In response to the rising cost of living in Australia, many consumers are likely to make trade-offs in how they spend their money. Knowing which products, experiences, and services consumers prefer, and the prices they are willing to pay, will help small businesses position their offerings and prioritise the investments driving the most impact.
One of the biggest opportunities for organisations to create new revenue streams today is through their digital customer experiences. We are seeing businesses of all sizes invest in and expand their digital capabilities to meet changing consumer needs.
The busiest showroom and one of the biggest revenue opportunities for many businesses is their website. With digital becoming the backbone of customer loyalty and growth, prioritising these four actions will help businesses deliver optimum outcomes.
Prioritise outcomes through understanding the customer
The first step of any customer experience program is to identify desired business outcomes, and to understand how the organisation delivers against customer expectations. This ensures the systems, processes, and metrics designed and implemented drive action where it matters.
It also ensures budgets are focused on delivering maximum impact. For example, it’s not realistic to over-deliver on every customer expectation as it would lead to higher than necessary operating costs. Likewise, consistently failing to meet customer expectations can result in customer churn, negative reviews, complaints, and poor word of mouth.
Personalise the digital experience
Today’s customers expect personalisation and actively engage brands able to meet this need. Developing ways to personalise experience through digital channels, whether it be the website or mobile applications, is critical.
It’s important to start by capturing regular feedback and use a directory to build a single view of the customer. These tools can go even further and segment the customer base into key groups, such as high-value and low-value segments to help businesses deliver personalised customer experiences. This could look like orchestrating individual offers to improve conversions across channels, or proactively reaching out to dissatisfied customers.
Think about post-purchase feedback
Using the right tools, businesses can use post-purchase feedback to better understand the key drivers of spend and what inspires people to come back. Collating data from customer reviews, social media comments, chat interactions and emails give a great picture of how businesses should tweak services and respond to unmet needs.
Businesses with automated post-purchase systems in place that ask for reviews of products and meaningfully action feedback, foster loyalty and gather useful insights about engagement. Forward-thinking organisations are building up profiles of their satisfied, high-value customers, as this group will not only repeat buy but are often happy to share a review or testimony, which positively influences prospective customers.
Drive effective results with a focus on simplicity
To maximise investments in digital customer experiences, organisations should prioritise tools that fit within the existing technology stack, are easy to use, and ready to deliver value out of the box.
By making sure customer insights can be easily captured, analysed, and shared enables organisations to focus on delivering value where it matters most. Investing in the right technology and the partners to deliver it will be one of the most valuable assets to improving overall customer experience.
Good CX cultivates outcomes
The power of customer experience cannot be understated, with the returns significant for organisations that get it right. According to Qualtrics research, Australian consumers are 3.1 times more likely to purchase again, 6.6 times more likely to recommend a friend, and 5.3 times more likely to trust the brand after a good experience. By building a deeper understanding of the customer through digital channels, organisations can align their offerings with customers’ changing needs, while delivering meaningful business outcomes and prioritised investments.
