Read this article to learn about customer experience and how it helps to drive your business success
About
Customer Experience CX is a term used to describe the relationship a customer has with a business. It refers to the total of all experiences the customer has with the business. Equally important, it’s based on all interactions and thoughts about the business. Equally important, it is an all-encompassing term.
CX includes communications touch-points, communications, emotional experience, behavior, data management, customer data platforms and technology ecosystems, and business model design implications. Similarly, Customer Experience Management is the operational management of systems and processes used for the purpose of building and maintaining relationships a business has with its customers.
Analyst firm Gartner describes Customer Experience Management (CEM) as: The practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.
The Total Experience
Customer Experience (CX) refers to the total of all experiences the customer has with the business, based on all interactions and thoughts about the business. Equally important, it is an all-encompassing term. It includes communications touch-points, communications, emotional experience, behavior, data management, customer data platforms and technology ecosystems, and business model design implications.
The influence of customer experience in business strategy
Not only is it important to business strategy but also as a change agent to process improvement. It comes down to the ability of organizations to maximize customer value and minimize operating costs by understanding what drives customer behaviors and decisions.
Peter Drucker famously said, ‘It is the role of every business to create a customer.’ These days, winning new customers is so much more difficult because 80% of buying cycles are done online. It’s difficult for buyers to ‘sell’ to customers as they once did. Retaining customers, and delighting them, has become critical to business success.
Customer experience matters to businesses because:
- It defines their customer value and the level of trust in the relationship
- It is the primary way customers use to define the quality of a brand
- When all other considerations are the same between buying choices, customer experience makes the difference in buying decisions
- Generally, the leaders and workers of a business want to do a good job and be seen to deliver a good customer experience; it inspires them to do better and recognize their efforts.
All of these qualities go towards making Customer Experience an important ingredient of any business strategy.
It’s game-changing
Every brand that competes for business online has to stand-out. Increasingly, customers do business ON THEIR TERMS. They want highly personalized offers that fit their needs perfectly. They can afford to be choosy, given there are so many buying choices and practically every supplier can deliver their products to the door within a matter of days. The very best way for businesses to stand-out in the minds of their customers is to deliver an experience that causes them to want to come back – and tell others of their great experience. Together with digital transformation initiatives, customer experience management is a game-changing topic that organizations choose to ignore at their peril.
Impact on businesses
Not only is CX important to business strategy but also as a change agent to process improvement. It comes down to the ability of organizations to maximize customer value and minimize operating costs by understanding what drives customer behaviors and decisions.
Influence of innovation
In light of recent technology innovations like cloud computing and big data, it’s now possible to develop systems and methods to fully appreciate what matters to customers by harvesting data from back-office systems. In like manner, it’s also possible to determine how customers want to interact. This helps organizations to forge effective marketing programs based on facts underpinned by data. Together with digital transformation initiatives, customer experience management is a game-changing topic that organizations choose to ignore at their peril.
The relationship between Customer Experience and Customer Data Science
In light of recent technology innovations like cloud computing and big data, it’s now possible to develop systems and methods to fully appreciate what matters to customers by harvesting data from back-office systems. In like manner, it’s also possible to determine how customers want to interact. This helps organizations to forge effective marketing programs based on facts underpinned by data.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enteprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America, and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.
Further reading
Gartner definition and further reading on Customer Experience Management (CEM).
What Wikipedia has to say on the subject.
Scholarly article on CEM.
Forbes article – 100 facts on digital transformation and customer experience
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