What is a Customer Experience Solution? Everything You Need to Know

A recent report by Forrester states how 2023 will be a year of reckoning for customer experience programs. As companies struggle to keep up with evolving customer expectations while navigating a turbulent economy, it is vital to unify data into complete profiles and unearth actionable intelligence. This helps organizations to showcase a complete picture of customers, including their needs, preferences, interactions, and more. So, what is a customer experience solution? Keep reading to find out what it is, how it works, and why you should have one.

Why is Customer Experience Management Important?

CX Management is crucial to business growth and success in an age where customer expectations are only growing. A deeper understanding of customers’ perceptions and feelings to better cater to their needs across the lifetime of their relationship: prior to the initial purchase and extending through the renewal or repeat purchase. Through interactions with a brand’s products and services, CX Management enables organizations to

• Take an omnichannel approach to customer engagement and respond to customer needs in a proactive and responsive manner
• Boost customer lifetime value by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, enabling repeat purchases, and enhancing the likelihood of them becoming brand advocates
• Reduce customer churn and turnover, thus curtailing the expenses of acquiring new customers and retaining them
• Enable competitive advantage by offering a superior customer experience compared to competitors
• Improve brand value in the eyes of the consumer by delivering on promises, providing high-quality products and services, and being responsive to evolving needs
• Enjoy higher customer retention through the quick and proactive resolution of issues – leading to a positive experience
• Reduce the costs of marketing while driving higher sales and profits, thus improving the overall performance of the organization 

What is a Customer Experience Solution?

According to McKinsey, a Customer Experience (CX) Solution is “structured to help meet companies where they are in their CX transformation journey.” Thus, Customer Experience Solutions help organizations:

• Enable real-time customer, operational, and financial data collection: There is ample data to use and better understand what products customers have bought and what they are likely to purchase next. These purchase and preference patterns help CX Solutions deliver critical insight across the sales funnel.
• Predict customer satisfaction and value: The insights from the data collected aid organizations in understanding what kind of customers are reaching out for which product at what time and use this data to be more proactive in fulfilling fluctuating needs. CX solutions help organizations understand the business value at stake while enabling them to prioritize customer journeys in a way that drives the best results.
• Develop and empower employees’ mindset and approaches around CX: CX solutions seamlessly empower employees with capabilities that help businesses reap the benefits of CX. These capabilities in turn help businesses to reap maximum benefits from customer data analytics and insights and help them succeed.
• Build robust CX capabilities to deliver effective CX Solutions: The solutions in question empower enterprises to take a customer-centric approach and eliminate a lot of the guesswork related to the needs and wants of the customers.  

What to Look for in a Customer Experience Solution?

As businesses realize the importance of CX, there is widespread interest in adopting a CX solution to streamline customer acquisition and retention processes. While several CX solutions are available in the market today, it is important to look for specific features and capabilities. These include:

1. Tools to collect customer data: When looking for a CX solution, choosing one that offers modern tools to collect customer data at every touchpoint is important. The continuous assimilation and analysis of customer data helps investigate existing experiences and provides direction on improving future experiences.
2. Built-in surveys: While looking for a CX solution, it is important to look for one with built-in surveys. CX surveys can be a great source of insight into your efforts – from the horse’s mouth. From customer satisfaction surveys to customer service surveys, these can gauge the level of customer satisfaction and help you ascertain the success of your actions. They also help evaluate case management, uncover customer issues, and find new ways to improve the overall experience.
3. Security controls: As CX solutions gather, store, and process extremely sensitive customer data, it is important to ensure they have the required governance controls in place. With data security and privacy regulations becoming increasingly stringent, your CX solution needs to stick to rules for collecting and managing data and ensure compliance with an evolving set of requirements.
4. Intuitive dashboards: Let’s face it. The amount of customer data that needs to be analyzed daily is humongous. Therefore, the CX solution you choose should have the ability to transform raw data into visual pieces of art. A solution that delivers intuitive and interactive dashboards and reports can help you get a clear, end-to-end picture of your customers and ensure you have all the data you need at your fingertips.
5. Integration APIs: If you want to enable seamless CX management, you need to be able to connect your CX solution to your favorite tools. When looking for a CX solution, look for integration APIs that enable seamless integration with your existing CRM, ERP, predictive analytics, and/or helpdesk solutions for quicker and more effective decision-making.

