Reinventing Experience Management for Next-Gen Customer Expectations

As businesses navigate their digital transformation journey, a delightful experience is no more just a buzz phrase.

It’s a robust and essential trend that’s transforming the entire digital ecosystem. 

We live in an era where users interact with market leaders like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. And they very well know what a great user experience means, and they expect something near it. 

So does it mean that a bit of friction in the overall onboarding process would drastically impact conversions and sales? 

Unfortunately, yes!

Being digital not only necessitates enterprises to adopt cutting-edge technologies; they have to reinvent and precisely align their consumer experience in a way that meets consumers’ demands.  Undoubtedly, customer experience management is quickly becoming the cornerstone of the new-age business model. 

Let’s dig deeper and understand the importance of customer experience management and how businesses can yield ROI by catering to the needs of the next generation of always-on customers. 

Role of Customer Experience (CX) for Business Success

The way a business thinks about customer experience has a profound impact on how you look at your product and services as a whole. This is a crucial aspect of why obsessing over a rich customer experience is vital. 

A happy customer is the one that becomes a loyal customer, and if a business knows what exactly customers need when they first interact with their brand, they’re on the right track. 

Moreover, the best marketing investment is the customer itself, who promotes your brand through word-of-mouth marketing, and advocates your services. Stats reveal 90% of individuals are much more likely to trust a recommended business even if strangers suggest it. 

However, everything relies mainly on how customers feel when they interact with your brand. Hence, businesses need to put their best foot forward to create a seamless experience for their customers by carefully examining the most crucial aspects of their customer journey and their product/service niche. 

Does your product solve the exact issues that customers think about before landing? Does your product or service deliver outstanding performance? Are your customers delighted by the type of attention your customer support representatives provide while solving an issue? 

These are perhaps the most known examples of what aspects must be considered when crafting a great experience for your customers.  

What’s the Missing Ingredient? 

You would surely relate to this- many established brands are becoming obsolete while most startups are navigating business success in a short period. 

This scenario indicates that today’s consumers hardly focus on established brand names or consider prices as the only driving factor for purchase decisions; they need personalized experiences and should be able to drive value for money. 

All these things in a couple of seconds! 

Let’s focus on aspects that can help brands cater to the ever-increasing expectations of consumers in the modern digital age. 

Improving the Product Experience

Creating intuitive designs and personalized experiences is a good start when it comes to enhancing the overall user experience; however, at the end of the day, product experience matters a lot. 

Understanding the exact needs of your consumers is the first step, and catering them with the exemplary product/service that solves the purpose is the game-changer. 

In short, the strategy of considering the conventional USPs isn’t going to work much in an era where brands need to look forward since customers are in a constant state of change.  Customer preferences change every day, which is perhaps why enterprises must try to listen to their customers and incorporate their exact demands in their products. 

Now that may seem a bit complicated, especially if a brand hasn’t done it before. However, relying on predictive analytics tools and customer surveys could help businesses design products that consumers love. 

Seamless Onboarding- The Game Plan 

The first interaction with a brand through the website or mobile application decides whether the company would have a loyal customer or not. 

User onboarding majorly impacts conversions and also decides customer return rates. But unfortunately, many businesses ignore the importance of a seamless onboarding process. 

As per stats, the global app abandonment rate in 2019 was 25%. This means that 25% percent of users abandoned an application after only using it once. Now what’s worrisome here is that the market is flooded with numerous options for competition in almost every niche. If not offered the best onboarding experience right from the moment they first interact with a brand, users would be encouraged to switch. 

So what’s the ideal way to enhance the user onboarding experience? 

Well, adding a seamless signup experience through social login can minimize sign-up fatigue. This ensures users keep engaging with the brand without squandering their precious time in creating an account and can quickly sign-up using their existing social media accounts. 

Treat Customer Support as the Part of User Experience 

We can’t deny that no product is so understandable and usable that users won’t need to contact the support team. Every user has its queries depending on their use case. This means they will reach customer support all day and night through email, chat, and calls. Hence, ignoring customer support while crafting the best user experience makes no sense for businesses to make their next launch a big hit. 

Yes, customer support is the most underrated tool for consumer experience design, which can severely impact conversions and lead generation. Businesses need to ensure that every touchpoint in their journey and need is met to ensure they’re delighted. Failing to which would lead to negative consequences for a brand. 

Furthermore, businesses should consider prioritizing users, listening to their queries, and apologizing whenever their users are dissatisfied. 

Final Thoughts 

Enterprises need to understand that staying connected to their consumers in real-time, taking feedback regarding their actual needs, and implementing the same is necessary to ensure that businesses remain up and running. 

Moreover, when delivering a unified user experience, enterprises should always keep their customers first and shouldn’t hesitate to tailor their product/services whenever required.