�鶹ԭ�� CX Archives - �鶹ԭ�� Africa News Center

The Value that Customer Experience Brings to Africa – Survey

�鶹ԭ�� News — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 14:15:52 +0000

Almost all of the respondents (94%) to a recent customer experience (CX) survey, conducted by ITWeb in partnership with �鶹ԭ�� Africa, said CX was crucial, given today’s climate.

Marc Emert, solutions specialist for �鶹ԭ�� Africa Customer Experience, agrees: “Customer experience is increasingly important and is seen as a key differentiator. Additionally, today’s customers are far less forgiving and quicker to leave a brand or business entirely because of a poor experience.”

He adds, “Offering customers a personalized, relevant, engaging and enriched customer experience is a key element of customer retention and reducing churn.”

This is supported by the survey respondents, 37% of whom regard CX as a valuable tool to create better customer experiences, with 37% also viewing CX as a key component of business survival.

Nearly a quarter (22%) see CX as valuable in building customer trust. Some 39% believe that an elevated CX experience is crucial to customer retention, with 15% viewing it as key to customer acquisition. Nearly half (46%) believe the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Emert agrees: “Customer experience is key to both customer acquisition and retention. From the very first interaction, such as an online purchase transaction, customers have expectations for personalization. As a customer I have no desire to sift through hundreds of search results to find what I’m looking for. A poor service experience will result in me taking my business elsewhere. CX is key to both acquisition and retention, far from mutually exclusive.”

Unified service

The vast majority (88%) see the CX function as unifying marketing, commerce, sales and customer service, while 12% see CX as something standalone and separate. “A truly personalised approach will consolidate data from various customer touch points and interactions on all of the various channels including Web site, sales reps, call centre and so on. This is why it’s challenging to sell to a customer who’s had a previous issue with your business, even if it was with a different division.”

Only 59% of organisations have clearly defined customer journey systems, designed to deliver an effective, memorable CX. “This means that 41% of customer journeys are highly fragmented and non-iterative,” explains Emert.

Asked whether their CX systems are installed on-premises or whether they use a cloud-based system, 30% opted for on-premises, 25% were in the cloud and 16% used a combination of the two.

Only 59% of organisations have clearly defined customer journey systems.

“We’re seeing a significant adoption of CX SaaS offerings. Customers are looking for fit-for-purpose solutions with scalability and continuous innovation.”

In nearly half (43%) of the organisations surveyed, the CIO or IT were in charge of CX, with 16% saying it was the responsibility of the business or the CEO. “CMOs and CXOs are ultimately the stakeholders driving this approach.

However, board buy-in is required to ensure the successful adoption of CX-centric software solutions.” Asked to rate their organisation’s ability to deliver a customer experience, half (49%) of respondents said it was well thought out and executed, while 44% rated it average.

For the purposes of the survey, an ‘intelligent enterprise’ is described as one that applies advanced technologies and best practices in order to make it resilient, successful and sustainable. Just over half (54%) of respondents said their organisation was on trend when it came to being an intelligent organisation, with 16% saying they were behind the times and 31% saying it was correct in theory but not in practice.

Personal conversations

Almost all (97%) of respondents agreed with the statement: To build customer trust, it’s as important to build and maintain conversations with them in person, as well as online and from places they are most comfortable.

“Conversations are irrelevant if they are not personal, engaging and enriching.”

Customers will share data provided there is an element of return in the form of personalization.

Emert says that one-directional spam SMSes could arguably be regarded as a conversation, but he prefers to use the term engagement – and engagements need to be relevant, personalized and, most importantly, on the customer’s terms, i.e. on their channel of choice (WhatsApp, e-mail) and strictly consensual.

Over half (56%) of respondents felt that the challenges of COVID-19 highlighted both strengths and weaknesses around CX within the organisation. A relatively high percentage (65%) said their organisation implemented CX strategies based on the COVID-related lockdown restrictions.

Information learned from these strategies was already being used to make changes to customer journeys by 19% of respondents, while another 19% said it was going to be used to form part of how they adjust in 2021, with 60% agreeing that both of these statements applied to them.

57% of respondents said COVID-19 had encouraged adjustments in the frequency with which their customer, experiential and operational data is reviewed for changes to operational practices.

Asked how often they think experiential and operational data should be reviewed for changes to operational practices, 41% said monthly, 26% said biannually and 15% said weekly; 10% said annually. Emert vehemently disagrees with this, saying, “Data is dynamic and should be viewed, interpreted and acted on in real-time. A customer today isn’t the same customer in a month. You can’t establish a bi-directional, mutually beneficial relationship (between customer and brand) if the data is ‘stale’.”

Who is in charge?

When it comes to leading the development of the CX journey, 57% believed that it should be led by IT, while 43% believed CX should be a department all of its own. Of those who favoured separate CX departments, half (49%) believed it should collaborate insights and develop solutions together with IT.

