How Can A Stellar Customer Experience Become Your Competitive Advantage?

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Harsha Khubwani

October 18, 2022

Research shows that 86% of consumers will leave a brand they trusted after only two poor customer experiences. Customers won't leave your brand unpunished for delivering a bad experience. Poor customer experience increases the churn rate, proving to be harmful to your brand revenue. It is a fact that today's digitally-aware customers are not willing to compromise on customer experience at all, and even a single slip can make customers move to your competitors.

With enormous solutions in the market and heightening customer expectations, consumers are applying more filters to pick the best solution for them. Whether it is SMBs or large enterprises, customer experience has become one of the crucial factors for customers to decide if they want to move forward with the company offerings or not. It has become utmost necessary to work on your CX endeavors consistently to stay ahead of your competition.

Missing Out on CX is Horrible for Competitive Advantage

Samsung failed to deliver a satisfactory customer experience to one of its customers. As a result, the customer was vocal about the lack of efficient services and shared a post on Reddit covering the issue in detail. The customer also shared the phone conversation with the customer service representative.

Actual phone dialogue:

Me: "So I won't be able to sign for my package and nobody else will either so how can I get my package."

Samsung: "Sir, for your own safety, you must sign for the package or it will be sent back to us and then refunded."

Me: "Am I supposed to skip work all day to wait around in the package lobby to sign for my phone?"

S: "That certainly is a solution."

*literally 10 seconds of silence because I was shocked at his response*

Me: Can you tell the safety difference between me signing for my package at my front door and me signing for the package at the FedEx Office?"

S: "I promise you, sir, it's for your own safety so that you don't lose your phone"

Me: "HOW CAN I LOSE IT IF IT IS STILL WITH FEDEX?"

S: "It's for your own safety sir."

Me: "So can you at least delay the shipment so that the 3rd delivery attempt is on Saturday so that I will be available to sign for the package when I am not working?"

S: "Sorry sir, I cannot do that"

In the decade of hyper-personalization, this is not how a customer support rep should deal with a customer. Companies need to move towards individualization as customer disappointment has enough power to ruin a business's financial goals. If you rule out the CX from the list of the primary entities that serve your business purpose, it will severely harm business outcomes.

Missing out on CX in any way results in the following:-

Weakening of the customer-brand bond with every interaction, and often customers do not return once they leave.
Negative word-of-mouth due to bad CX hurts the brand image, and the brand can witness a declining customer base.
Desired customer metric numbers become difficult enough to achieve, demoting business growth.
Lack of customer-centricity reflected in actions pushes potential prospects away, affecting the returns unfavorably.

Lean on CX to Get Ahead of the Competition

The 2019 Gartner Customer Experience Management Survey indicates that 86% of survey respondents engaged in or leading CX expect to compete on the basis of CX. Competing in the existing crowded global market isn't easy. CX plays an essential role by boosting business efficiencies and assisting your brand to stand out. Consequently, customer experience is one of those elements, improving your business growth curve and making stakeholders associated with your brand happy. Satisfied stakeholders bring in more value and play their part in the best possible manner that uplifts the position of your business in the market.

Building a robust customer experience strategy is a must to outperform. The aim is to step-up the customer convenience game by removing roadblocks at each customer touchpoint, making appropriate solution proposals, and upselling and cross-selling to smoothen the customer journey.

Here are 3 ways in which companies embrace customer experience with the help of primary components to win the competitive race:-

1) Use Data and Technology

In this digitally-driven world, reading customers' minds and fulfilling their requirements is only possible with valuable customer data and cutting-edge technology. For supplying top-notch CX, the assortment of data and techs like AI and ML generate customer insights that assist your brand in making impactful decisions.

To demonstrate, Clootrack, a customer experience analytics platform, delivers actionable insights to industry leaders, allowing them to take directed actions and increase their Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score. Let's take a sample report and understand how the CX analytics report aid you in getting a competitive advantage for your company. In the 2022 Customer Experience in Energy Drinks Industry report, Clootrack mentions the top five factors affecting customer purchase decisions. Those are:-

1) Taste & Flavor

2) Price

3) Sugar Content

4) Usage

5) Energy Boost

Decision-making authorities of an energy drink company can utilize the outcomes of analyzed customer data to specify and work on the customer pain points. These reports generated by the powerful AI-enabled engine help your brand to keep up with customer trends promptly, leaving your competition behind.

