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Improving Customer Experience Isn't a One Size Fits All Solution

By Michelle Amodio
TMCnet Contributor

A customer experience strategy can help you retain more customers online and offline, gain market share, and generate revenue growth, but not all solutions are one-size-fits all.

What strategy works for one company may not work for yours, and that’s the gist of Econsultancy’s Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing report. How is the bar being set for your customer experience strategy? You wouldn’t look at Starbucks’ success if you’re peddling software, because Starbucks isn’t a company you’re in direct competition with.

However, technology companies have a pretty positive view overall in terms of rating their own customer experience. According to the report, customer experience maturity for technology was rated quite advanced by 46 percent, meaning the importance lies in keeping “pace with incumbents, meeting customer expectation for increasingly slick services.”

The challenges to offering an exceptional customer experience include how and when data is used.

“Data, the complexity of the customer journey, organizational resources and system architecture combine to hamstring many organizations seeking to improve,” Econsultancy notes from the report.

Data is a large piece of the puzzle in terms of learning about customers and how to tailor the customer experience to work for your business. Essentially, data creates an opportunity for any company to collect information about their customers and optimize their interactions with the business.

Companies often struggle with structured data and organizing useful analytics framework based on their CRM systems, as well as consolidating different internal and external data sources.

Data is how you cater a program to fit your own unique needs instead of trying to make a non-working solution fit.

According to a survey by CompuCon, 48 percent of companies are using big data analytics to improve their overall customer experience.

"Customer experience has become a critical benchmark for success, especially in low-touch digital environments," said Ken Jackowitz, leader of CompuCom's service experience management business unit, in a statement to the press.

"Companies realize that customer experience correlates strongly with loyalty and revenue, and they are increasingly looking to big data analytics to help them boost consumer and end-user satisfaction with the enterprise through positive experiences in every phase of sales, service and support.”

For example, data generated by your mobile web/application channels, offline sources/point-of-sale, CRM, or email/SMS databases provide rich insights into various aspects of your customers’ lives and interactions both on and offline, helping you to create a more complete view of your customers and their behaviors.

Successful brands can rise above the challenges simply by looking at existing consumer information and tap into the data they own.