Creating a Unified Customer Experience For The Modern Brand

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For modern brands, creating a great product is only the start. Today, customers want a great product and a great experience. Unfortunately, the way many large enterprises do business today — with siloed point solutions, fragmented teams, and traditional practices that don’t match modern customer behaviour — can make a unified customer experience hard to achieve.

The good news? Creating a unified customer experience is possible, and every investment your brand makes in a customer-centric approach will build loyalty, grow revenue, and protect your business.

But first, you need to overcome a few challenges.

Customer habits and expectations have changed. Have you?

According to McKinsey, in May of 2018, roughly 20 per cent of customer interactions were digital, from a global perspective. In December 2019, that number had jumped to 36 per cent. And by July 2020, driven in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic, it made whatMcKinsey termed “a quantum leap” to 58 per cent, almost a 3X increase from just two years prior.

In short, the customer experience has gone digital. Fast.

Here’s what you’re up against:

• 3.8 billion people connected online across the globe
  
• 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (that’s 18 zeros if you’re wondering)
  
• Just since you started reading, a few hundred thousand tweets have been sent
  
• That’s just one of a list of 35+ digital channels, and counting
  
• Today, 5 million blog posts have been published
  
• Tomorrow, there will be 5 million more
  

Billions of people. Massive amounts of unstructured data. Countless public conversations.

Many of these conversations are about brands. Some of them, of course, are directly about your brand. Likes, dislikes, customer feedback, competitive insights, memes, industry trends, the next public relations nightmare; it’s all out there, happening in real-time across a growing list of digital channels.

Delivering a personalised customer experience at scale

Hand in hand with this massive shift to digital channels is a similarly massive shift in customer expectations. Customers want an experience that is increasingly personal, real-time, and on the customer’s preferred channels. And that experience will be amplified, for better or for worse.

In this digitally connected world, it is no longer enough to simply react to customers’ needs transaction by transaction, storefront by storefront. Whether it’s a new product launch or a new movie premiere, a huge volume of both instantaneous and unsolicited feedback is now the norm. Brands that capture these digital customer insights where they are happening and bring the voice of the customer into the heart of the enterprise can and will stand out from the competition.

In fact, data shows that customers who have excellent experiences with a brand spend 140 per cent more. On the flip side, 96 per cent of unhappy customers don’t complain, but 91 per cent of them will simply leave, according to research by 1st Financial Training Services, giving you little opportunity to course-correct until it’s too late.

Also Read: The Evolving Customer Experience

Make your customers happier

This is the challenge your brand is facing: How can you listen to this vast amount of unstructured data, create actionable insights, and deliver a personalised customer experience at scale?

To do this, you need a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform that cuts through the point-solution chaos and data silos and gives your team the tools they need to execute your brand vision on a global scale.

Your approach must include:

• An omnichannel digital strategy aligned to modern channels
  
• Artificial intelligence that turns huge volumes of data into actionable insights
  
• Workflows, governance, and collaboration tools to keep your teams empowered and informed
  

While this creates new pressure for brands, it is also an unprecedented opportunity. To hear and understand customers like never before. To delight, surprise, and engage. To be human at scale.

Kavya Nath is the Senior Director of Product Marketing, Core Platform & Products at Sprinklr and is based in Austin, TX, USA.