Importance of Managing Customer Experience for an organization!!

How do you measure the success of an organization? The paradigm is changing and it is changing the way how organizations think about their customers. Gone are the days when an organizations goal was just to sell products/services to complete their sales targets. The importance of repeat buyers and customer loyalty has attained the top management’s priority. According to a research 70% of the organizations feel it is cheaper to retain customer then acquiring new ones. Another research suggests that it costs 4 to 6 times more to acquire new customer than to retain them.

It may seem obvious that a loyal customer base is important to the organizations success, but many businesses tend to overlook it. The fact remains that most powerful tool to get a new customer is the referral from the existing one. A loyal customer helps in increased revenue through repeat business, lower customer acquisition cost and increased referrals..

Buying pattern of a customer starts with testing products/services of a company by purchasing/consuming a small amount of them. In the outsourcing industry chances to crack a multimillion deal in much more if the service organization has an existing relationship with the customer. A research conducted by Bain and co. suggests that average repeat customer in a retail industry spends 67% more in their repeat purchases thus stressing the importance of customer life time value.

As research firm Gartner defines it as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy”. Customer experience is the way people identify and analyze the buying pattern of a consumer; it is about making your customers your advisors representing your brand. It is about creating long term sustainable brand which is driven by people or the end users.

Imagine a sales funnel where large number of prospects comes at the top and only few qualified one remains in the middle even fewer converts into customer stays at the bottom on the funnel. In this journey of customer experience which starts with awareness followed by the familiarity with the services and solutions at the top of the funnel. A loyal customer plays an important role by becoming your point of referral. Once the prospects get excited about the product and the company it starts the movement towards the bottom of the funnel. At this point the loyal customers become their advocate in helping the new prospect to arrive at meaningful decisions by sharing their experiences.

Once customers make purchase(s) it is extremely important for the service provider to keep them engaged. A good practice that can be followed by any service provider is to provide their customers with relevant information on how to use their services through collateral on best practices, case studies, and possible additional services which they can purchase to make the solutions/service worth the money spent by them.

Slowly and steadily when a customer becomes regular user of the service and is happy with the provider s/he starts the journey to become the loyal customer which organizations thrive to have. This journey starts all over again as this loyal customer becomes an advocate for the new prospects and the cycle goes on and on.

While we see all these stages of the journey of prospects to become a loyal customer and advocate to the service provider, the way we manage the experience at each stage becomes extremely important.

The omni-channel experience which is provided to a customer through the various touch points like mobile apps, websites, contact centers and social media should be in sync and communicate the same consistent language. This is the key to succeed in this age of digital transformation and socially connected society.