Every consumer is unique, each with their own sets of needs and expectations. With every interaction with your brand, consumers will have many different options for how they can go about taking the next step in their customer journey. Not to mention, these options will also often depend on how well – or how poorly – their last brand interaction went.
For a Customer Experience professional, it can be very valuable to be able to pinpoint what types of experiences lead to specific paths along the customer journey, especially costly ones. These insights can guide them to make more customer-centric decisions when trying to design positive experiences that will better lead consumers down more desirable paths.
Collecting the “Next Steps” metric as part of a CX program can help you do this.
http://customerthink.com/cx-metrics-series-next-steps/
With a string of big names disappearing from the high street, requiring rescue or teetering on the brink, we need to ask, if retail’s battle cry is truly ‘adapt or die’, why have so many chosen the latter in 2018? And as the year draws to a close, which trends will drive the former in 2019?
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2018/12/06/retail-marketing-why-will-the-customer-cross-the-road-2019/
In today's business climate, companies need to ensure an excellent customer experience across all their channels to remain competitive, but how is this possible in a digital-first world?
Getting the customer relationship right is vital for every business – but it has its challenges.
Increasingly, customers engage with brands across a number of channels while competition from all quarters – including new “digital disruptors”– means their loyalty can no longer be guaranteed.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/intelligent-business/customer-experience-digital-age/
Brands often talk about being customer-centric but in reality, most businesses are still not set up with customers at their core. Simply installing a chief customer officer and hoping the rest will fall into place will not cut it in 2019.
https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/12/12/marketing-trends-2019-customer-centric/
Get customer experience right and profit will follow. That’s the conclusion of a survey by Hotjar of 2,000 CX professionals published in November 2018. Only 12 percent of respondents regarded their companies as being mature when it came to customer experience.
“Customer experience leaders prioritize delivering an outstanding experience over everything else (yes, even over revenue),” the Hotjar survey states. The leaders focus on current customers, rather than obsessing about potential ones. They allocate a regular amount of time every week to make calls, meet for coffee or find out about the support issues of their customers. They follow the Golden Rule of customer experience: “Treat customers how you would like to be treated.”
https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/customer-experience-trends-for-2019/
When it comes to the customer experience, consumer comfort levels with artificial intelligence can vary greatly depending on how the technology is applied. As we shared in a recent ebook, consumers often think AI is ‘creepy’ when it utilizes information they did not directly provide. In other circumstances, however, AI is seen as useful, particularly when it makes recommendations based on past interactions.
In a recent survey conducted by Interactions, we looked at how AI impacts the customer experience in order to better understand how companies can best apply this technology to their benefit. One takeaway from the research that was pretty clear: consumers prefer to interact with conversational AI. In fact, 79% of respondents said that one of the most useful capabilities of AI in providing a positive customer experience is the ability to use conversational words or phrases, as if they were talking to a human, rather than speaking “robot talk”. Additionally, 70% said they prefer interacting with a virtual assistant that has a human-like voice or personality as opposed to a computer-generated voice.
http://customerthink.com/3-revenue-driving-benefits-of-conversational-ai/
Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs enable business leaders to gather the critical customer feedback they need to address customer concerns and shape the future of their products.
Traditional VoC programs are one-on-one interview based and can generate volumes of unstructured customer interview data. Making that information actionable is where the rub is, according to Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, Principal Analyst of Customer Experience at Forrester.
https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/how-ai-is-impacting-the-voice-of-the-customer-landscape/
Jamie Dickinson, retail sales director for UK and Ireland at Datalogic, reveals the four areas retailers should be focusing on in 2019 to improve customer experience.
https://www.retail-week.com/retail-voice/four-ways-to-revolutionise-cx-with-data-capture-tech/7030182.article?authent=1/
Customer experience (CX) professionals have it so easy today. In the past we relied on surveys as our primary source of customer insights. Now with so many options for connecting with customers, CX professionals have it made!
But can so many options actually make it more difficult? How do you keep track of the options? How do you determine which are best for you? How do you pull everything together into one cohesive voice?
On second thought, maybe today’s CX professionals have it harder than I thought.
https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=128311/
Contact center Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) are used by SMB and enterprise companies to make better business decisions and improve the customer experience. Also called metrics, KPIs are the measurable values that show just how effective your business is at achieving its goals.
In our last couple blogs, we touched upon the top agent KPIs and team KPIs that your contact center should be tracking. We also covered the real-time metrics that supervisors use on a daily basis to monitor the status and productivity of their agents.
This time, we’ll check out some of the most used services metrics that show how your services are doing. A service is a specific reason for customers to initiate an interaction with a contact center, or, in the case of outbound dialing, for a contact center to initiate an interaction with a customer. In the contact center space, a service typically means the type of channel that connects the customer to the business: voice, email, chat, and so on.
http://customerthink.com/boost-customer-experience-by-utilizing-service-kpi-insights/