2) Adopt CX Through Employee Actions

"The main challenge in delivering any lasting customer impact is ensuring that the very people who deliver those experiences, even in a digital-first world, your employees are fully aware of the designed brand and customer experiences you are trying to deliver. If your teams understand the organization's ‘why’; how each of them, regardless of role, aligns to the experience delivered to customers you are already ahead of many of your competitors." says Jane Treadwell-Hoye, Founder & Chief Experience Officer at Necto in the Clootrack's 102 CX Expert report.

Employees should be well aware of the unified CX goals for assuring the alignment of customer experience operations and business objectives. Organize the training sessions and workshops to impart knowledge about the current CX strategies followed by your company. Simultaneously, motivate employees to feed the CX ambition with new ideas.

Acting on suitable employee input proves to be profitable as employees work closely on customer solutions and interact with customers on a regular basis to solve their doubts and issues. Ultimately, encouraging your workforce to drive focused efforts avails the enrichment of CX and support in contesting exceptionally in the competitive space.

3) Encourage C-Suite Involvement

According to a report, 76% of executives say enhancing CX is a high or critical priority, and many companies have appointed a C-level position to manage it. Top executives understand how vital customer experience is to remain highlighted for generating more sales. But, it is critical to put obtained comprehension into action to emerge as a leader in your industry. With the changing times, various roles are arising to monitor the CX activities.

Gartner disclosed that in 2017, more than 35% of organizations lacked a Chief Experience Officer (CXO) or Chief Customer Officer (CCO) or equivalents, but in 2019, only 11% and 10% lacked one or the other role, respectively.

Source: Gartner

“There has been significant growth in the presence of CXOs and CCOs or equivalents in many organizations over the last two years,” says Augie Ray, VP analyst covering customer experience (CX) for marketing and CX leaders. The involvement of the C-suite in CX projects enables you to define the tone of customer experience culture in your organization. The decisions taken by the CX leaders determine the course of customer-focused operations. Eventually, their participation provides guidance on various ways to satisfy customers and beat competitors to remain at the top position.

Example of Companies Using CX As A Competitive Advantage

In the current scenario, well-recognized companies leverage CX to attract customers and scale their business. They come up with innovative ideas and programs to orchestrate best-in-class customer experience by ingraining a customer-first mindset.

Let's look at how these 3 industry giants make use of customer experience as a weapon to hold the top positions in their respective industries:-

1) Walmart

Walmart's success is due to its customer-driven approaches. The company comes up with innovative ways to serve customers with the best solution. The company elevated the standard of the customer journey through an Omni-shopping experience that enables a consumer to combine digital and in-store experiences. Walmart is creating a seamless shopping experience for its customers with different offline store formats and online services that increase customer loyalty and trust.

In the third quarter of the fiscal year 2022, total revenues generated: 140.5 billion U.S. dollars.

2) Apple

With every new launch, Apple surprises the consumer industry with mindblowing features that ease everyday tasks and increase the utility of devices. Every year the company live streams events on different platforms, such as the Apple website and youtube, to unveil its new devices. In September 2022, with the launch of the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, the company replaced the notch on iPhones with Dynamic Island. Such changes by Apple create an unbeatable customer experience as improvements in facilities bring customer satisfaction.

In the third quarter of the fiscal year 2022, net income was reported: 19.44 billion U.S. dollars.

3) Disney

Disney is famous for its magical experiences. The company continuously keeps adding magnificent elements that captivate customers. From My Disney Experience App to MagicBand+, Disney is not leaving a single corner to create an incredible customer experience. Entering theme parks, accessing Disney resort hotel rooms, paying for purchases with a tap, and the way into many such facilities with a band result in smooth experiences. With several creative services, Disney nourishes its consumers with a better experience and preserves its place at the top.

In the third quarter of 2022, revenue generated: 21.5 billion U.S. dollars.

In Conclusion

Customer experience is a new standard that indicates how well an organization is performing. Industry leaders are conscious of the importance of the CX and working vigorously on CX endeavors to stand out. The integral point here is how leaders take action to use customer experience as a competitive advantage.

Embracing CX requires fundamental elements like data, technology, and workforce that the corporation uses to carry out business operations. From using data analytics to involving top executives, every step assists in implementing customer-centricity that ensures the delivery of a great customer experience to your buyers. Offering CX attracts customer attention and helps in delivering exceptional services.