Your Customers Deserve a Great Experience: Are You Delivering?

Organizations are struggling to differentiate themselves in a growing pool of competitors. Traditional approaches to the “Four P's” — products, price point, place dominance, promotion — no longer cut it when it comes to winning and keeping customers. As a result, businesses are turning to customer experience (CX) as a competitive differentiator. And for many brands, it's becoming a unique cornerstone.

But CX has hit a wall across industries because companies are relying on outdated approaches and technologies to try and solve complex engagement problems, generating frustration for consumers and businesses alike. Customers want to engage with brands that not only respond to their needs, but anticipate them, and match the rhythm of their lives. On the other hand businesses have spent billions of dollars on customer experience, but often see little return on investment — they know their existing CX approaches aren’t cutting it. Sixty-three percent of respondents to a recent survey by my firm, Pega, agreed that mass marketing to customers is a thing of the past. The one-size-fits-all approach is no longer relevant, annoying and driving away customers more often than not.

What’s missing when it comes to truly successful CX? The answer lies in a business’s ability to read and react to a customer’s context, and use that insight to take immediate action in ways that are relevant and meet that individual’s evolving needs. Like when a customer’s cable box stops working, so they visit the provider’s website to find a quick fix — but can’t find anything to help because it’s lost in a sea of pages, offers, promotions and a million tons of irrelevant noise. This company didn’t sense the problem and clear a path, which increased their customer's frustration and maybe their likelihood to churn. To provide a truly differentiated experience, businesses have to be able to activate and process real-time information, and immediately pivot to get in front of that kind of problem.

These moments of opportunity with customers open and close within seconds, as they’re exposed to a massive number of competitive messages from other companies each day (current studies say 6000 per day). Businesses only get a second — or less — to identify a customer’s needs and react with messages or offers that are actually relevant and helpful. If businesses don’t take context into consideration when engaging a customer, they can’t hope to stay relevant, and in extreme cases, may push that customer into the arms of a competitor.

Businesses can benefit massively when they can “re-decision” a customer. This means constantly reassessing an individual’s needs as an interaction is actively taking place, sometimes 10, 20 or even 50 times within a single experience. That’s where real-time data and decisioning capabilities comes into play. If they can activate real-time data streams and leverage predictive analytics “in the moment” to understand that customer context, they can take immediate action with that customer in-channel, and make that experience much more relevant. That’s what real-time decisioning is all about. And when done right, it not only enhances a business’ ability to enhance the experience, but it can drive improvements in response and conversion performance.

Related Article: Elevate the Customer Experience Through Timing and Context

Relying on data that’s a week, a day or even an hour old is no longer effective, or even practical. Differentiating customer experience requires a framework that can harness and activate data, and make it available for immediate use. These are the four cornerstone capabilities that together can power this kind of real-time decisioning strategy:

It’s imperative for businesses to incorporate real-time decisioning into their customer experience strategies to help ensure their customers feel like they matter to the brands they interact with. In a very noisy market, understanding a customer’s unique context and providing hyper-personalized experiences can keep a brand miles ahead of the competition — and provide hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental customer value, at the same time.

Related Article: Decisioning — The Only Way to Accelerate Analytics to Value