Why investing in customer experience pays off

Why is customer experience important? One of the most frequently asked questions in our industry, with one of the most obvious answers. When CX is prioritized, improvements across the board when it comes to customer loyalty, revenue and cross-sell opportunities are likely to follow and companies across the channel are already capitalizing on this.

The way in which your customers and your customers’ customers experience your products is now almost as influential as the actual products themselves. This means that if you’re not already doing so, you now need to be focusing on CX, from your choice of customer experience support structure all the way through to how your product looks and feels.

What is customer experience?

Let’s get one thing straight, Customer experience doesn’t just equate to how many 9s are in your SLA. CX encapsulates anything and everything that you do as a business to serve your customers’ needs, from delivering value in your product to providing support when things go wrong. Above all else, the customer experience journey should be one that businesses actually want to take, rather than one that is only travelled out of necessity.

The good news is that when it comes to CX, the majority of businesses want their experience to be more ‘consumer-like’ and even go so far as switching vendors to get it. This means that you can use the massive amounts of data that is at your disposal to shape your own Customer Experience plan.

The bad news is that when we talk about CX for Service Providers things become complex almost immediately. Customer experience in the channel is aimed at more than just one stakeholder, which means you have to design your customer experience for multiple people with multiple roles and multiple goals. In real terms, if you’re designing your CX journey to focus solely on James in Product, Anne in Platform is probably going to have a bad time.

Why is customer experience important?

As some companies battle it out to differentiate themselves with product features and pricing models, others are now focusing on things like simplicity, ease of use, ease of integration, accessibility, customer support and UI design. Simply put, when customers actually like to use your product, they invariably feel more loyalty towards it and are open to trying more of your ecosystem.

But this shift towards being CX-forward isn’t simply just another way for businesses to get ahead of their competition, the data is there to show just how powerful a good customer experience really is.

Here are some facts you should know:

• 80% of leaders plan to increase their budget for CX over the next year, and 70% plan to integrate generative AI into their CX journey over the next two years.
• Improving the customer experience journey has been shown to reduce customer attrition by 10 – 15%. Not only this but a better focus on CX has also proved to raise offer win rates by 20-40% and reduce customer service costs by up to 50%.
• 80% of B2B customers expect their purchase experience to be similar to that of B2C buyers.

How much of a role does support play in the customer experience journey?

How your customers have their issues resolved when things go wrong is a big part of CX overall, and its only getting bigger. One of the key trends that we are seeing from the market is the big move towards self-serve and at the centre of this shift is the ever-evolving chatbot.

Until recently chatbots have been almost universally looked down on, but gone are the days where customers actively avoid support simply because its automated. As AI capabilities grow year-on-year, people are finally starting to see the rapid, helpful responses that chatbots can give as the superior method of support. Because of this, as generative AI grows to be a more dominant part of customer experience, a lot of companies are folding their support journey into one, efficient, self-serving pathway. The customer doesn’t have to deal with long wait times and inefficient processes, and you can have your entire support system running itself, everybody wins – that is, if you have the right solution.

Overall, if you only have one takeaway let it be this – Unless you have a major focus on your customer experience journey, you need to be doing more. CX is already at the forefront for a lot of businesses, and just like in the B2C market, a lot of B2B companies are already seeing meteoric returns when they put customer experience first.