To deliver the best Customer Experience (CX), you have to know, not assume, what your customers want from your brand. Simply put: assumptions about customer expectations do not yield results. 50% of brands think they are getting better at delivering experiences, but only 11% of consumers agree with this, according to one report.
Customers want to have conversations with your brand. When asked the most effective way a brand can understand customers’ feelings toward their customer experience, nearly 70% of customers selected the option of brands asking them for direct feedback. Yet, only 40% of brands thought this was the best way to understand customer emotions, showing how most brands continue to underestimate the importance of customer conversations.
Leveraging a customer conversation platform like Discuss.io can put you ahead of the curve, enabling you to bridge the gap many of your competitors may not even know exists. Forrester’s 2019 research reports that just a 1-point improvement in their CX Index score can create $244 million in incremental revenue for a big-box retailer, which also means there is little time to waste.
Your CX strategy should begin with research, and not just the kind that you can quantify into a single metric. Having conversations with Discuss.io’s video feedback platform lets you ask the questions that determine your company’s success, but that you cannot boil down to a single KPI. They can also be tailored to every moment of the customer journey from perception to post-purchase. You can learn more about how to shape your qualitative research strategy for CX here. With Discuss.io, you can start and share these conversations with key stakeholders of your company quickly and effectively, accelerating your overall CX strategy.
Customer conversations are a fundamental part of a CX strategy with many moving parts, but you also have to consider how to integrate them into other elements of CX. To have a successful CX mindset, a company has to address every aspect of customer experience, from gathering these qualitative insights to turning these insights into actionable steps.
According to a report by Bain, you can better understand CX by grouping it into the following four categories:
Sensing
Objective:
Collect sentimental or sensory data from customers, where the method of data collection may vary
Includes:
- Real-time feedback with live audiences through video platforms to understand their experiences and expectations, such as through Discuss.io
- Survey and survey analytics to understand perceptions, thoughts, and expectations (hence why Qualtrics calls itself a CX company). Net Promoter Score (NPS) software falls into this category.
- Sensors and biometric software to perform sentimental analysis, such as uncovering emotions embedded in customer reviews, or facial/voice recognition
Key Takeaway:
Gathering insights on customer thoughts, emotions, and expectations forms the basis on which businesses then make their marketing decisions and create actionable strategies.
Deciding
Objective:
Once data is gathered, the decisions and actionable insights to derive from this data
Includes:
- Predictive analytics and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence driven software that process data and identify next steps based on historic or present-day data points
- Analytics tools to consolidate and analyze data
- Experience dashboards to view all data simultaneously in one view
- Data aggregation software to provided a unified view of clickstream, solicited, or operational data
Key Takeaway:
Just getting the data is not usually enough. Your business needs tools to most effectively extract insights and create an optimized strategy from this data.
Acting
Objective:
After you have the data and know what to do with it, you need CX tools and software that help you implement these actions
Includes:
- Automated customer service and support, such as AI-powered chatbots
- Personalization software, such as the company Dynamic Yield, acquired by McDonalds, which provides predictive algorithms for one-to-one messaging
- Customer support through multiple channels
- Automated email marketing
Key Takeaway:
Once you know what you want to achieve, you need to deploy it effectively. Whether it be creating a new level of personalization in your brand interactions or atuomating your salesforce, you’ll find enterprise tools at this stage of CX to help you do so.
Managing
Objective:
A holistic system or set of processes to manage the collective set of customer interactions and experiences
Includes:
- Platforms that enable a holistic view of the customer journey through multiple touchpoints, such as customer journey mapping software
- Offerings that bundle sensing, deciding, and acting to provide varied capabilities; end-to-end integrated tools with add-on features such as privacy and blockchain
- Platforms to manage negative customer experiences]
- Designing software enabling structuring how a particular experience ought to be
- Post-purchase and Net Promoter Score (NPS) management
Key Takeaway:
Managing CX often integrates offering from other categories such as sensing and deciding to offer multiple capabilities. Companies that offer a combination of sensing, deciding, and acting capabilities often market themselves as CX management platforms. However, CX focused on managing is also about recognizing the complexity of the customer journey, and incorporating any final features necessary to complete the journey such as privacy management, customer issue management, and blockchain.
How Discuss.io’s Qualitative Research Through Live Video Conversations Fits Into Your Broader CX Strategy:
A CX strategy has many puzzle pieces that need to come together, from data gathering software to survey creators and automated personalization. Live qualitative insights from consumers are a key, irreplaceable part of this strategy. Discuss.io is easily integratable with other elements of CX strategy, such as automatic clickstream data or survey-generated data points. It is complementary to surveys and data aggregators.
Simultaneously, there is no other way to replace the value of live video interactions with your consumers. Discuss.io offers the missing puzzle piece to your CX strategy: real-time feedback with key stakeholders through video interviews that can then be shared with others in your organization as you continue building out your customer experience design teams.
CX is about understanding the whole customer journey, not just pre-launch market research or immediate feedback. Discuss.io lets you implement your CX strategy by letting you get feedback from consumers at multiple touchpoints throughout the customer journey. At each touchpoint, customers are making judgments about your brand and there is an opportunity to collect valuable data. Customers are making judgments and generating feedback through these various interactions.
Discuss.io empowers you to succeed in this CX-driven world where traditional market research or just CRM is not enough. Customer expectations of brand interactions and experiences are at an all-time high. Traditional approaches lack scalability, are not comprehensive, and do not gather insights fast enough to keep up with the accelerating pace of customer journeys, especially digital ones.
Real-time insights are crucial. You need solutions that recognize the complexity of CX and offer specific tools to help implement your CX strategies. As more companies implement CX-focused initiatives, Customer Experience becomes a competitive necessity.
With Discuss.io, you can enhance or get started on your CX strategy by incorporating what might be the most important component of CX: real-time qualitative feedback from your customers.
Get more guidance on building a Voice of the Consumer program that with the eBook “Why Successful CX is All About Reclaiming the Human Touch”.
