“Give customers a great experience and they’ll buy more, be more loyal and share their experience with friends.”
This is the opening line from PwC’s Future of CX report, entitled Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right.
Most enterprise leaders have received the memo. The customer experience is now a top-of-mind issue in executive suites and boardrooms around the world. In fact, according to Dimension Data’s Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report, 81% of organizations view it as a competitive differentiator.
And the stakes are very real. According to the PwC report, 73% of customers “point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions” and are willing to pay a price premium of between 7% and 16% to get it.
The problem, according to the Dimension Data report, is that only 13% of those same organizations that identify the experience as a competitive differentiator currently rate themselves as delivering an exceptional one. Why?
The challenge is that while many enterprise leaders got the first memo, they missed the second one explaining that delivering a differentiated customer experience is about more than just creating a whiz-bang user interface.
Instead, delivering a world-class customer experience is about getting “past the glass” and executing across every step of the customer’s journey.
Misreading the Disruptive Tea Leaves
The idea that the customer experience is the new driver of business value has been gaining traction for some time, and it largely coincides with the era of digital disruption that began over a decade ago.
Enterprise leaders can be forgiven, therefore, for associating the customer experience with the so-called user experience.
In the first days of disruption, it seemed that it was snazzy new interfaces and form-factors that were exciting digital consumers (e.g., the first iPhone, Facebook, etc.). That enthusiasm for clean interfaces and intuitive interactions quickly spread as customers and employees demanded that the enterprise deliver similar experiences.
The mandate, it would seem, was to banish clunky green screen and client-server interfaces for sparkling new web apps. And many an enterprise launched massive “transformation” efforts to do just that: build modern interface skins to sit on top of their old legacy applications.
Like buying one of those knock-off MP3 players when the iPod was new and cool, however, these facsimile efforts showed their colors fast enough.
It turned out that what was delighting customers wasn’t the interface — or, more precisely, wasn’t just the interface. The delight was in the reimagining of the entire experience from the customer’s perspective.
These disruptive companies had reimagined entire business models and ways of operating. The user interface was just the window into this much broader transformation.
To create a differentiated customer experience, therefore, requires much more than just a new user interface. And, of course, that’s the challenge — but one with a huge payoff.
The Business Outcomes Driving the Focus on the Customer Experience
As enterprise leaders begin to grasp that competing on the customer experience demands a more wholesale reshaping of that experience, two things become clear.
The first is that this will require a much more intricate dance that delves deep into the organization — and its legacy technologies and processes — to work. We’ll get to this part of the story in a moment.
But the second realization is that launching this type of effort will require a more definitive and measurable return. The good news is that there is now ample data on the business outcomes that a focus on the customer experience delivers.
Besides the price premium that customers will now pay, an investment in the customer experience is delivering direct top and bottom-line results. For instance, Deloitte estimates that “client-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies not focused on the customer.”
Dimension Data’s study showed that 84% of companies reported a direct relationship between customer experience investments and an uplift in revenue and profits.
Investing in the customer experience isn’t just about price premiums and increased revenue, however. It can also reduce costs. According to a Harvard Business Review article entitled The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified, an investment in the customer experience actually reduces costs, noting that Sprint reported reduced customer support costs of 33% due to their customer experience initiatives.
To deliver these world-class results, however, you’ll need to address that first issue: how to weave together a customer experience that extends throughout the customer’s journey?
The Intellyx Take: Customer Experience Innovation through Process Orchestration
Most organizations’ challenge is that creating these types of immersive experiences means getting past the interface and addressing the complexity that lies deep within an organization.
The reimagining of a customer’s experience inevitably means integrating and automating it through every system, business process, and function within the entirety of your organization. But how?
Most enterprise leaders have assumed that the only way to do so is to rebuild everything — and that’s a daunting prospect. Fortunately, there’s another way.
New automation platforms, such as Nintex Workflow Cloud, give enterprises the ability to leverage a combination of low-code automation and process orchestration to weave together new and old — modern and legacy.
This approach provides organizations a viable mechanism to transform the experience by bringing together the often disparate elements of an enterprise’s processes, technologies, and people into a new, integrated whole.
However, this approach demands a deeper understanding of the complex reality facing the enterprise and how to leverage process orchestration to transform that complexity from liability to advantage.
In fact, we recently wrote a white paper (for K2, who was later acquired by Nintex) on this very topic, examining how process orchestration is the key to customer experience innovation.
There is no magic new interface that will allow organizations to create world-class customer experiences that deliver the business outcomes described in this article.
The only way to win in an experience-first world is to get past the interface and, instead, truly transform the way you interact with your customers on an end-to-end basis. Doing so will lead to happier, more engaged customers, and undeniable business results.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. At the time of this writing, Nintex is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper.
