Enabling Customer Success in the New Normal
Mentor Speak
This series of short write ups provide pearls of wisdom from Global Leaders and Mentors who are associated with us. They bring in a practitioner’s perspective and serves as an effective combination of advice that has authenticity, experience and most importantly – relevance.
Customer success is a mutual win for both business and customers; excellence in Customer Experience (CX) and service helps convert mere buyers to advocates or, better still, brand ambassadors.
What will it take for brands, and their customer experience, to succeed in a world dealing with the impact of a global pandemic? Approaches that are tried, tested, and honed over the years, now find themselves facing an entirely new paradigm: one that has seen consumer preferences rapidly switch from that of luxury and comfort to survival. It is a stark reality of the pandemic: companies are suddenly on the back foot—often struggling to catch up with the increasingly fierce pace of changing consumer demand and associated regulations.
It is the demolition of business, as usual, matched by uncertainty in revenue over the long term. How companies began, the year is almost certainly not the way they will meet today's challenges. Importantly, in the face of rapidly changing consumer patterns, how can we—as CX experts —provide direction and increase shareholder value to the brands?
Traditionally, CX has ensured that customers gained meaningfully from every interaction with the enterprise; over time, brands increase loyalty and achieve desired outcomes.
That definition, and those earlier expectations, pivoted sharply within a few days—if not weeks—of the pandemic. It rapidly became clear that the rules of customer engagement were inexorably moving toward somewhat uncharted waters. Quick, contactless fulfillment gained favor, while a gradual acceleration of digital transformation was no longer an option.
CX – The new Pivot for Profits
Customer experiences —the critical success factor central to profitable commerce—is now the main lever of business leaders' control. Businesses need to ensure their CX efforts are aligned with customer expectations in the new normal. It begins with every business leader who curates an idea, trains his teams to make and sell a value proposition, and believes every customer—rather than a select few—is an influencer. This approach is a shift in thinking from the traditional; the biggest beneficiaries are those businesses that optimize CX by effectively pivoting to the new normal with fresh thinking and change management.
The shift from customers as buyers to brand ambassadors correlates well with the connected and rapidly evolving marketplace we see today. Every new product or service is only as good as its experience and utility and is often promoted openly across platforms. For instance, the sharing economy thrives on the principle of customer insights and data analysis that can make or break everything from automobiles brands to vacation home services.
The power of the human connects
As a practice or function, CX has recently witnessed a massive growth spurt across sectors and market-caps; there is a near-obsession with tools that manage engagement and experience on both industry forums and consumer platforms. While that is a great place to start, it is a misplaced obsession unless substantiated by a strategic alignment with business outcomes.
Technology is an excellent enabler—a tool that reaches out to show that customers are indeed at the center of the business. But when it comes to connecting with a brand, a commoditized chatbot on a homepage can never replace the warmth of a human connection. Optimizing CX is about training service specialists in the art and science of the ideal dialogue. It is about empowering specialists to empathize and quickly deliver on the brand promise at the upper limit of quality—through a secure channel that respects both the customer's time and effort in reaching out and their data privacy.
The responsibility for addressing the new normal that we talked about earlier rests not just with brands but also with service providers. It lies in our abilities to transcend the regular and develop a unified view of a customer's ecosystem. It lies in digitization and the hiring of digital natives. It lies in providing pure data, governance, behavioral analytics, and insights that can transform the customer's value chain and increase revenue, brand, and shareholder value.
We, as CX experts, need to hire and train to help clients visualize that larger picture in a post-pandemic world. We must chart out a roadmap that aligns our efforts with our customer's shareholder returns; to view spends on upskilling as an investment in customers' success and growth. That is a real value differentiator—and a value that better connects brands with their philosophy.
