How Customer Experience Management become Smarter in 2020

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is a new visionary approach to marketing & it’s about architecting a favorable environment for enhanced customer experience (CX). Customer Experience Management is all set to become smarter in the year 2020. The marketers keeping pace with digital transformation will harness mountains of customer data from diverse platforms across the web, as well as from the physical channels & will put them to use for extracting valuable insights from data analysis & interpretation. In an era of omnichannel marketing, marketers need to connect to customers at every touchpoint, analyze their multi-intent & accordingly, need to work out ways to deliver customer expectations. Customer Experience Management (CXM) is an absolute imperative for B2B marketers to get a competitive edge in the year 2020 & beyond. According to Gartner, over 80% of the organizations expect to compete mainly based on CX this year. Evidently, focusing on CXM is essential for a company’s future success. Having a stringent Customer Experience Management (CXM) framework not only helps marketers with customer acquisition & optimized sales conversions but also helps in client retention & omnichannel reputation management & branding endeavors. According to Gartner Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the practice of designing & reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty & advocacy. Customer experience is the summation of both conscious & subconscious perception of customers of explicit & implicit emotions that they have about a brand – resulting in interactions with your brand during the customer life cycle. Customer experience management (CXM) is about serving online customers by understanding & prioritizing their expectations. Understanding your customers well & delivering personalized experiences inspires customer loyalty & evangelizes others about your brands via positive Word-of-Mouth-Marketing (WOMM). Read more on 8 Reasons why B2B Marketers Should Prioritize Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) Why Customer Experience Management is Important With the evolution in the field of B2B marketing, customers have become more powerful than ever before. As the research methodologies of the customers have evolved, it has led to a marketing paradigm shift from a product-focused approach to a customer-focused approach. Marketers need to create new opportunities for customer success. This, in simple words, means that customers should get the answers to the questions that they’re seeking at the right time & at the right platform. They must be able to figure-out clearly whether the answer to their question lies with a particular product or service at scale. According to Forrester, experience-led companies have 1.6x higher brand awareness, 1.5x higher employee satisfaction, and 1.9x times higher average order value.  Moreover, businesses driven by experience have 1.7x higher customer retention & 1.6x higher customer satisfaction rates. At a time when digital transformation is spurring across many of the B2B organizations, the brands need to prioritize Customer Experience Management (CXM) to collect truly relevant customer information to drive revenue growth. Analyzing the intent data of the customers from the first & third-party sources gives marketers an idea to collect truly relevant customer information & implement the data-driven customer insights to make wiser business decisions. Collecting relevant customer information helps the marketers in devising impeccable strategies for optimizing their core marketing endeavors & for formulating winning strategies for achieving revenue goals. Marketers also need to qualitatively & quantitatively access their CX indexes. Assigning core metrics related to CX & aligning them the core business KPIs, assures that the brands are well-positioned to measuring & optimizing their CX endeavors. Customer-centricity isn’t a new concept for the brands & with the evolution of the MarTech technologies, excelling at Customer Experience Management (CXM) provides brands a critical advantage over their competitors in terms of acquiring a bigger chunk of marketing share & can provide tangible business value. Devising an optimized Customer Experience Management architecture benefits the marketers in the following ways:

• Providing hyper-personalized & individualized experiences to the prospects and customers at the right time & the right place assures that the multi-intent of the customers is prioritized. This ensures that the customers’ experience is optimized leading to optimized conversions.

• As the brand performance strengthens through differentiated experiences not only the sales revenue bolsters but the positive Word-of-Mouth-Marketing (WOMM) also helps in building positive brand resonance

• Improve customer loyalty & create advocates through valued and collaborative sessions with the customers

