Despite numerous articles and opinion pieces promoting the need for brands to adopt customer-centric commerce, the business realities and commercial pressures placed on retailers still mean that many are taking a purely conversion-centric approach.
As more brands make the shift into the digital space, it’s important to prevent tunnel vision when it comes to customer conversion and instead, find a balance between outcomes and customer experiences and help business to recognise that their conversion-centric approach is detrimental to their success.
According to recent research by Aberdeen Group, delivering a good digital experience can result in as much as a 15% uplift in customer retention rates, up to 7x improvement in annual company revenue and 6x improvement in customer satisfaction rates. Such stats have helped to convince marketers that – when used correctly - customer experience can be a powerful marketing tool, both helping to drive growth and bolster customer loyalty. In order to gain these benefits however, brands must first become more self-aware and more willing to embrace digital transformation.
One way to welcome this change and drive success in all areas is to think of experience as a transactional currency, from which both the brand and the customer can benefit. As competition blooms, brands need to understand that user experience is often a more powerful differentiator than price, as consumers gravitate to brands that adapt to their needs . This loyalty, which in turn drives engagement, can be harnessed – using the right technology - for maximum benefit to both brands and customers.
This will become even more apparent once brands begin to harness their customers’ data, turning gained knowledge into tangible business outcomes. There is never a lack of data to garner; customer experience data is rich and almost limitless – often gaining even more value over long periods of time. Brands can use this information to consistently tweak and improve their path to purchase and move toward their goal of meeting a customer’s needs. By using this data to build personas of their customers, marketers can become experts in the customer groups that frequently interact with their brands.
Many of the brands embarking on the customer experience shift have already started to see positive outcomes. A company that has been successful in getting digital customer experience right, to transform its success, is the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). The company set itself the challenging task of trying to redefine its brand in the market, transforming from being a financial services provider to being an ‘experience business’ which works within the financial sector. This change in focus, away from products and towards customer experiences, has helped RBS provide a higher quality of service to its customers, ultimately building trust and loyalty in the long run. In the first week of using this technology, RBS saw a significant increase in click-through rate, and the agreement in principle completion went up by 10%. RBS has since been able to improve over one million journeys.
Success like this is not limited to any particular sector and can be achieved by any brand that is willing to modernise and understand how customers purchase within the digital realm. All businesses – regardless of the products they sell or the services they deliver – ultimately strive to modernise their practices and identify areas that can be optimised and improved. Optimisation allows brands to overcome difficult business challenges that stem from a lack of interaction with customers. This holistic approach takes into account all the aspects of online behaviour that may have previously been missed. Focusing on experience allows brands to gain an edge over their competition, using sophisticated metrics and complex data sets to reach their targets and drive success for many years to come.
Whether you are looking for better ways to manage the full lifecycle of your B2C customers or you want to nurture B2B clients from first impression to customer advocacy, you won’t want to miss what Modern Customer Experience 2018 (ModernCX) has to offer. Join other marketing professionals, industry influencers, product experts and Oracle executives to learn how you can use the entire marketing ecosystem to impact the customer experience.
Register for the event here. Looking forward
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