Why is positive customer experience vital to business success?
At the most basic level, customer service encompasses a simple interaction. A customer has a particular need or expectation, and your business has a product or service that can match it. You provide the product or service to the consumer in exchange for payment, and the customer departs. Then you repeat the same customer interaction for the next customer, and so on. Simple!
Of course, organizations of all shapes and sizes understand that this approach does not lead to the most successful or sustainable business model, let alone a great customer experience. Extensive studies have been conducted, articles and reports written, and consumers bombarded with market research questions, all in search of understanding what customers really want, and how businesses can offer it to them.
This is the next level of customer service. Not just caring about your customers but understanding them, anticipating their needs, predicting their behavior, and satisfying their desires almost before they know what they want. This emphasis on how your customers actually experience your business—rather than an idealized or non-evidence-based assumption —is what distinguishes the good from the great. Marketing campaigns can only go so far; a great customer experience, leading to better customer relationships, is the path to generating that all-important customer loyalty.
Certainly, you can consider this as a chance to create an emotional connection with the people who purchase your products or services, and in turn give them the chance to engage with your brand on multiple levels. Just like a positive customer experience means more than good customer service, a good customer experience strategy means more than customer retention. Working to create a truly effective omni-channel approach to the customer experience goes beyond a positive experience or two; after all, meaningful loyalty is built, not enforced.
How can I use technology to improve customer experience?
The best way to improve customer experience is to understand customer expectations, then orient your business around them. Of course, understanding what your customers actually want may mean changing the way you do things, rather than just tinkering with processes that deliver the same things you always have. This could encompass everything from employee engagement and recruitment, to marketing initiatives, right up to fundamental business strategy.
We might be some way off from this sort of customer service and experience, but there are plenty of technological changes that suggest we’re moving in that direction. Online shopping continues to grow in popularity compared to traditional in-store purchases, with statistics suggesting e-commerce growth for 2019, 2020, and 2021 will hit 21%, 19%, and 18% respectively. We can see the same ethos in personalized advertisements and targeted marketing, chatbot-based customer service, the rise of social media 'influencers', and algorithms predicting the next purchase we might be persuaded to make.
In fact, the technology already exists to track the way customers interact with your business, in the form of customer journey mapping (CJM). One of the critical pillars of creating a powerful and memorable customer experience is actually understanding what that customer experience is. Do customers have positive or negative feelings when they interact with specific touchpoints within your organization’s processes? Are there points where customers stall, or disengage, or want more information? How do the people you're trying to reach really respond to your customer service options? Customer journey mapping helps you to answer all these questions, and more.
Using customer journey mapping to create a positive customer experience
By embracing the customer journey as a fundamental strategy, you can see and understand where your business processes need to improve. In this way, an engineered, consistent, positive customer experience becomes the norm for your business. Supported by clear operational performance metrics based on your customer journey maps, you can use the same emphasis on customer experience to drive future digital transformation and process optimization, creating a cycle of positive reinforcement to continually optimize your business processes and the experience you offer customers.
When combined with an effective and efficient customer support framework, and informed by meaningful customer feedback, this customer-centric approach is ideal for not only maintaining customer satisfaction, but essentially acts as a marketing strategy in its own right. Your referral rate may even improve, as customers share positive stories about the customer service they have received.
In short, this transformation can put you on the right path towards a brand reputation and a relationship with customers that takes you beyond simple interactions, and into the realm of trust. In a world where one customer's bad experience can lead to instant, widespread negative publicity (particularly on social media), it is imperative that each employee within your organization clearly understands that what they do and how they do it impacts the customer experience. This employee understanding is not an optional extra; it is crucial to your organization’s ability to deliver on its promises to your loyal customers. This is the next step many companies are working towards on the customer continuum: customer excellence.
Positive customer experience at Signavio
At Signavio, we pride ourselves on offering a customer experience second to none, and high levels of customer satisfaction to our own customers. For us—as it should be for all organizations—customer experience is not simply a project, it is the way we do business. That’s why Signavio is proud to have been featured in a 'Voice of the Customer' report as part of the Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for 2019 for Enterprise Business Process Analysis Software.
Customers reflected on their positive experience with Signavio by awarding us 4.7 out of a possible 5-star rating. This achievement is based on feedback and ratings from end-user professionals with experience purchasing, implementing, and/or using our services. Signavio easily reached the minimum of 50 published reviews with an average overall rating of 4.2 stars or higher, and received verified customer reviews from 13 different industries in the Enterprise Business Process Analysis Software category (as of October 2019).
Signavio was also named as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Enterprise Business Process Analysis in March 2019. Continuing our focus on understanding and delighting customers, Signavio is also pleased to have been recognized as a leader in customer journey mapping, especially as one of the only organizations to be doubly awarded by Aragon Research, as both a Hot Vendor™ and a Tech Spectrum Leader™ in the field of customer journey mapping.
You don't have to take our word for it, either! End-user experts at the forefront of business transformation initiatives worldwide endorse Signavio products, as well as the customer experience we offer. You can find out more about real customer experiences about the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite—from actual users!—at review site IT Central Station. To find out more, check out our recent blog post about what makes a successful BPM implementation.
How to create a positive customer experience in your organization
Once you’ve decided to start mapping your customer journeys, pick up some helpful suggestions on how to place yourself properly in your customer’s journey, as well as the close relationship between business processes and customer journey mapping. If you’re ready to experience this for yourself, find out how the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite can help build a long-lasting and customer-centric competitive advantage into your business. Sign up for a free 30-day trial today!