Innovative products have much better possibilities to succeed, if they are introduced to the market in the right time widow. The right timing is equally crucial for the roll-out of new ideas within companies.
According to a recent survey by Gartner, eighty-nine percent of companies surveyed plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016. Many other studies show that now is the time when companies consider customer experience (CX) to be critical to their success and plan to increase their efforts to become CX leaders in their industry.
Company strategies have now been defined for 2015. It is the time to turn the strategies into concrete actions. For those, who focus on CX, one or more items from the following list may be on the agenda:
- Defining what CX means for the company
- Clarifying the CX goals and communicating them throughout the company
- Engaging teams and individuals to defining actions an taking the strategy to a concrete level
- Improving the ways the company listens to customers
- Offering customers easier ways to give feedback
- Investing in the data analysis – both quantitative and qualitative – to ensure that feedback is turned into useful insights
- Organizing internal communication to ensure that all employees have good visibility to customer opinions
- Defining roles and responsibilities to ensure that actions are taken upon feedback
- Agreeing the use of metrics
- Telling the customer what the company has done based on their feedback
Future trends also require attention from the CX perspective. Questions about digitalization, mobility, security, privacy, 3D printing, cloud computing among other things will impact the CX of products and services.
Competing on the basis of customer experience is enabled by a customer centric mindset – both at organizational and individual level, by CX-related structures and practices, and effective communications.
Competitive edge on customer experience is not developed overnight – but steps on the development path start paying off well before the destination is reached.
