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I’ll admit it, as a customer experience consultant I have a tendency to see improving customer experience as a cure for all business ills. As the saying goes, if you have a hammer everything looks like nails.
Over time, I have come to concede that product development, finance, and other business disciplines are equally essential to business success. But clearly, a bevy of mounting research does indicate your company’s future is linked to the consistent delivery of a differentiated customer experience .
Here are some random but interesting tidbits for your consideration:
International Customer Management Institute’s research on business leaders suggests that 62% think mobile customer service is a competitive differentiator.
Forrester found that 71% of consumers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service .
In a study of 2,000 American Consumers, Brodeur Partners found that “shareability of the experience and association (I’m ok if people know I’m associated with a brand) are” twice as important to Gen Y as to Baby Boomers.
According to Gartner, 85% of business to customer relationships will not involve human interaction by 2020 .
According to CEI, only 1% of customers feel providers CONSISTENTLY meet their expectations.
McKinsey reports that more than 50% of customer interactions jump across channels such that brands must be excellent via web, mobile, phone, and brick-and-mortar.
Ok, enough of the statistics, the picture that emerges from all this disparate data is that the perceptions of your customers matter greatly and those perceptions will increasingly matter in changing ways .
As such, to be successful we must pay attention to trends in customer behavior and leverage people, process, and technology to assure we effortlessly meet our customer’s needs. All the while, we must build work cultures where people listen to customers and constantly make improvements in experience delivery – so that consumers can share their perceptions loudly and favorably across their social networks.
Given global choice and the power of social media…customer experience elevation is here to stay so you might want to get a customer experience hammer because there are a lot of nails out there!