Atul Tuli
MANILA, Philippines – Imagine a scenario when the book you ordered online did not reach you after the promised delivery deadline of three days. You called the website’s customer care and the representative promises that the book will reach you the next day, but it still does not. You call again the next day and connect to another executive this time who does not know the history of your purchases or requests; gives you the same status and adds that there is no record of your previous conversation with the organization. Does this sound familiar? The book may reach you in another 1-2 days, but would you like to make another purchase at the same website?
Now, let’s tweak this scenario a bit. When you call customer care for the first time, the representative tells you that your book was stuck in transit and assures you that it will reach you within a day. She even checks to see whether you have faced this situation before; for example when you had ordered another book a month ago. The book reaches you the next day and you then get another call from the company confirming the receipt and apologizing for the delay in delivery again. Would you go back to the same website for another purchase?
The only difference between the two scenarios is the ability of the organization to turn around an unpleasant experience for a consumer and end a transaction on a high note. This is the difference that one great customer experience can make in spite of circumstances not being in favor of the organization.
Put simply, customer experience is the sum total of relationships a customer has with a business and is based on all interactions and thoughts the customer has about the business. Customers who have a positive experience are more likely to become loyal customers to the business.
While the predictability of customer interactions has vanished, the way in which businesses engage with customers has fundamentally changed. Customers can now interact with brands from multiple touch points or channels (Web, mobile, social, retail stores, kiosks); however, they cite cross-channel inconsistency as their number one complaint. Your customer is only interacting with you as a single entity, she is unaware that you have separate teams to run your Twitter account, tele-support and email support – none of which are connected to the same view of customer information.
To succeed in this multi-touch point world, businesses must indeed shift from channel-centric organizations to customer-centric organizations. The best way to achieve this transformation is to connect internal data, teams, and technologies to drive cohesive personal experiences that increase engagement, sales, and loyalty across channels.
As a first step, businesses must understand that the best investment decisions in improving the customer experience can be made only after understanding the customer lifecycle and expectations. In this context, marketers are already overwhelmed by the quantity of information flowing in from all sources. The emergence of social networks has added complexity to the implications for enterprises. However, embracing social networks has compelling rewards in terms of understanding customer behavior and analytics.
The solution lies in leveraging huge quantities of data – also called Big Data i.e. traditional enterprise data or machine-generated/ sensor data or social data– to truly understand the customer. Big Data solutions help marketers to combine and pool information by linking disparate and siloed channels. Technology vendors like Oracle are making it easy for enterprises to unlock the value of their data with fast and pervasive Business Intelligence. By collecting and analyzing transactional data, enterprises can actually map customer needs and expectations. Predictive analytics therefore helps marketers to target the right customer with the relevant offers, thus reducing cost and effort without overstepping and making the customer uncomfortable.
Secondly, positive engagements are so important to consumers that they are willing to pay for it. In fact, the 2011 Customer Experience Interactive (CEI) Survey highlights that 86 percent of consumers will gladly spend more for a better customer experience. Moreover, marketers understand that acquiring new customers is a lot more expensive than retaining old ones.
Big Data plays a key role here again as it helps in deriving loyalty metrics used in assessing customer loyalty. By linking financial data to customer data and customer feedback, marketers are able to assess the loyalty displayed by customers towards an organization or a brand.
Exceeding expectations of the customers helps ensure superior customer experiences that make the consumers return to a brand more often. Poor experiences are typically a result of unmet expectations, leading consumers to move to newer vendors. The CEI survey also states that 89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following an undesired customer experience. Some industry studies also indicate that it costs an organization eight times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
Thirdly, businesses must integrate their various customer interaction channels. As customers are turning to an ever-growing assortment of devices and touchpoints, businesses struggle to solve new problems with legacy systems and team structures. This is because internal teams are siloed and held to channel-oriented goals and legacy technology is unable to scale; data and content are scattered throughout the enterprise. Moreover, no universal view of the customer lifecycle or cross-channel performance can be provided with the archaic technology. Millions of customers using multiple touchpoints often find themselves exposed to the product or service provider’s internal business problems at the point of engagement. Atul Tuli, Sales Director for Oracle Cloud CRM, Oracle Corporation, APAC
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