The words customer experience are buzzing throughout every industry, especially retail. From financial services to technology, companies are setting aside their traditional marketing practices to focus on the customer – becoming customer-centric. Recently, CMO.com compiled some of their top stories focused on customer experience and the results were clear – companies must be customer focused to succeed. Research shows that companies that embrace the customer-centric view have a higher average order value, higher customer retention, higher RIO, higher brand awareness, and higher customer satisfaction rates.
Amit Ahuja, VP of ecosystem development at Adobe, joined CMO to discuss the customer experience movement and how it can benefit retailers. According to Ahuja, implementing a customer experience management (CXM) strategy is the only way for companies to create a fluid customer experience across all channels.
“The broader business landscape is evolving and changing very rapidly. So, if you look at any industry, in any geography, every company is going through the same fundamental challenge and problem right now, which is consumer expectations are continually rising,” he said. “People expect more and more out of the companies that they give their business to. And every single brand has an opportunity every day to either win a new customer, retain a customer, or lose a customer.”
Companies need to understand that building a memorable, positive customer experience is more than just traditional marketing. It’s about getting to know your customer and their preferences on a deeper level. “Delivering any meaningful experience to any customer requires a comprehensive and current understanding of that customer, and at the heart of that understanding lies the real-time customer profile. That profile is made up of all of the different data signals about individual customers and lives in an accessible dashboard, empowering cross-functional teams to deliver personalized experiences—at scale,” explained Ahuja.
When implementing a CXM strategy, many organizations hit roadblocks because of poor data management and teamwork. “I would say that a lot of times companies fail because they get stuck within these organizational silos and they’re never really fully able to deliver on the promise of CXM. Instead, they need to make sure that they have a team of individuals that are working cross-functionally, across the organization, that are committed to aligning on CXM,” he said. “These teams become almost like a center of excellence and are instrumental in breaking down data silos and building that single view.”
For retailers looking to engage new customers, retain current customers, and increase brand value, building a CXM strategy that is shared across teams is one of the first steps to success.
“At the end of the day, what brands are trying to do is personalization at scale across the whole customer journey to better understand and satisfy that customer no matter where they are within that journey, whether it’s the top of the funnel or the bottom and be able to offer the exact right personalized experience. To do that requires a massive scale,” said Ahuja.
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