By Marc LeCuyer, Vice President & General Manager, Canada, ServiceNow
Innovation and investment in customer experience (CX) have seen exponential growth as we’ve entered our new world of work (and rightfully so). As enterprises digitize their business and customers raise their expectations, demanding increasingly personalized, instantaneous and proactive interactions from brands – new strategies and tools should be considered to meet their evolving needs. While business leaders evaluate the merits of competing business priorities, the value of continuously perfecting the customer experience should not be underestimated.
Great experiences drive customer loyalty – one of the most important drivers of profitability in today’s highly competitive, digital landscape. Yet organizations still struggle with fragmented legacy technology and siloed systems that cannot deliver the modern, digital experiences employees want and customers expect. Companies need to modernize and digitally transform to deliver better end-to-end customer experiences and become more operationally efficient. Speed, agility, and efficiency have become the key requirements for customer service. But in order to enable this, workflows need to connect the front, middle, and back office.
Modernizing CX through experience insights
The digital world demands seamless experiences for every customer and employee. And there’s no margin for error. According to research from PwC, 59 per cent of consumers will walk away from a brand they love after several bad experiences. Empathy at mass scale is the business differentiator of our time, and businesses succeed or fail based on the experiences they deliver. In turn, experience data has become the most valuable information across the enterprise.
As brands continue to become increasingly digital, this dynamic data will become readily available. So, there is no better time to invest in the modern technology and systems needed to turn this data into actionable insights. Business leaders should make these investments with the goal of anticipating customer sentiment. Then they will be able to predict and proactively resolve issues, as well as improve processes. This requires a proactive approach to customer service – one that includes responding to feedback in real-time. Utilizing data and analytics tools that pull immediate insights can help brands do away with the reactive nature of legacy techniques like those built around surveys.
Every CEO knows that delivering exceptional experiences is hard work. But leveraging the data and insights that come from every customer and employee touchpoint throughout the enterprise is the essence of creating consistently great experiences. The brands that are doing this right are transforming customer service and support. By integrating these functions, they can streamline customer interactions for a consistently convenient experience – increasing the odds of earning customer loyalty and employee retention.
Realizing the benefits of feedback-driven service
Brands can evolve their CX strategy to improve satisfaction and loyalty by adopting the latest digital customer workflows and experience management technology. By combining these modern tools into an integrated solution, service leaders can turn insights into action while redefining the experience economy at the same time. This is truly the best of both worlds for brands that are serious about delivering next-generation experiences to their customers and employees.
The quality of a brand’s customer experience is directly tied to the success of the overall business. But many still struggle with getting the insights they need to optimize service delivery and create happy, loyal customers. With joint solutions, like those offered by ServiceNow and Qualtrics, enterprises can bring experience data into workflows and easily act on those insights.
When taking this approach, the benefits to key stakeholders become clear. A ripple effect begins as customers have a more seamless service experience and agents have the tools they need to understand customer journeys and quickly resolve issues across channels. At a high level, managers get insights into key experience gaps and senior executives get visibility to tie operational metrics to C-suite priorities. With forward-thinking and continued investment in digital transformation, the most successful brands of tomorrow can deliver best-in-class customer experiences that are truly fit for the 21st century.
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Marc LeCuyer is the Vice President and General Manager, Canada at ServiceNow. Its cloud‑based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise.
