Co-Creating with Your Customers Is the Future of HD-CX
Digital has changed and impacted the lives of many, with the pandemic world increasingly reliant on online tools and technology. This year more organizations will be making an even more coherent and concerted effort to manage customer expectations, habits, and behavior. But the gulf between what many organizations deliver and what customers expect has also widened.
The line of who owns customer experience will be expanded in 2022 to involve C-level executives, operations, marketing, customer service, and technology teams. Setting a standard set of goals across the organization to form the basis of achieving a high-definition customer experience (HD-CX) to address the complex customers’ needs will be at the top of the board and C-suite agendas.
Co-Creating with Customers
More organizations realized that co-creating with customers is the secret to success in 2022. Strategic customers will be invited to the table and given a significant role in co-creating solutions.
Co-creation transforms the customer experience as organizations and customers have an equal part in learning to ride the digital wave to create and capture value. Organizations start asking more questions and simultaneously listen and embrace customer feedback and views, so value-creation becomes more progressive.
Customer alignment will lead organizations towards better ideation, problem-solving, performance improvement, and product innovation. In addition, customers develop brand preference and loyalty and become advocates for extending the brand’s reach.
Digital Acceleration Will Increase
The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by organizations and consumers. As more companies seek to transform customer experience further, they have also become more aware of the increased capabilities of a CRM platform and what it can deliver. More and more companies have started to invest in automating customer-facing processes and tracking customer interactions to gain a rich view of the customer journey from marketing to sales and service.
Investments in CRM accelerate digital transformation, enhance efforts to achieve HD-CX, and help organizations stay competitive. More effort will be geared towards making things easier for the team, such as modernizing the employee experience through revitalizing the platforms they use to perform their work. Any organizations that are not digitally prepared risk being left behind.
Tighter Cross-Functional Collaboration
As more companies dip their toes and start receiving encouraging successes in cross-functional alignment to transform their business, we will see an uptake in sales, marketing, and service collaboration and practices.
Digitalization has changed customer behavior drastically, and how technology enhances customer service is a much larger focus for organizations. There will be a new dimension of what a fully aligned cross-functional collaboration can do to provide a complete view of customers and how the organization can leverage these insights.
We can see the difference in resolution when we flick between the high and low definition versions of a movie. The same goes with customer experiences, where the margin between success and failure can be incredibly thin.
When we use data to know our customers better, we can deliver highly refined HD experiences for them. Instead of having a fuzzy picture, we can create a detailed view of what they want, from the time we first meet them, right through customer acquisition to service and support.
Through adopting techniques such as listening to customers, empowering digitalization, and tighter collaboration between functions, we can better understand our customers and their preferences and create a true HD-CX that delights and keeps them returning for more.
This article was initially published on www.retail.biz.com.au.
