How to win the new battle for relevance?

Embracing the shift in CX philosophy, to take on rising customer demands, sea of sameness and the fight for purpose

Source: Brafton

What once seemed important, is now deemed vital. What once made us complain, is now getting unbearable. The pandemic turned up the heat on what we really want while pushing us to discard what we don’t. It has prompted us to reconsider what truly matters. Businesses have increasingly realized that omni-channel customer experience alone is not enough. In order to maintain customer loyalty, brands have a bigger responsibility to connect all the dots and operate at speed and scale to ensure long-term commitment.

With the world coming to terms with remote engagements, the real challenge will be to remain indispensable to customers, build and maintain an engaged workforce, and create additional value through strategic partnerships.

What makes a brand perpetually relevant?

The ability to keep its customers engaged, surprised and connected.

Brands that push themselves to earn and re-earn customers’ loyalty — continually redefine what’s possible. Be it Uber sending an email to notify about the latest air travel restrictions based on seasonality of past airport rides or Amazon creating a self-service portal to address customers’ concerns even before they surfaced at the very start of the pandemic.

The foresight to turn uncertainty into opportunities that are valuable not only to the customers but also to every business stakeholder, is the real investment a brand needs to make in order to remain indispensable.

Time to re-imagine competitive advantage

Committed customers are probably the single biggest competitive edge that a company can have. But with rising competition and lower switching costs, the consequences of getting things wrong with our customers have become more serious than ever, resulting in weak financial performance and loss of market share.

The conversation has shifted from “how to sell more” to “how to service more”. Remember when Nike was launched, it was all about bright products, colorful ads and legendary athletes? Today, Nike is an ecosystem of dynamic ‘living’ experiences, like the Nike+ community, providing expert coaching from Nike pros, personalised connections to millions of athletes, training clubs, and valuable offers from its partners like Apple, Headspace and ClassPass.

To build a community like that, businesses need to constantly pivot, take bold steps and ensure there’s more room for course correction if things go wrong.

However, given the current state of brand-building, there are too many variables for an organisation to consistently provide great customer value across all its channels. For one thing, customers are more in control than ever, and their expectations of brands continue to rise. Technology, from mobile to wearables to Internet-embedded homes, further disrupt those expectations, allowing people to perceive and interact with brands in new ways. Brands that aren’t evolving get lost in the shuffle.

NTT Data’s enterprise applications services have been helping brands to grow their customer value by facilitating brand advocacy through:

• CRM Strategy and Technology

• CX processes and methodologies

• CX project planning, prioritization, execution and measurement

• Understanding customer needs, expectations and perceptions

Source: iStock

Customer experience sets a new baseline

In a recent VoC (Voice of customer) survey conducted by NTT Data, 1.4K professionals across 34 global markets and 14 different sectors were interviewed to assess the global state of customer experience. The findings revealed a potentially growing disparity between how businesses assess their own performance and how consumers perceive customer experience, calling for a re-calibration in the rapid adoption of CX technology.

Organizations now expect that the majority of CX will be automated in twelve months’ time, with workloads handled by AI and robotics rising to 51 per cent from 32 per cent today. However, when asked about human-led support, 94 per cent of CX decision-makers agreed that it remains critical, and 38 per cent stated that their biggest reason for avoiding digital channels is that they would rather speak to a human.

“The fruition of new technology in the CX space is exciting, but the ultimate focus always needs to be on people” comments Rob Allman, Vice President, Customer Experience, NTT Ltd.

Employee experience taking center stage “A brand is defined by the customer’s experience. The experience is delivered by the employees.” — Shep Hyken, New York Times & Wall Street Journal best selling author

73% customers say they are likely to switch brands if a company is unable to provide consistent level of services across channels. Digital interfaces may manage to look spic and span, but they need coherent employee touch points to efficiently fill the gaps left by digital interactions. Be it long hold times with a customer support agent or painful vendor management software adding complexities to marketing operations, employee experience inevitably translates into customer experience.

The global pandemic is a testimony of an increased need to steer business transformation to ride out the difficulties posed by remote operations. More employees are needed to be part of the change that will drive the necessary strategy to reset business growth.

Get the partner experience right

The digital ecosystem is incomplete without a robust channel partner experience. With the evolution of tools and engagement practices, partner relationship is critical for gaining access to complementary services needed to serve customers better. Recently, Zoom took the world by storm and strengthened its partnership with almost every other organisation. Not just that, it offered direct integration with the client’s CRM to schedule meetings with leads and track conversions in real-time. With growing partner engagements due to emergence of new technology and faster innovation cycles, it’s critical for businesses to have a turnkey partner management platform that can personalise partner recruitment, onboarding, and sales without any hassle.

But how do you ensure efficient collaboration in a complex business environment where partners may not be on the same page? The answer is good governance, which determines ease of doing business with a partner, resulting in long-term success. A modern partner relationship management software is trained to manage org-wide governance, mission-critical workloads and transformations to enable faster product expansion by harnessing the full power of the partner ecosystem.

Source: iStock

How to ensure long-term customer commitment?

You don’t want your customers to know that you’re a series of different departments, they want to know that they’re talking to the brand and expecting it to solve their problems in real-time.

The three essential commitments for a future-ready customer experience are: Reduce friction for customers, empower employees to bring higher customer satisfaction, streamline partner integration to leverage a holistic source of data and customer insights. This may require new ways of working, more focus on the employee experience and a sophisticated view of the human-machine relationship in customer experiences.

The traditional approach of connecting contact centres, marketing teams, sales professionals, and business leaders to support clients is taken over by the next-generation tools and platforms, especially with rapid virtualization of business processes. The need of the hour is to not only create omni-channel customer experiences but to also ensure strong collaboration within teams.

Our enterprise application services have helped businesses streamline internal processes and replace manual workflows with robotics process automation (RPA) by partnering with Salesforce. Being the industry leader in CRM solutions, Salesforce Customer 360 is the next-level platform engineered to bring business transformation and customer experience under one roof. Powered by intelligence and ease of use, it makes customer interactions more immersive as well as memorable.

By helping businesses connect with customers and promoting cohesive internal operations, Salesforce and NTT Data have been helping organizations to discover each step of the customer journey through a 360-degree customer view.

Our 5-step proven methodology to help organizations accelerate innovation and delivery are:

• Evaluate customer’s indispensability by leveraging a holistic set of Salesforce services and capabilities

• Solve people, process, strategy and technology problems with our comprehensive tools and frameworks

• Realize the benefits of your investments with the help of a specialized team of technology experts

• Enable greater focus on customer delight while disciplined delivery methodologies cost effectively operate your platforms

• Leverage cross-industry expertise to optimize performance and be prepared for the next inevitable disruption

In the age where relevance is the new currency, brands must align their customer experience with a higher purpose that creates shared value. It’s the only way to inspire people, both internally as well as externally. And finally, brands need to be powered from the inside out through culture, capabilities, and engagement. With Salesforce, we’ve been helping organisations to enable their workforce to do what they believe they do best, which is ‘building their relationship with their customers’. Because, the pandemic may have democratized digital interactions, but those interactions can still make or break the customer experience. Learn how to take the next step towards delivering a relevant customer experience with us at nttdata.com