According to Forrester, a customer experience (CX) leader, is in-charged of aligning the organisation around customer value. From the C-suite on down, the customer experience leader needs to advance customer-centricity — evaluating experiences from the customer’s point of view.
Forrester says this approach drives loyalty and growth. But rallying the necessary level of focus and alignment is tough, to say the least. It requires persuasiveness, adaptability, and determination to move the needle and realise your CX vision.
Vasupradha Srinivasan, a senior analyst at Forrester says a key requirement of loyalty in the digital era is about understanding what customer sentiment about a brand and customer engagement about that brand is on a continuous basis.
"It is the ability of a brand or enterprise to understand customer pulse at an ongoing pace and driving loyalty as an outcome that's dependent on the service experience. Everything in the digital era for a customer is pivoting back to how good a service experience was with that brand."
Vasupradha Srinivasan
For Srinivasan, this is what builds trust and loyalty among customers.
Great customer experience is…
Forrester defines customer experience as an inclusive assessment of the customer's experience with the brand across all its touchpoints. Srinivasan says it is an expansive metric across the entire customer life cycle and every service experience that the customer goes through across their lifecycle, every single touchpoint, whether that is a store or a physical setup, whether that is the contact centre or customer service or even a post-sale experience to do with loyalty and retention and promotions.
She insisted that all of these different touch points need to deliver a consistent level of experience that kind of cumulatively becomes what the customer's experience with the brand is.
"That said what we have increasingly understood based on research that we've done over the last year is while there are many different drivers that contribute to customer experience, the one driver that seems to have a massive amount of impact or a significant influence on how customer experience is perceived is actually the customer service experience," she elaborated.
"Customer service has become, and established itself, as a very critical differentiator for how end customers perceive overall customer experience with a brand," she added.
Drivers of loyalty
Srinivasan is quick to dismiss perpetual loyalty and noted that a vendor's product or service is constantly being benchmarked against what is the best-in-class experience for the customer – meaning it is not against providers in the same industry, but the customer's lifetime experience and this can include retail, online and offline, any experience.
"Loyalty is driven by two things: the initial service experience that a customer gets, which is the foot through the door, and this is you securing that initial loyalty, but then you have to continuously deliver a consistent level of experience for you to retain that loyalty," she elaborated.
Click on the PodChat player to hear Srinivasan share her perspective on how organisations can drive loyalty and growth in the digital economy.
- Describe loyalty in the digital era.
- What are marketers doing to acquire this loyalty? And is the effort worth it?
- What constitutes great customer experience?
- How does customer experience drive loyalty? (is there such a thing as perpetual loyalty?)
- What comprises design experiences that drive loyalty?
- Given that customer expectations will evolve over time, is it possible to create a customer experience design architecture that is able to change with time (without having to do a massive uplift)?
- Recap: What is your advice for customer experience leaders on driving loyalty through customer experience?
