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Everything has changed with how consumers now engage with brands. Oracle calls this the “Experience Economy,” where customers are the true innovators, not brands nor the enterprise.
Why does this matter? This is because technology has empowered customers to discover and engage with brands in the way that is right for them. As customers become more adept with technology, they’ll keep creating new ways to manage their daily lives and online experiences. They expect or demand that kind of ease and flexibility from every company with which they do business.
To meet these expectations, brands have to think differently and essentially consider the customer experience as their point of differentiation. It may be impossible to actually anticipate what a customer needs at the very moment they need it, but it only takes one bad experience to lose a hard-earned customer to a competitor. Customers expect a single, seamless brand experience across all channels and get frustrated when they feel like they’re talking with multiple different departments.
For CX professionals, expectations have risen to where they are expected to know their customers even better than customers know themselves! One of the challenges from today’s digital experiences is that companies now have so much data about their customers, they often don’t even know how to use it! Therefore, disconnected customer data across marketing, sales, service, commerce and other systems can make understanding customers nearly impossible. This results in many lost opportunities to grow the relationship with the customer.
Companies that put together a mature CX strategy should be able to compete no matter how much consumers and the business world change. They do this by capturing and managing customer data, using the right applications to serve customers, and equipping sales and service people with real time data, in full context.
But what does CX Excellence actually mean? CX is complex because every brand’s path to excellence is unique. The path you follow depends on current business priorities across marketing, sales, commerce, services and field service. If you consider the less sophisticated end of the "Path to Excellence", processes are typically siloed, manual and are measured in terms of cost reductions and efficiency improvements. When starting out, customer experiences are typically static and use limited customer data to influence personalization. Data plays a critical role in driving CX excellence and successfully connecting data and intelligence is often the difference between success and failure.
Brands that are successful in differentiating on the customer experience have mastered automation, connected processes across marketing, sales and service and successfully unified customer intelligence across all touch points. With their customer in the middle, these brands measure success in terms of customer lifetime value, customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
To find out more about connected data and crafting a masterful CX, visit Oracle CX Marketing.
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