior is likely to stay for longer.
Looking at some other aspect of the changes the pandemic brought to the fore is the voice to go local. As our Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged his citizens to be ‘Vocal for Local’, many of us have transformed the way we live. We have integrated more and more local products into our lives and even corporates are more than willing to explore the best local partners.
So when the moves are redefined, it is important that business change the way they interact with customers. Hence when you are rewriting or resetting your CX button, you need to consider some of these points – use behavioral science to revisit and better understand new customer beliefs & expectations; align brand purpose to customer belief; redesign customer experience; rethink employee strategy and restrategise and much more.
Technologies like AI and ML will also see more integration into CX. Gartner’s recent prediction that by 2022, 70 percent of customer interactions will evolve emerging technologies such as ML applications, chatbots and mobile messaging, up from 15 percent in 2018. This will help companies offer personalized CX experience, enhance organization’s ability for operational success and more.
So when the benefits are unprecedented, why wait to follow the suite! Get set and re-set your CX button and reap the first-mover advantage.
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