‘What does your company do?’ It’s a common question, one most of us can answer without even thinking: X product, Y service. But the real answer is bigger than that.
Today, what your company does is about a lot more than just what you sell. It’s about the experience you provide. Because customers don’t just buy based on who has the best product anymore—they buy based on who’s giving them the best experience. And they’re willing to pay for it, with 86% of buyers ready to spend more for a great customer experience, according to Econsultancy.
So, what’s in an experience? At its heart, customer experience is made of all the interactions customers have with your brand—but it’s more than just the sum of all those parts. Customer experience really comes down to how well those different parts come together. Which means better customer experience isn’t just about better touchpoints.
But for all these expectations, only 7% of brands can provide unified, personalized experiences across channels.
If you’re looking to beat the odds, you’ll need to be more than customer-focused. You’ll need to be customer-obsessed. Looking for every possible way to streamline and simplify those different touchpoints, so customers can get the unified, personalized experience they want.
If this sounds hard, that’s because it is.
You can spend hours obsessing over how your different applications integrate, where customer data is coming from, how customer insights could be used. You can do everything possible to create seamless CX. It doesn’t matter. Your customers are never going to be completely happy.
And there’s a simple reason why.
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The better the experience, the higher the expectations. Every time you make something better, that becomes the baseline. Look at mobile carriers—after all the work to get 4G in place and the only thanks they get is their customers impatiently waiting for 5G.
So why bother? Why put the effort in if you’re never going to win?
Well, for starters, there’s some good news. You’re not alone. Your competitors are dealing with the exact same pressures from their customers—with Deloitte noting that 62% of companies see customer experience as an area they need to improve in order to stand out.
But just because you’ll never have perfect customer experiences doesn’t mean you’ll never see results. Rising customer expectations are a good sign—a sign that your customers like what you’re doing and want more of it.
With that in mind, the first step to customer-obsession driven CX is to change how you’re looking at customer experience. The most important part of this shift comes from simplifying how you see experience—not as a series of touchpoints, but as a unified whole. In other words, you need to see experience like your customers do.
When you’re taking this approach to CX, one thing is going to make or break your success—your tech stack. Bringing together all those different parts that go into a customer experience means bringing customer data together. Because if you want to improve CX on the whole, you need to see CX as a whole.
Working from one unified platform—where all those touchpoints can talk to each other—makes it easier to understand and improve customer experiences. You can see what’s working (and what isn’t) at a glance—the same way your customers do in their experiences.
Even with the right outlook, the right effort, and the right tech, you’ll never win at customer obsession, but you can give your customers a winning experience—to keep them coming back for more. There will always be another area to simplify, another touchpoint to streamline, another roadblock to remove, but the drive to keep getting better will push you to create better experiences.