Most Consumers Would Pay More for a Better Customer Experience

Imagine Experience founder and CEO Bill McCoy told Loyalty360 last month that personalizing the customer experience to meet the needs of consumers being engaged is what matters today.

“Everyone wants to collect experiences and memories as we go through life,” McCoy said. “Having an experience that’s tailored to the needs of each customer, and not offering something that is broad and cookie cutter, has proven to have the best ROI and level of engagement. Thanks to millennials and the younger generations, this mentality is now expected in our culture.”

And, according to a new report from Capgemini titled, The Disconnected Customer: What Digital Customer Experience Leaders Teach Us About Reconnecting with Customers,” most consumers (81 percent) are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

Capgemini’s study involved 3,300 consumers and 450 executives at the companies that serve them in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, the U.K. and U.S. Foremost among consumers’ reasons to pay more for a better customer experience is they are frustrated by organizations that don’t listen to their feedback or reward their loyalty, the study says.

What’s more, for consumers digital is imperative in meeting their expectations. Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute evaluated organizations across 80 different digital experience attributes, ranging from the ability to view and edit personal data to personalizing products and services on mobile devices, to create a Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Index. The more digital attributes an organization has deployed, and the more advanced those digital attributes are, the higher its DCX Index score.

Capgemini discovered that for each single point increase in the DCX Index score, consumers would be willing to spend 0.6 percent more with an organization and the NPS then also increases by nearly five points.

Pierre-Yves Glever, global lead of digital customer experience at Capgemini, said that digital has enabled new ways of engaging consumers, but is also driving new behaviors and creating new expectations.

“It’s clear that many organizations are struggling to keep up with the pace of change,” he noted in the study. “As our research reveals, experience is the new battleground, and how you connect will determine how you win. Organizations that tightly link their business operations with customer experience will reap the benefits in both streamlined operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.”

Another key revelation in the study is how businesses and consumers view the pace of customer experience improvement. Capgemini used the industry standard Net Promoter Score to gauge consumer satisfaction. Ninety percent of companies believed that their organizations’ NPS had increased by five points over the past three years, but only a bit more than half of consumers agreed (54 percent).

Less than two in 10 organizations (19 percent) are meeting consumers’ expectations, the study shows.
And for those that aren’t, the challenges are both organizational and technical. The rapidly evolving technology landscape (56 percent) and rising consumer expectations (57 percent) are cited as the major IT challenges, above integrating disparate platforms (38 percent) or a poor user interface (32 percent), indicating that while many organizations have cracked the digital basics the relentless evolution of technology is a major problem for them. Businesses also cite a lack of dedicated customer experience budgets (41 percent) and internal ownership of the digital customer experience (35 percent), suggesting that many organizations are still not prioritizing digital as a means of driving competitiveness and growth. 

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