Genesys, a global omnichannel customer experience solutions provider, recently commissioned a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) titled, “The Value of Experience: How the C-suite Values Customer Experience in the Digital Age.” The study revealed a significant connection between brands that prioritize investments in customer experience and profitability.
This is especially true when customer experience support begins at the C-Suite level and is integrated across all channels to seamlessly engage customers at every touch point.
Loyalty360 recently spoke with Keith Pearce, Genesys VP of Corporate Marketing, about how the C-suite is looking at customer experience in the digital age and how customer experience is more important than ever.
What was the baseline of the survey?
Pearce: For years we have talked about customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, and these are all things that are benefits of investing in customer experience. But the real narrative of this research is that customer experience is actually about revenue growth and profitability, and the companies that invest in CX out perform their peers in both of those categories. So it is not just the right thing to do for customers anymore. It is just good business.
We have seen a lot of consumer preferences in terms of channel preference research, and what impacts customer satisfaction and net promoter score, but we have never really seen hard business metrics tied to customer experience investment. That’s what this study does.
How was this measured?
Pearce: It was both quantitative and qualitative research. We asked 516 C-level executives across 21 different countries how they value and treat customer experience investment in their organizations. We asked if they prioritized investment in customer experience and we asked them why? We wanted to know if that was to deliver a better customer experience only. Or was it to drive revenue growth and profitability? And we wanted to know how they measured the success of their CX initiatives, and how they were organized to deliver on customer promises.
We were interested in seeing how engaged the CEO was with CX initiatives. And that’s where we saw the big delta between the companies that prioritized CX investment, and planned to invest more than 10% in the next three years, versus those that didn’t. So you see a gap of 59% better revenue growth for those that prioritize CX investment as opposed to 40% that don’t.
How can brands use this information? Do you think it can garner greater support for customer experience initiatives within the industry?
Pearce: It’s a wakeup call for companies to get more C-Suite engagement in their customer experience initiatives to drive business results and returns. As we continue to look at more nimble competitors and more disruptive technologies coming in to traditional industries, a lot of established companies have the legacy of what they built historically that challenges their ability to innovate around customer experience. This can be an issue because it was built around a compartment, or a point technology being optimized. It was not build around being centered on the customer.
Do you have any advice for brands looking to change their company culture from within?
Pearce: There is an organizational element that needs to happen. Now we are starting to see the appointments of Customer Experience Officers, where that is an empowered office and person with a budget and a direct line of reporting to the CEO to lead customer experience. Organizationally, that helps center the company around the customer.
The second thing is to think about a system of engagement in the same way a company would have enterprise-wide applications for finance and HR and sales – to handle customer interactions. We see this as an enterprise application that would coordinate and organize what needs to happen in a customer journey for a customer, regardless of a department or what a company is trying to sell to a customer. Companies really need to think about where the customer is in their journey and how they respond accordingly – instead of by department or single interaction. So we think a system of engagement that harmonizes all the different customer experience touch points is a new requirement.
Do you see this as sort of the next step in the evolution of customer experience?
Pearce: If you look at the history of how we got here, it’s been 30 years of customer interaction evolution from leaving brick and mortar interactions with customers to call center interactions and now its these digital interactions and it is just this amalgam of different technology that is very confusing to customers in terms of how and where they are supposed to engage with an organization. Organizations that can implement a system of engagement will win the hearts and minds of today’s digitally driven customer.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.