“IT has a fundamental role to play in ensuring an adopted solution fits into the IT landscape. An integrated solution is the best solution. However, the CX function should lead the initiative with IT’s support – not the other way around.”

Of organisations that currently employ CX initiatives, 42% said they were focused on different products at different touch-points and channels. 18% said they were singularly focused on one overall experience with the organisation.

Finally, more than half (53%) of respondents said that forward-thinking companies needed to consider the customer experience in order to adjust to the next normal in 2021 and beyond. 38% said data and security should be a focus, and 9% said POPIA compliance. “All three are equally important,” says Emert.

“It’s impossible to offer a personalised, relevant and engaging customer interaction without data. However, this data needs to be consensually shared by the customer. Customers will share data provided there is an element of return in the form of personalisation.”

About the survey

ITWeb, in partnership with �鶹ԭ�� CX, conducted a CX survey to examine what South African businesses expect the new normal for 2021 and beyond to look like.

Focusing on the value that CX brings to the business, the survey ran online during November/December 2020 and asked, among other things:

1. Whether organisations have clearly defined customer journey systems, designed to deliver effective, memorable CX.

2. How organisations rate their ability to deliver a customer experience.

3. Who’s in charge of CX within the organisation.

A total of 356 responses was captured, with 54% of respondents being at executive or middle management level, and working in a range of industries.

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Customer Personalization Remains Challenging

�鶹ԭ�� News — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:30:57 +0000

Despite much talk of a focus on customer experience, most eCommerce sites still fail to provide effective recommendations to consumers. There are several reasons for this.

Although product recommendations by eCommerce sites have become a familiar sight to online shoppers, it seems many of these retailers are still missing the mark. A recent global survey by �鶹ԭ�� has indicated that three out of four online shoppers worldwide fail to regularly see product recommendations that interest them.

There are numerous reasons why so few shoppers receive meaningful referrals, but perhaps the single biggest one comes down to personalization , according to Amrish Singh, customer experience solution architect at �鶹ԭ��.

He explains that true personalization is all about the brand connecting with the customer on a personal level. It is about understanding their past, knowing what they are doing now and, most crucially, how to influence their future through personalized messages and recommendations.

“The vast majority of marketeers believe that personalization is the key to customer experience (CX) success. After all, it is believed that at least two thirds of online customers prefer to buy from brands that deliver relevant recommendations. Of course, the challenge is to do this without invading the customer’s privacy,” he says.

“In fact, there are three challenges to be overcome to ensure that you have the right customer and are targeting them correctly. Firstly, the data needed to achieve true personalization is found in different systems and departments, so it is essentially siloed. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to integrate this or to create a centralized data management platform to provide a true 360-degree view of the customer.”

It is important to know your customer at every possible touch-point, in order to deliver personalization that creates lasting loyalty. This, in turn, boils down to the company’s ability to collect customer data effectively and then to analyse it to gain deeper insight, suggests Singh.

“Remember that when you have information silos, you will always have a fragmented view of the customer. Without a single view, your customer engagement strategy will miss critical opportunities – basically, you won’t know when the exact right time is to market something to them.”

“The second challenge is data privacy, as regulations governing this are very strict and any failure on your part here exposes you to legal and brand reputation risks. The way to solve this is to give the customer the tools needed to manage their own data. That way, they can tell you what products they would like to have marketed to them.”

Finally, there is also the issue of the inability to manage data volumes. Singh points to a plethora of touchpoints that exist, which create vast amounts of information. However, many organisations don’t have the flexibility or agility to manage these many and varied touch-points properly.

“There is one other important part of personalized CX, and that is to ensure that you keep the promise you offer to customers in terms of the service or delivery you are supplying. You need to understand the back-end processes – such as invoicing, delivery schedules and what is available in the warehouse – and connect this expertise to the front end. In this way, you can ensure the customer receives the product that they ordered or a suitable replacement, and delivered according to the estimated delivery time or quicker.”

CX is all about creating a living, breathing customer profile that delivers a 360-degree view, adds Singh. For this you must gather three forms of data: first party, where the customer tells you about themselves; second party, which is about what they are doing; and third party, which is more in-depth data from social media platforms.

“True personalization is about much more than sending a client an automated ‘happy birthday’ message. It is about knowing specific details so you can deliver a specific service. A good example might be knowing the client recently bought a new phone from your store, because you have that data, so send them a personalized birthday voucher offering them a discount on a new phone cover. This is the ultimate aim of CX – to create hyper-personalization, or the so-called ‘Segment of One’. Remember the key to engagement: the right content at the right time via the right channel at the right price,” he concludes.

Amrish Singh is customer experience solution architect at �鶹ԭ��.

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