The customer experience trends influencing us now
Today, customers can purchase from many different brands, in many different mediums, and through many different channels. They equate brands with experiences, so we need to be thoughtful in how we deliver our services and products and make an impression because that matters more than ever.
The customer needs to be at the center of everything we do. That’s why at Lenovo we continue to transform from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric focus. We’re not alone — last year, Medallia predicted that within a year 50 percent of organizations would have significantly adapted their business model around customer experience (CX).
The benefit isn’t only for customers though. There are clear parallels between a superior customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), and as the war for talent becomes more fierce, both trends are incredibly important.
Here are some trends in CX that I believe will continue to influence our work in 2019:
Taking action based on the voice of your customer
52% of consumers who had a bad experience in the last year say it could have been improved if they had the opportunity to give real-time feedback and the company took immediate action. (Medallia)
Customers are vocal in terms of their experience so it’s important for companies to hear them and take action, because it can lead to huge opportunities. In our own enterprise feedback management system, we follow up with our customers or “close the loop”, which helps nurture and retain customer relationships. If we hadn’t responded, we most likely would have lost that business.
Our cloud-based platform enables us to close the loop with the customer a lot more quickly. As a result, we’ve seen an upward trend in our business on all metrics, whether it’s quality, delivery or tech support, because we’re bringing the problems to the forefront and teams are taking action to address those in the short term. It also helps us to understand long term what solutions we need to put in place so that other customers don’t experience the same issue.
To make sure that we are always in the mindset of delivering for our customers and responding to their feedback, we’re also continuing to embed the three core CX tenets — Effectiveness, Effort, and Emotion (the 3Es) — into everything we do.
Connecting the dots
By 2020, over 40% of all data analytics projects will relate to CX (Medallia)
Today, a big issue many companies face is that data exists all over the company, and they need to find ways to bring this data together to successfully analyze it.
One of the areas I’m focused on is a voice of the customer (VOC) program where we are looking at the feedback from a holistic, end-to-end standpoint. From there, we want to make sure we’re asking the right question at the right time. That involves simplifying the surveys, asking fewer repetitive questions, and applying text analytics at every touch point.
Right now, we’re doing a great job with product analytics because we’re getting thousands of data points on what customers are saying. But I think we need to focus on improving text analytics across services, across delivery, and across purchase experience. Did you know that by 2020, as much as 93 percent of all data in the digital universe will be unstructured text? We need to have better methods of leveraging that.
Tracking customers across every interaction
Optimizing a single touchpoint is not enough; companies will need to tie together all their interactions to envision an ideal customer journey and provide a consistent experience (Medallia)
About 15 years ago, customers only needed two touchpoints (Marketing Week). Today, customers are using at least six, and not all of these are going to involve an employee who can help them along the way. As customers are looking for more reference points to help assess what they want to buy, companies need to look at the entire journey of the customer.
However — interestingly, I think — a lot of people don’t want to interact with an employee at all. Self-service kiosks and counters have changed customer behavior, and now people are much more comfortable making purchases online and on their own, so long as the mechanism is well-designed and easy to use.
Companies need to give customers a choice. For simple issues that require efficiency and speed, it makes sense to have a self-service option. For more complex issues, you may need to connect with a person to resolve it.
Think of it like a coffee shop. Some customers are going to want their coffee as fast as possible, and they have no problems using a touchscreen to order it, and they are happy to just have their name called and pick it up. This can be any kind of customer — one who has difficulty with language, with social interactions, or who’s simply very busy.
There are also customers who love walking into the coffee shop and having the barista remember their name and their order. They chat to the barista about their day and new options available. They emphasize the social connection in the transaction, and they like seeing behind the scenes of the coffee being made — they like seeing the effort that goes into it.
Both customers leave the shop satisfied. Both customers return the next day. Both are completely valid experiences that a customer-centric coffee shop can support.
To me, customers are the center of everything we do. The Customer Experience trends in 2019 revolve around ensuring the customer feels like they’re being listened to and supported at every step of the journey. The tools that we choose to use to support that journey — analytics, AI, self-service chat bots — aren’t as important as the consideration of the journey itself and the impression that we leave on our customers along the way.
About the Author
Dilip Bhatia is Lenovo’s Vice President of Global Marketing, User & Customer Experience, PC & Smart Devices. As Lenovo’s Chief Customer Officer, Dilip drives the company to achieve its goal of being the leader in the PC, smart device, data center and mobility space. Start a conversation with him here, or on LinkedIn and Twitter.
