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Skip to Main Navigation Skip to Main Content Skip to Footer Home * News & Insights * News & Insights Home * Innovation * IT Careers & Skills * Cloud * Cyber Security * Future of Work * All Categories * Marketing * HR * Finance * Community * Ask question * Community Home * Spiceworks Originals * Cloud * Collaboration * Networking * Water Cooler * Windows * All forums * How-Tos * Scripts * Vendors * Meetups * Reviews * Online Events Login Join Login Join -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Customer Experience WE’RE APPROACHING CX BACKWARDS Learn why marketers must focus on customer experience rather than technology. Christine Crandell President, New Business Strategies April 20, 2023 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When it comes to customer experience (CX), companies mostly rely on technology to give it a boost. Christine Crandell, President, New Business Strategies, discusses why marketers need to focus more on a customer-centric approach rather than rely on technology. I spend most of my time talking with B2B technology buying teams to understand how and why their purchase behaviors and sentiments are changing. Those insights help brands align their strategy, teams, touchpoints, and technology to meet buyers where they are and in ways they prefer. Everybody expects more from brands. Today’s expectations go beyond features, pricing, reputation, and customer service to include a brand’s values. Seven points summarize customers’ expectations of any brand: To be known, engaged, delighted, empowered, heard, helped, and protected. Pretty straightforward. At critical touchpoints, a company must deeply understand each target segment and personas’ use cases, context, behavior, and expectations. Then deliver on those expectations by aligning your people, processes, data, and technology to major touchpoints. Couple that with a consultative selling approach genuinely grounded in helping customers achieve their target outcomes, and rinse and repeat. See More: Why Customer Support Should Be Abuzz With Intelligent Swarming TECHNOLOGY BEFORE CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING Instead of starting with the customer, most begin with technology. Self-service support is a good example. According to the 10th edition of the National Customer Rage SurveyOpens a new window , 63 percent of customers rage about a support or product experience. And that rage is turning into revenge. And churn. According to Verint’s 2023 ‘Closing the Engagement Capacity GapOpens a new window ,’ one-third of business leaders lack confidence in their organization’s ability to provide high-quality customer experiences. Fifty-six percent of respondents in a recent SugarCRM studyOpens a new window stated they are missing the data to improve marketing campaigns and sales conversion. And over 70 percent believe customers leave due to poor customer service/experience, communication, or loss of trust in the brand or organization. No wonder 55 percent of companies cannot spot customers at risk of churning and do something about it. A mind blogging statistic considering how many billions of dollars are spent annually on customer experience management (CEM) software. The result is a big revenue gap. Due to churn, SugarCRM reports an average annual loss of $5.5M for mid-market companies. When I ask companies why they start with technology instead of customer understanding, common responses are that they do not have actionable ICP journey maps, documented internal process flows, an internal champion, and the time or resources. However, they fail to mention that they are often overconfident in how effective their customer experience efforts are and have an organizational mandate to reduce costs. Technology is seen as the route to “deliver exceptional customer experiences while also lowering the cost to serve,” according to Verint’s study. The more technology they employ, the greater their confidence that they deliver exceptional experiences. These companies prefer to engage with customers predominately on digital channels, promote self-service, and are more successful in implementing CX automation strategies, 3.2, 2.9, and 2.9 times greater than their peers, respectively. They also spend more annually on CX technologies than their peers in the following areas: * Digital-first engagement: Messaging and social channels, chatbots/IVAs. * Experience management: Speech and text analytics, Voice of the customer/experience management. * Workforce engagement: Quality and performance management, workforce management, and UCaaS. That greater confidence doesn’t necessarily translate into more effective customer engagement. Verint found that “highly confident respondents are 3.5 times more likely to think their companies’ use of digital channels was very effective.” Yes, these organizations have lower cost-to-serve, but it comes at a steep price – customer dissatisfaction and increasing rage. See More: Why Data Privacy and Customer Experience Are Not at Opposite Ends THE MOST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY STARTS WITH THE CUSTOMER Only by starting with a detailed understanding, developed through the lens of the buyer-customer, of all digital-physical-social interaction points and channels, content, context, expectations, and tollgates can an organization deliver a consistently valued experience over the lifecycle of the relationship. That doesn’t mean automation doesn’t have a crucial role in customer experience — quite the opposite. Technology is a powerful enabler when matched to customer preferences and interaction expectations. Let’s take self-service support as an example. Countless