Making the CX, Customer Spend Connection

Focusing on customer experience has come into vogue in recent years. You probably know that. The thinking goes that people are less patient and less likely to put up with sub-par customer service since connected devices and the internet make it easier for them to comparison shop and easily switch suppliers.

But, now that we’ve been talking about CX for a few years, customer service industry players and their customers are starting to get more analytical about their thinking and approaches to this topic. And they’re starting to consider how and whether CX relates to customer spend and revenue growth.

Recent research indicates there is a connection. And many industry players and CX publications have been sending out that message, and offering tips on how to ensure those are the results you get when investing in efforts to improve customer experience.

Here are some of the statistics we’ve found in articles from past issues of CUSTOMER magazine and other sources.

• A company that improves its customer-retention rates by as little as 5 percent may see increased profits that are 25 to 95 percent higher, according to Bain & Co. research.

CX leaders experienced CAGR of 17 percent over five years while laggards saw just 3 percent growth in the same time window, according to Forrester (News - Alert).

• 89 percent of companies say CX is key in driving customer loyalty and retention; it costs five times as much money to attract a new customers as to keep an existing one; repeat customers spend, on average, 67 percent more; and a 5 percent increase in retention yields profit increases of 25 to 95 percent, according to the Mize (News - Alert) Inc. website homepage.

So how can businesses improve their customer experiences, increase their customer spending and grow their revenues, and lower their customer acquisition costs? Here are a few of the ways.

• Define your goals – and measure them again and again. The key to improving customer service and meeting internal goals is to first figure out what factors are most important to your customer service effort, then to make a plan for how to measure those metrics, and then to put the procedures in place to leverage that data to make improvements where needed.

• Empower your agents. Providing contact center agents with the tools they need to quickly and efficiently serve customers and imbuing your customer service initiative with a culture that encourages agents to find answers for customers rather than simply read scripts are two great ways to enhance CX and customer spend. That may include tying your CRM to the contact center, and maybe even using artificial intelligence, so agents are fed detailed information on incoming callers so they can address their requests much faster.

• Remove buying and customer service friction. As I mentioned during the recent MetTel (News - Alert) webinar “Revenue Generating Wi-Fi – Amazon-Like Advantages at Your Brick & Mortar,” Amazon got where it is today by making buying easy, creating a simple return process, and continuing to remove friction for customers as they interact with the company. Removing friction is important whether you’re talking about interactions online, in store, or over the phone or other channels to the contact center. That said, contact centers need to enable seamless experiences among channels, make their IVRs easy and fast to navigate, offer self-service channels, and work to achieve first contact resolution as frequently as possible.

Edited by Mandi Nowitz