The Customer Show highlights why customer experience is still #1
The Customer Show is one of Australia's biggest conferences focused on customer experience and customer service. With over 1000 attendees attending the CX event at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre, it's a fantastic chance for marketing professionals, HR heads, and other specialists involved in both customer experience and employee experience to come together and hear cutting-edge research from the world of CX.
The conference is a sure sign that, despite the staggering advances that companies around the world are making in fields like tech, AI, pharmaceuticals, and design, customer experience is still the number one priority of many client-facing businesses across the globe.
Why is customer experience so important?
While the quality of your products and services - which might mean how long your products last, how many features your products have, or how flexible your services are - will attract new customers to your brand, customer experience impacts whether existing customers stay with you. No matter how good your products are, if your customers have a bad experience with your company, you can say goodbye to their patronage. It follows that companies should be investing just as much time and energy into offering a great customer experience as they do into other aspects of business operations. Customer experience includes customer service, but it also affects every other stage of a company's output, including product design and marketing. CX is really just about meeting the needs of your customers, whatever they are.Good CX can:
- Promote brand loyalty, encouraging customers to shop with you again and again
- Encourage customers to promote your brand via word of mouth by recommending you to friends and family
- Reduce the overall cost of serving customers because less time is spent on complaints and other customer service elements
- Increase customer retention rates
What's more, yours won't be the only company investing time and resources into improving CX. Today, many businesses understand the importance of CX, and the bar is set very high both for existing companies and new entrants to the market. These days, you'll need a customer satisfaction rate of around 90% just to keep up with the competition. If you want to beat it, you'll need to do even better.
5 ways to make customer experience your priority
Unfortunately, great CX doesn't just come naturally; it's important to invest resources into improving your CX all the time. And CX standards are always changing, which is why this is an arena you'll never be able to coast in. Let's take a look at five ways that you can improve the customer experience in your company.
1. Learn how to use customer intelligence
Customer intelligence, or CI, refers to the process of gathering customer data and drawing insights from it. Harnessing the power of CI allows companies to find out more about their customers, including who they are and what they really want, in order to tailor the customer experience to these factors. In order to make the most of the customer data that comes your way on a daily basis, it's important to invest in a quality CI platform that will help you to collect, store, and analyse customer data in order to gain meaningful insights into your audience.
2. Don't forget about employee experience
Some companies might think that EX has nothing to do with CX. But they would be wrong. In order to identify the link between EX and CX, it's important to understand why EX is so important. Employees who have a positive experience and feel engaged at work are more likely to understand the purpose of their role and strive to achieve good results consistently. This added effort that engaged employees make to achieve results contributes positively to customer service; customers served by happy, friendly, helpful staff members are far more likely to feel positively about their experience than those served by disengaged or reluctant staff.
3. Look beyond the competition
When you're setting goals for CX teams, it can be tempting to look to your direct competitors to set a benchmark. This can be limiting and means that too often, companies in smaller, niche markets aren't setting their aims high enough. Look beyond your immediate competition to CX principles used outside of your industry to ensure that the time and money you invest in improving CX is well spent. If you settle for 'good', all it takes is an ambitious start-up with higher standards of CX to threaten your spot at the top.
4. Measure CX every step of the way
There's no point in spending a large chunk of your company's resources on customer experience improvements if you've got no idea whether they're working. It's important to implement various procedures that can help you to measure and track customer experience, and this is usually done using surveys that enable customers to directly feed back on their experience. Popular metrics include the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures how likely a customer is to recommend a brand to their family and friends, and the Customer Effort Score (CES), which measures how much effort customers have to put in to reach their goals.
5. Go digital
No matter what industry you work in, we can guarantee there are ways to improve customer experience by embracing digital technology. Technology can reduce wait times, increase customisation, and improve accessibility for those customers who need it. A common example of using technology to improve the customer experience is chatbots, which can be used to answer customer queries online with minimal wait time, which in turn reduces the strain on human advisors, who can then deal with more complicated customer queries more quickly. Online dashboards, AI automation, and interactive voice response (IVR) can all contribute to improved CX scores across multiple industries.
Book your tickets today
If you're a CX professional or you're responsible for improving customer experience or employee engagement in your workplace, why not come along to The Customer Show? The Customer Show is a CX expo designed to connect like-minded CX professionals and offer a platform to industry insiders who want to share their knowledge of contemporary CX strategies with others.
Contact us today to find out more about this event or book your tickets now!View the agenda to see the program for all 3 conferences and complete speaker line up!
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