Going into 2025, your internal teams may be brainstorming ways to dazzle your customers.
“What can we do to make this interaction stand out? To give it the wow factor?”
While “wow!” experiences are nice, it’s the quick, easy experiences (and not the amazing ones) that are more responsible for building brand loyalty across your customer base. According to Gartner, 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal, as opposed to 9% of customers with low-effort interactions. Building loyalty and reducing churn are central to any brand’s CX strategy, especially considering that it can take three new customers to replace the value of one customer who churns.
To improve customer experience (CX) and bolster loyalty, it’s not counterintuitive to say that brands should focus on delivering journeys that are so quick and easy, they’re forgettable.
Customer Experiences We’ll Remember (For the Wrong Reasons) From 2024
Consider these negative memorable interactions that CSG employees experienced in 2024:
Telco: Taking advantage of a cellular promotion to add a line and get a free phone was far from easy for Erin. The first phone was sent to the wrong address, and the second phone didn’t have the correct phone number ported in. After spending two hours on the phone with customer support and sales, repeating the problem several times, Erin went to the store to pick up phone number three. When the phone still didn’t activate after 24 hours, she was forced to call customer support AGAIN. This time the call was escalated to a more intensive level of support and the problem was resolved in five minutes.
Retail: Danielle was surprised (not in a good way) to receive an email promoting a pair of jeans—the same ones she had purchased the day before. A few weeks later, she was asked to complete a survey for another product (not the jeans) that she had already returned. While these situations weren’t stressful, they revealed that the retail brand didn’t know Danielle, and she now associates the brand with cluelessness.
Banking: Beth called her bank to request that money that had been refunded to her credit card be transferred to her checking account. After hearing that it would take 30 days to “investigate” her request, Beth asked for and was promised expedited service. She was told that an email confirmation wasn’t possible, but that she would be notified when the money was transferred. When Beth checked her online bank statement 10 days later, she discovered that the money had been transferred, but she never received a notification. Not exactly a trust-inspiring situation.
Insurance: Doug needed to submit a claim for a minor roof leak after a winter storm. He had to wait in queue to submit the claim via phone, and he didn’t receive any type of digital confirmation on the claim or status updates. When he needed to check on the claim a few weeks later, he was forced once again to wait on hold to contact an agent, to whom he had to re-explain the situation. He won’t forget this long, winding customer journey anytime soon.
Why Should CX Teams Focus on Minimizing Memorable-Yet-Negative Experiences?
We tend to recall negative experiences more easily than positive ones because they’re often associated with high-stress situations. This means negative interactions can have a bigger influence on how customers perceive your brand. However, these negative experiences often pop up along the customer journey where there’s less focus and investment from the marketing and CX teams.
Negative interactions with a brand jeopardize customer loyalty. In fact, even a single bad experience can be enough to send customers packing. According to a PwC survey, 32% of consumers said they stopped using or buying from a business after a bad experience with customer service—almost as many who left after a negative experience with products or services (37%).
How is it that these negative experiences go unnoticed by so many businesses? Customer journeys are typically complex, difficult to change, and involve departments that would otherwise be focused on short-term revenue gains. Addressing these challenges requires a cross-functional approach that focuses on building intelligent and proactive experiences by pinpointing the breaks in the customer journey for action.
Make These Experiences Forgettable in 2025
Customer journey orchestration (CJO), paired with a purpose-built customer engagement platform, would have prevented those negative customer experiences. CJO leverages otherwise-siloed customer data, real-time decisioning, and channel activation to deliver effortless, empathy-driven experiences that meet your customers at their time of need and on the channel they prefer.
A customer engagement platform with customer journey orchestration at the center powers everyday, forgettable experiences that customers appreciate. These include interactions such as:
- Sending digital, timely updates on how a customer’s insurance claim is being processed
- Proactively providing guidance to call center agents so they understand the intent of the call before customers must re-tell their story
- Delivering appointment reminders (e.g., including the clinic address)
- Sending payment reminders before a bill becomes late or is sent to collections
- Providing proactive alerts about suspicious activity on a customer’s account
- Relating information about expected service outage notifications
- Reporting missing or undelivered products via digital channels
- Refraining from sending a survey to someone who returned the purchased item
By focusing on the post-purchase experience in 2025, businesses can proactively provide a more seamless and personalized experience. Think of it as standing out from your competition by blending into your customer’s day.
Ring in the New Year with CSG Xponent.
When customer loyalty is on the line, CSG has the experience and expertise to help you combat the operational challenges of CX. With award-winning journey orchestration capabilities that drive better business results, CSG unapologetically supports the journeys that seem forgettable but impact CX the most.
CSG Xponent is our customer engagement platform that combines journey orchestration with a customer data platform and journey analytics. Xponent is the only customer engagement platform built to bridge the gap between customer expectations and brand execution in the post-purchase experience.
