Why make customer experience a central element of your business strategy?

According to a survey conducted by Genesys in 2009*, "a bad customer service costs businesses 338.5 billion dollars per year worldwide in lost revenue". A significant cost, which demonstrates that the quality of the customer experience provided by a company has a major impact on its growth and results.

Long neglected in corporate strategies, customer experience is now establishing itself as a strong differentiating element, and therefore a potential key competitive advantage. Here’s what to do to fully benefit from it.

Customer Experience, Cornerstone of Loyalty

In a society where consumers can constantly share their opinions and instantly switch from one provider to another, offering a quality customer experience entails a multitude of positive outcomes. But before showing what benefits arise from a successful customer experience, let’s focus, initially, on this concept.

Customer experience can be defined as the perception that an entity gives to its customer when the latter comes into contact with it. This concept encompasses both the quality of the product and/or service offering as well as the quality of the relationship maintained with the customer. Thus, a positive customer relationship naturally leads to long-term customer satisfaction.

The optimized management of customer experience relies notably on two key points:

• A fulfilled brand promise,

• A personalized and distinguished offer.

A customer journey that manages to generate a positive feeling at each of its stages will be synonymous with a quality experience. The satisfaction it provides to the customer becomes a source of loyalty, even influence, which translates into direct recommendations, positive reviews, or referral actions.

How to Provide a Successful Customer Experience?

To achieve sustainable customer satisfaction, some practices seem fundamental:

• Provide an immediate response to every customer need: responding quickly to a request has a major impact on customer satisfaction. Moreover, there are important metrics to measure customer satisfaction:

• The Net Promoter Score (NPS), which calculates customer satisfaction in the form of a recommendation score;

• The Customer Effort Score (CES), which evaluates the quality of an interaction with a company and allows estimating customer loyalty;

• The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), which measures customer satisfaction in real-time by collecting customers' immediate emotions.

• Multiply points of contact: It is essential to multiply the communication channels through which customers can reach the company: website, social media, email, phone, SMS… Companies that support their customers across multiple channels generate higher engagement and are able to provide a faster response to their requests.

• Deploy a natively omnichannel customer interaction management solution that can simultaneously integrate all the channels mentioned earlier.

A customer who becomes a promoter of the brand is extremely virtuous and of inestimable value, but be careful… The opposite is also true! 64% of consumers surveyed in an Odoxa/Emakina study conducted in 2018 stated that a bad experience could lead them to the competition.

Neglecting the good management of customer experience will have considerable consequences in a context of high consumer volatility and heightened competition. In this sense, implementing a customer interaction management tool seems essential to achieve long-term customer loyalty!

ViaDialog, an Innovative Platform to Support You in Managing Your Customer Relationship

Thanks to ViaDialog and the various solutions offered for efficient and unified management of customer interactions, transform customer experience into a decisive strategic factor! Take advantage of our solutions for managing customer relationship flows as well as our voicebots for automating exchanges in natural language to improve the experience of your users. Contact our experts for a detailed demonstration!

*1 Genesys, "The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience and Engagement", 2009

*2 Observatoire des comportements de consommation, "Loyalty to Brands and Retailers", 2018

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