In a world where every brand is fighting the price and product game, it’s time you start leveraging the power of customer experience to create brand differentiation for your business. Studies show that customer experience is most likely to surpass price and product in 2022 as a key differentiator for brands. Data shows that brands that focus on customer experience are about 60% more successful than brands that don’t. There’s no doubt that customer experience is one of the most important factors for the growth of any brand. Now let’s understand how customer experience can create differentiation for a brand.
By virtue of technological advancements such as the availability of the internet, customers have an abundance of options to choose from. In such a scenario fighting on the basis of price, product, etc. becomes extremely difficult. Thus, when it comes to choosing between two similar products from different brands, customers usually go with the one which not just matches their needs but provides them with a great experience as well. A Gartner CX study revealed that customer experience is the new marketing battlefront. It stated that about two-thirds of marketers in the study said that their company competes on the basis of CX in the market. In fact, studies show that about 86% of customers pay more or are willing to pay more for a better experience. In 2022, consumers will care about the experience as much as your product or service. However, there’s no need to worry. In fact, this is a great opportunity for brands to gain a competitive edge by using CX as a brand differentiator for themselves. The best companies are committing fully to their customer experience as well. This tells us how important the voice of customers is for every brand if it wants to grow.
The most appropriate way of providing a good experience to your customers is to simply ask them. You need to capture the feedback of your customers in real-time to understand their perspective of your brand. Only your customers can tell you what it is that they truly want. Capture the customer feedback and act on it accordingly. Just collecting the data won’t be enough as you want to act on it as well. This would have a really positive impact on differentiating your brand. It would even allow you to understand what improvements need to be made in order to provide a better customer experience.
If you aim to take advantage of customer experience as a brand differentiator, you need to understand the value of personalization. It is one of the key concepts when it comes to providing a seamless customer experience. More than 80% of customers prefer brands that offer them personalized services as opposed to brands that don’t. Personalization isn’t just using customer names in email headers but it goes far beyond that. Providing customers with personalized recommendations, and landing pages using algorithms is just one example of personalization in customer service. For e.g.: The reason for the success of Spotify in music streaming services is personalization to a lot of extents. Spotify leveraged the power of personalized recommendations and offers which provided its users with a great customer experience.
Yet another old but really effective way of providing a great experience for your customers. This process provides you with a clear-cut image of your brand at every touchpoint of the customer. It helps in understanding both positive as well as negative interactions that your customers have with your brand. Customer journey mapping allows you to understand your business from the perspective of your business and helps in putting the customer at the center of your entire decision-making process. It allows you to look at the larger picture and understand what kind of experience the customer is having at multiple touchpoints of their customer journey. Doing so allows for the identification of issues that the customer is facing and rectifying them in real-time.
Statistics show that businesses with emotional connections in their CX approaches experience about 85% more sales growth as opposed to the businesses that don’t. Connecting with your customers on an emotional level is really underappreciated. From a CX point of view, emotional connection in CX acts as one of the topmost brand differentiators for any business. Emotional connection is directly linked to customer engagement and loyalty. When customers are emotionally connected with a brand, they build a certain level of trust with that brand and are much more likely to bring repeat sales for that brand. For e.g.: Whenever we think of chilling at home on a Saturday night, there’s only one brand that comes to our mind i.e., Netflix. Netflix is one of the greatest examples of brands that used emotional connection in their CX strategies. They have captured the mind space of their customers with emotions like chilling, relaxing, etc.
You might have heard this term a lot of times if you’ve been studying/researching customer experience. Marketers often like to play with this term explaining its importance. However, you might be surprised that even after this much information is available there are only a few brands that actually integrate omnichannel services in their customer experience strategies. Omnichannel customer experience is one of the easiest methods to differentiate yourself from other brands. It refers to providing a consistent level of experience to your customers through multiple channels at different touchpoints of the customer journey. For e.g.: Customers can contact a company through different channels of contact if they are following an omnichannel CX strategy. Customers can contact them through web messaging, video chats as well as phone and email for customers who prefer traditional channels of contact. This allows you to satisfy the needs of all kinds of your customers and eventually help in standing out thus using CX as a differentiation for your brand.
This might sound like really basic advice but when it comes to any brand, everything comes down to understanding your customers and their needs. This is very basic and simple but not easy. It’s easier said than done. Understanding your customer needs requires a lot of work that needs to be done, but this is the only way you can truly accomplish the goal of creating brand differentiation. Generally, customers aren’t that self-aware, which is why it becomes your job to understand their needs that aren’t getting fulfilled by conducting surveys, asking for feedback, and creating practical solutions to that problem. This would allow you to satisfy your customer needs in the most efficient way, thus helping you differentiate your brand using customer experience.
Once implemented, keeping track of these strategies is another essential task that helps you differentiate yourself from others. There are a lot of metrics and tools that you can use to measure the success of your CX strategies. For e.g.: NPS allows you to measure your net promoter score. It asks customers questions like, ‘would you recommend our brand to your friends and family and provides a 1-10 scale. Similarly, you can also make use of CSAT which stands for customer satisfaction. It asks questions like, ‘on a scale of 1-10, how satisfied were you with our product/service.
Despite such a tremendous rise in technology, the basic principles of customer experience remain intact. The key motive of all this is to understand the importance of customer experience and how it’s rising as one of the key brand differentiators for businesses. Gone are the days when they 4Psused to be the center point of every business. In today’s world, CX has become the center point of every brand. By investing in your CX strategies today, you can set yourself apart from others and create brand differentiation for your business. This is where we come into play. Survey2Connect provides you with one-stop customer experience solutions. We provide you with proper CX strategy tools that allow you to capture your customer experience in real-time and take the necessary actions. With S2C, you find the right answers to take timely actions. Get in touch with us for a demo.