How to Approach Customer Experience Management?

Customer expectations are evolving all the time. As the gap between what customers expect and what companies deliver constantly widens, there is increased pressure to build an approach that aligns with rapidly changing expectations. Since customer experiences influence both loyalty and repeat purchase behaviors, here is how you can approach Customer Experience Management in the most optimum manner:

• Assess current state processes to identify gaps and challenges that exist in your current approach to CX management
• Define desired future state, including how you want to respond to your customers and engage with them in better ways
• Deeply understand customer needs by collecting data about them at every touchpoint and analyzing them
• Track customer journeys to get deep insight into their behavior across different devices and channels
• Co-create innovation by investing in the right CX solution and opting for capabilities that align with your CX goals
• Test and implement the CX solution to get the CX management ball rolling and deliver the level of experience and service your customers expect

Customer Experience Solution Success Stories

The right approach to CX can truly transform brand loyalty and increase business revenue for any organization. Let’s look at two success stories that underpin the need for a robust CX solution:

Success Story #1

Customer challenge: A leading credit bureau company experienced a 30% customer retention loss that translated into $34 million. The company realized they had to up their CX game and looked for a partner who could completely refresh how products were developed and customers were engaged to ensure they delivered on expectations and provided substantial value.

Solution: Customer Experience Agency Macquarium, now acquired by Synoptek, undertook the assignment by infusing CX/UX best practices into tactical projects and enhancing capabilities to meet quality standards. By creating robust CX implementation strategies, frameworks, design standards, and governance processes, Macquarium successfully established an Experience Management Center of Excellence and designed a playbook that could be used as an ongoing reference guide to evolve to the next level of CX maturity. 

Benefits: The design, development, and implementation of a robust CX strategy and reference guide has enabled the credit bureau company to become an experience-led growth company. The CX solution delivered is now helping the company support its brand strategy and drive continuous efforts toward defining, structuring, and evolving customer experience as a discipline across the enterprise. 

Success Story #2

Customer challenge: An electric utility serving 1.5 million customers was looking to capitalize on the emerging trend of smart homes and smart devices and curate a new digital brand experience to target their modern, tech-savvy customers. 

Solution: Macquarium started with the implementation project with a detailed evaluation of the power company’s e-commerce platforms and technical infrastructure to understand the integration requirements with internal processes and operations for billing, shipping, accounting, and customer service. Once the technical foundation was identified, Macquarium created a new brand story, strategic framework, and style guide that reflected the new mission. 

Benefits: The world-class brand, identity, and e-commerce experience have enabled the power company to offer more value to its customers. The Digital Experience Solution’s catalog has steadily grown and currently provides a broader and deeper range of products, including Smart Homes, Art Filters, Appliances, Electronics, Furniture, and Home & Living. Today, the website witnesses an average of 50K visits and is able to engage customers on a variety of levels, with brand awareness and customer base expanding across Alabama, the Southeast, and beyond. E-commerce sales are expected to surpass the $43 million mark by 2023.

Boost Your Customer Experience Management with Synoptek

Organizations that excel at customer experience management are most likely to succeed in today’s volatile business landscape. As attracting new customers is five times more expensive than retaining existing ones, the right approach to CX greatly improves these retention rates. Furthermore, CX offers an array of benefits, including better sales, improved ROI, and stronger customer relationships.

If you want to improve how your customers engage and interact with your brand while being at the forefront of their needs, you must invest in a modern CX solution to deliver more effective customer engagements.

At Synoptek, we provide a comprehensive set of Customer Experience Services. We can help you become a customer-centric brand and empower you with the capabilities you need to deliver positive customer experiences, enhance customer loyalty, and create sustainable business growth.