Why Customer Experience Is Business-Critical and How to Achieve It

February 10, 2021 // Christian Wettre

If you’re not paying attention to customer experience, you may be ignoring a mission-critical factor for your organization. Find out why customer experience is so important, and get some tips for attending to it in your business.

A Better Experience Equals a Higher Price Point

Whether it’s premium service or luxe products, many consumers are willing (if not eager) to pay extra for a better experience. PricewaterhouseCoopers polled consumers about how much more they’d be willing to pay, asking them to answer 1% and 25%. Here’s what better experiences will net you in various industries:

Hotel/hospitality: 14% more
Restaurant/Dinner/Coffee: 12% to 16% more
Travel/Airline: 10% more
Optional utilities, such as cable or cell phone service: 8% to 9% more

Customer experience (CX) is business-critical because it directly impacts the sales, revenue, and profit your business generates.

Poor Experiences Drive Customers Away

PwC also notes that customers’ bad experiences do more than drive down your potential price points — they might mean you lose out on sales as consumers flock to competitors. U.S. respondents in the PwC survey indicated that around 19% of people would leave a company after a single bad experience. And almost 60% would leave after a few lackluster or poor experiences.

Customer experience is business-critical because if you’re not investing in it, you’re ignoring what customers want. And they’ll start ignoring you too.

Good Experiences Keep Customers in the Fold

The opposite is true too, though—stellar customer experiences help keep your clients loyal. Around 92% of organizations that invest in customer experience say they see an improvement in customer loyalty because of their efforts. That customer loyalty might be one reason that increased customer experience has a statistical correlation to increased revenues for many people.

Customer experience is business-critical because it keeps clients around so you can sell to them again another day.

An Ever-Growing Importance

One of the fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic for many businesses in 2020 was the realization that they weren’t prepared to provide customer service in a new normal. More than half of enterprises polled said that their entire business model should be completely reconsidered. And numerous studies point to customer experience as the primary differentiator between competitors in the future.

It’s something worth considering, as enterprises have been notoriously wishy-washy on customer experience. More than 75% of businesses in North America point to it as a leading strategic area, which means they’re probably working hard on improving it. Yet only around 16% rate their customer experience as 90% or more, and less than a third have a manager or someone else who is in charge of customer experiences.

So, What Do Customers Define as a Good Experience?

The numbers are in, and it’s obvious that customer experience is important to the success of your business. But how do you deliver it?

Here are some of the best goals to strive for when designing your business’s CX, based on what customers in the PwC survey rated as most important:

Create efficiencies that save customers time without taking away from the service or product. Around 80% of consumers rated efficiency as important, and more than half said they would pay more for it.
Ensure customers have choices for how to proceed. Convenience and ease of payment were close to efficiency in both importance and whether or not people would pay extra for them.
Use data and automation to personalize your offerings. Close to 70% of users rated this as important, and around 30% said they’d be willing to pay for the perk.
But don’t make automation and computers the only option or remove humanity from your process altogether. More than 70% of people rated human interaction as important, and close to 35% said they would pay a premium for it.

Use Technology to Drive Customer Experience

Truly knowing your customers and understanding how digital transformation can change the way you interact with them is key to delivering an excellent customer experience. The constant evolution of technology provides new opportunities to rethink time-worn processes.

Where businesses once only had basic customer information at their disposal, the proliferation of channels and devices in use today means companies can build a 360-degree view of their customers. New technologies are enabling businesses to create complete customer profiles that help them understand and measure customer behaviors across multiple channels, giving employees the information they need to deliver a truly superior customer experience.

It’s vital that you have an in-depth knowledge of your customers’ needs, the challenges they’re facing, what they are shopping for and how they are using your product or service. Using analytical tools and a solid Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system lets you keep all of this information at your fingertips so you can personalize the experience for individual customers, adding real value for the individual.

How SugarCRM’s HD-CX Software Can Help

It might have been a while since you watched a video that wasn’t in high-definition but think about how old television clips look compared to standard programming today. You miss details, especially in the background, and some visuals might actually be somewhat blurry.

Did you know that you can have the same problem with your customer data? If you’re not getting “high-def” data, you could be making business decisions based on incomplete, wrong, or fragmented information. In all likelihood, you may be dealing with current-state-only information — a snapshot of data from right now only that doesn’t take into account buyer’s journeys and other consumer behavior.

Consider this: Up to 70% of your data goes bad every year simply because it ages out. And when your data is no good, your revenue and customer loyalty also suffer.

Even more harmful to your bottom line is the fact that if your data is poor, then you can’t forecast, identify trends or create predictions that help you proactively serve better customer experiences.

SugarCRM’s HD-CX software, which is a time-sensitive CRM, lets you avoid many of those data problems and work effectively and efficiently on customer experience. Contact us today to request a demo.