Customer experience (CX) and engagement are now board level priorities—for a good reason. According to a PwC survey of 15,000 people, 73% consider customer experience an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Positive experiences influence purchasing decisions in almost every industry but are particularly influential in healthcare (78%) and banking (75%). In the U.S., 59% of customers will stop interacting with a brand they love after several bad experiences; 17% after just one bad experience.
Most business leaders know they need to be taking steps to improve their customer/patient experiences through orchestrating better customer journeys. But many are struggling to understand what they could and should do to improve these experiences. Implementing a successful CX program can be challenging, and many businesses need prescriptive guidance on how to get started.
Why Is Implementing a Strategic Customer Engagement Solution a Challenge?
Over the past year, the Customer Engagement team at CSG set out to better understand why it is so hard for businesses to get started in enhancing CX. The team leveraged primary research, a customer advisory board, focus groups, customer implementations, a CMO advisory forum, and commissioned study of 480+ CX leaders, director level and above, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CSG to learn where businesses are struggling. We’ve learned that:
- Getting started is a struggle. 90% of companies said identifying where to start is very/extremely challenging. One business leader couldn’t get stakeholder alignment on how her business “could” vs. “should” set up their CX program. Another said, “I spent nine months creating presentations just to find out we were wrong and needed to start over.”
- Generic tools aren’t cutting it. Many businesses have invested in tools that only solve part of the customer experience problem. 70% of businesses indicated that they are leveraging a CRM as a customer engagement solution. Additionally, businesses need a solution that sits alongside their existing investments to bring together the entire customer experience and disparate customer data.
- Prior investments haven’t yielded ROI. More than half of the organizations surveyed are currently spending $2.5 million or more on CX initiatives and strategies; yet, 30% report “investment in CX tools has been unsuccessful in the past.”
- Lack of understanding and strategy makes it difficult to deliver impactful CX. More than 50% of organizations do not have a CX strategy because they find it difficult to understand, navigate, let alone prove. The top three challenges (very/extremely challenging) are:
- 50% of businesses say keeping customer experiences consistent across multiple platforms, channels and/or lines of business;
- 49% of those surveyed say breaking down internal data silos to develop a holistic view of the customer journey; and
- 45% surveyed say analyzing and making sense of customer data to deliver insights about customer behaviors.
CX Pressures Are Similar, Industry Needs Are Different
If getting started wasn’t challenging enough, customers across industries are demanding that their telecommunications, financial services, retail, and healthcare providers deliver the same fast and convenient service they receive from digital natives like Netflix, Amazon, and Uber. Nearly 80% of Americans point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service as the most important elements of a positive customer experience.
For brands to win in the market, regardless of the industry, businesses must make it easy for customers to do business with them digitally. With digital disruptors breaking into industries, there are numerous challenges that traditional businesses face on their road to digital transformation. With over 40 years of experience across these industries, here’s what we’re seeing:
Telecommunications
Communication service providers (CSPs) are feeling the pressure to keep up with the seamless, end-to-end digital experiences that streaming services deliver. For the first time, streaming services now own more market share than traditional cable providers. To compete, CSPs are looking to make it simple for customers to research, acquire and manage cable, internet and phone services.
Financial Services
In financial services, fintech companies are stealing market share from traditional banks and financial services organizations with seamless experiences around robust portfolio sets. When it comes to personal finances, it is imperative to deliver real-time, contextual communications about high stake information around loan applications, fraud alerts, and bill pay reminders that instill trust with each customer.
Retail
Many customers who once flocked to brick-and-mortar stores now expect rapid pick-up systems, self-service and same-day delivery. Providing superior products and services isn’t enough to satisfy customers anymore. Businesses must deliver a fast, intuitive, end-to-end experience from researching products to purchasing them and, if necessary, returning them–as well as providing communications that cut through the noise and generate purchases.
Healthcare
The healthcare landscape is seeing tech giants enter the market with far more advanced digital technology than the systems and processes in place at traditional healthcare organizations. Patient leakage is at an all-time high, and the shift to value-based care means that patients need to be more engaged in their own care plans. Digital communications are essential for better patient engagement.
Ignite CX Improvements in Your Industry
Businesses need an industry-specific customer engagement solution that gathers and analyzes customer data across your business to deliver personalized messages at the right time, via each customer’s or patient’s preferred channel.
CSG Xponent Ignite provides pre-built customer journeys for four key industries: financial services, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications. The foundation of Xponent Ignite is CSG Xponent, our award-winning, industry-leading customer engagement solution that combines a customer data platform with best-in-class customer journey orchestration and journey analytics. Xponent Ignite helps you illuminate the path to value by assessing your company’s CX maturity, identifying desired business outcomes, and calculating your expected ROI. With pre-built journeys and pre-configured integrations, seamlessly tap into your current tech stack to transform today’s static journey maps into tomorrow’s exceptional experiences that wow customers.
Xponent Ignite is our answer to turning board-level pressure into transformational growth strategies that elevate customer satisfaction and the CX your customers have come to rely on. Let’s work together to assess your organization’s CX Maturity in an interactive workshop where we will help you build a business case and strategy to give you a running head start.