studies have shown that when customers have an issue that they consider important, they want to talk to a human. Pronto. Self-service is fine for interactions, including discovering pricing, managing their profiles, and order status. Following your customers’ engagement and experience preferences will appropriately balance automation with human interaction at the micro-moment level. And it works every time. It’ll also optimize your cost to serve. For example, let’s talk about how speech analytics helps to understand customers. FirstsourceOpens a new window is a provider of business process management in the banking and financial services, customer services, telecom and media, and healthcare sectors. They used Verint speech/text analytics and transcripts to build a predictor model and identify customer segments likely to be “Super Detractors” (i.e., would likely give a 0, 1, or 2 on an NPS survey). The speech analytics categories are used to understand interaction drivers and how Firstsource should reach out to recover and convert detractors into prompters. IT COMES DOWN TO MINDSET Every business is wholly dependent on its customers. You can ‘guess’ what your customers want and spend endless cycles trying to get it right. Or you can invite strategic customers to partner with you to deliver the experience and value that will keep them loyal. They will gladly do this out of self-interest. I advise evolving your culture to embrace the customer first – become experience-led. According to a recent McKinsey report, experience-led companies have twice the revenue growth as their peers. Companies sticking to an automation strategy to lower costs are trading short-term gains for long-term success. What is your approach toward CX strategy? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you! Image Source: Shutterstock MORE ON CX (CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE) * How To Transform Customer Experience Using the Cloud * Data as Currency: Consumers Willing to Pay for Personalized Experiences * How the Right Steps and Technology Improve Employee and Customer Experience * How Marketers Can Reach Customers With an Evolved Buyer Journey About Expert Contributors: The Expert Contributor program is designed to help kickstart meaningful conversations around the priorities and challenges most critical to C-level executives. The insights and perspectives will help CIOs tackle what’s most important to them. We are always looking for industry thinkers who can help set the narrative for our enterprise audience. To know more about this program, and submit your ideas, reach out to the Spiceworks News & Insights Editorial team at editorial-toolbox@ziffdavis.com Customer Experience SHARE THIS ARTICLE: Join Spiceworks to get the latest Tech News & Insights newsletter delivered to your inbox! Join Spiceworks Christine Crandell President, New Business Strategies opens a new window opens a new window opens a new window opens a new window Christine has over 25 years of marketing experience, and is a recognized thought leader, speaker and author with expertise in corporate strategy, CX and emerging technologies. She has been published in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Huffington Post and has been quoted in several books on marketing and technology. Christine has keynoted and spoken at over 30 conferences on CX and business strategy. She has directly contributed to creating over $2.7B in value for clients like Oracle, Great Place to Work Institute, Santa Clara University, PayScale, Selligent, New Pig Corporation, Prime Therapeutics, Lithium and McKesson. Recognized by SDL as a CX Master in 2015, and one of three “B2B Luminary” by MarketingProfs in 2013, she was also Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Women in 2010 as established by Silicon Valley Business Journal. With stints as EVP Marketing, Business Development & Alliances at Egenera, CMO at Ariba, she has also held management positions with SAP, Oracle and PriceWaterhouse. She holds a Masters in Business Administration from Florida Atlantic University and a Doctorate from Golden Gate University. Do you still have questions? Head over to the Spiceworks Community to find answers. Take me to Community POPULAR ARTICLES 95% of Marketers Find the Ability To Predict Pipeline Outcomes Crucial for Success Why It Is Time for the Ad Industry to Demand Standardization AI-Generated Content Not Against Its Policies: Google Clarifies RECOMMENDED READS Customer Experience 55% OF RETAIL CHATBOT USERS DON’T TRUST CHATBOTS TO RESOLVE THEIR ISSUES AI in Marketing SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT: GENERATIVE AI AS A TEAMMATE Content Marketing MAKE YOUR LOCALIZED MARKETING STAND OUT ON FACEBOOK FinTech HOW ARE INSURTECHS DRIVING THE BIGGEST INSURANCE INDUSTRY CHANGES? Big Data DATA AS CURRENCY: CONSUMERS WILLING TO PAY FOR PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES Customer Experience 5 DIGITAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT TRENDS BRANDS SHOULD KNOW THIS YEAR Go to mobile version WE CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY If you consent, we and our partners can store and access personal information on your device to provide a more personalised browsing experience. This is accomplished through processing personal data collected from browsing data stored in cookies. You can provide/withdraw consent and object to processing based on a legitimate interest at any time by clicking on the ‘Manage Preferences’ button.Our Privacy Policy WE AND OUR PARTNERS PROCESS DATA TO: Store and/or access information on a device. Personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Our Partners Reject All I Accept More Options