In uncertain economic times, making the right choices for your business becomes that much more important. Even a slight misstep can have a drastic impact on a company's ability to compete in the market. While navigating a recession is undoubtedly difficult, spending the time to understand customer motivations and concerns can significantly reduce risk from decision-making and help create more value for both customers and the business. While 2023 will pose its own set of challenges for businesses, it welcomes new opportunities for innovative customer engagement.
While taking a leap into customer experience (CX) during uncertain times can seem daunting, Alida’s customers have proven just how valuable engaging with and meeting the needs of your customers really is. Businesses like Duke Health, Morning Brew, Pixel United, and Sun Life have demonstrated their commitment to their customers and consistently embed customer insights into their decision making. This has allowed them to create truly exceptional customer experiences and become innovative leaders in their industries. Check out their full stories in our new Alida innovator e-book, Insight-Driven Innovation: How top brands harness ongoing customer feedback.
The CX journeys of these Alida customers are great learning opportunities that can inspire while also providing practical advice on how to navigate CX in 2023. Here are the top three trends that will take your CX strategy to the next level this year and help you create exceptional experiences for current and future customers.
TREND #1: Proving ROI with Value-Based CX is the Top Priority
In today’s climate, every decision executives make is going to receive tremendous scrutiny. Every investment, every project, has to be value-based and must have a measurable return. When selecting a CX provider, make sure they will work with you to build an ROI model based on the outcomes that are most important to you and your organization.
Another consideration that will help drive ROI is consolidation of spending in CX. Many companies have multiple survey providers, but in this market that is very difficult to sustain. Multiple vendors leads to more time and work required to piece together data—time companies can no longer afford. Consolidation into a single, integrated platform will reduce the licensing costs of software and also drive efficiency across the organization.
When CX Innovator Duke Health was looking to improve their end-to-end patient experience, they also needed to ensure their CX provider could help them communicate tangible results to their stakeholders and leadership teams. With the help of Alida, Duke Health was able to establish clear CX goals, execute their patient feedback strategy, and achieve savings of over $200,000, resulting in approximately 140% ROI.
TREND #2: Double-Down on Your Loyal Customers
Now more than ever, it is imperative that companies understand how best to retain existing customers and expand their relationships with them, all while understanding where to reduce unnecessary cost. The secret to achieving this is by increasing your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). With a focus on your CLV, you can uncover who your greatest customer advocates are and focus on gathering their insights. Their feedback will help uncover the truth on how to create innovative customer experiences for your entire audience.
Whether you're in the service, technology, streaming, or gaming industry, customer churn is a great concern. At Alida, we have an expression that a customer generally won’t churn if they're busy expanding to drive solutions and achieve an ROI. Keeping your customers close and understanding their requirements is important. This is where you need to be investing your time and resources.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your company and making sure their needs are met is pivotal to success. Tapping into your best customers to gather insights that help you better understand their needs, priorities, and preferences will provide a road map for how to retain all of your customer segments and ensure you’re driving the maximum value for every audience.
Leading mobile game developer and CX Innovator, Pixel United, is all about their players' experience. While they knew just about everything about their players' in-game behavior, they wanted a way to get to know who they were as people. With the help of Alida, Pixel United was able to build a digital community of highly involved players who were motivated to provide rich insights. By tapping into this highly engaged group of players, Pixel United was able to combine existing behavioral data with community insights to improve in-game experience for all, all while saving thousands of dollars in recruitment, external sample, and incentive investments.
TREND #3: Tap Into The Power of Community
A community is a group of people that come together based on a shared, vested interest and who are passionate about supporting a brand. This can be a group of customers, employees, UX designers, or baristas. The possibilities are endless. CX tools help you pull these groups into a digital community to gather insights in a scalable way.
The beautiful thing about a community is that you don’t have to rely on incentivization to respond to surveys. This audience truly cares about your company and is excited to provide ongoing feedback that will improve their experience and your brand. Their insights will be reliable, accurate, and tell you how to make decisions that matter most.
The result will be direct access to your best customers, all in one place, when you need it. Being able to access these customers and have direct dialogue and gain their feedback in real-time builds long-term trust with your most loyal following. With a community, you’re able to gain approximately 50% more responses than with traditional survey methods -- otherwise meaning, you’ve got your best customers directly at your fingertips.
Having access to a multitude of feedback sources within your community will also be important to your CX strategy. Make sure that the way you reach out to your community best fits their lifestyle and needs. Options include conversational surveys or even video feedback. A comprehensive community solution that engages with customers in their preferred methods will be critical to your success and will help you not only inform exceptional customer experiences for all, but also help ensure your business decisions are 100% customer-centric.
CX Innovator Sun Life built two communities, one for brokers and the other for employers, to uncover customer motivations and challenges, industry trends, test marketing materials, get feedback on product development strategy, and so much more. Not only was Sun Life able to effectively gather insights from audiences that mattered most, they were able to do so quickly. Sun Life brokers and employers raved about their community experiences and have consistently provided satisfaction scores in the 90-100% range, well exceeding industry benchmarks.
Conclusion
2023 is the year to fully commit to your customers. Consumer behavior has shifted and customers are now a lot more discerning about where they shop. Engaging your customers and deepening your relationships to build loyalty and trust is vital in today’s market to achieve business success. You need to be the brand they can lean on and believe in during tough times. The only way to do that is by truly engaging your customers and bringing them into your decision-making process. Customer insights are the secret to making better and more informed business decisions that are sure to help you navigate these uncertain times. Your customers will tell you how to create exceptional and innovative experiences, you just have to be ready to listen.
A number of global Alida customers are already thriving into the new year by having embedded the voice of their customers into their decision-making processes. Check out their full stories in our new Alida Innovators e-book, Insight-Driven Innovation: How top brands harness ongoing customer feedback.