• As the customer churn is reduced, costs of customer acquisition are lowered

Evolving trends of Customer Experience Management in 2020 Customer Experience Management (CXM) is increasingly becoming driven by technology. Leading technology companies across the globe are embracing the fact that implementing the latest technological developments have helped their companies grow their footprints in providing exceptional customer experience across omnichannel. Technology has become a decisive factor for companies of all sizes to sustain in their marketplace & outlast their competitors. Data lies at the center of all the CXM endeavors that the enterprises make. To access & analyze the multi-intent of the customers, the marketers need to collect as many data-points about the customers as possible. Based on the analysis of the intent data of the customers, at various stages of their buying cycles, marketers can think of ways to optimize the graphs of their customer experience (CX). With the whole of 2020 ahead of us, marketers need to think of ways to enhance their reach to customers’ data & come up with new ways to precisely segment their audience groups. The more refined the segments, the better is the targeting, the greater is the customer experience & the higher is the probability of optimized sales revenues. With data fueling almost every big bet in the B2B dominion including Customer Experience Management (CXM), the following are the emerging trends in B2B customer experience management that the B2B marketers can look forward to matching pace & ballet with:

1. Employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) to Understand Your Customers:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an enabler of customer experience management (CXM) strategies. AI along with machine learning can influence every aspect of any organization. We have already seen the impact of AI on every aspect of an organization including customer interaction management. Micro-targeting & customer segmentation strategies are already being enhanced by Machine Learning Algorithms. As the segments of customers are refined to suit niche marketing by leveraging ML algorithms such as k-means clustering, the right messages can be sent to the right customers at the right time which helps in elevating the CXM index. Improvement in AI & the ML algorithms has largely made the search results on the search engines intent-based rather than being keyword centric, a process which continues in 2020 with the evolution of the Google’s core search algorithm after the January 2020 core update. Businesses can apply data cleansing, analysis, interpretation & learning algorithms to get a sneak-peek of customers’ behaviors & research methodologies across omnichannel, their desires, as well as their expectations. According to a report by IDC, 65% of the customers are expected to extend the pursuit of their physical & digital experiences using voice search, images & implying augmented reality to interact with brands on their mobile devices by the year 2023. The same research predicted that by the end of the year 2020, 25% of international brands will contract with AI & human translation platforms to provide a multichannel localization and contextually relevant personalized experiences. The IDC analysts have also predicted the customer experience technology market to total over $600 billion by 2022.  Thus, artificial intelligence (AI), backed by groundbreaking technologies lies at the core of revolutionizing Customer Experience Management.

2. People-centricity will take Centre Stage in driving Customer Experience Management (CXM) & Silos Marketing Endeavors will be a thing of the past: 

According to Gartner, 70% of enterprises will experiment with immersive technologies to be used by the customers as well as enterprises & 25% will deploy them for production by the year 2022. Leveraging the intelligence of the integrated technologies the customers will be able to develop holistic customer experience management (CXM) platforms. The multi-touchpoint aspect of experience will connect people across an array of devices – be they traditional computing devices, wearables, automobiles or environmental sensors. Brands can try prioritizing CSR (corporate social responsibility) activities. This assures that brands reflect on their pledge to contribute to society. This, in turn, enhances customers’ experiences. Equally important for brands is prioritizing employee experience. According to Harvard Business Review, companies that invest in employee experience are 4.2x more profitable than those that don’t. The social, environmental or political factors within a company influence the realm of Customer Experience Management (CXM). Companies can perform market analysis such as SWOT & PERT to statistically infer where they are placed in the market in terms of capturing the sentiments of their customers. The concept of departments working in silos will be a thing of past & agility & integration will take over.

3. Assimilate Internet of Things (IoT) in Your Marketing Strategy:

IoT has revolutionized the B2B marketing world. To scale up their marketing game, marketers need to be proactive with their data analysis & reporting strategies. The data needs to be collected & analyzed in real-time. Customers’ expectations & their methodologies of research continue to evolve. As this happens, customers will expect to be served with the pieces of information on their preferred digitized platforms. Marketers not only need to have omnipresence but also need to have an efficient multi-attribution modeling system in place to optimize their customers’ experiences.

4. Augmented Reality Will Help Elevate the CX Index:

Businesses across the globe have started to realize that AR offers more practical applications for customer experience. According to a report by Irishtechnews.ie, the market size for AR is predicted to reach $108 billion by 2021. The applications working on the principles of Augmented Reality use the camera & screen of smartphones to operate its applications. The breakthrough of AR will eventually lead to the disappearance of smartphones & the development of exclusive apps that will revolutionize the marketing world. B2B AR tech solutions at present include Microsoft Hololens & Meta Vision glasses which are AR hardware solutions. Inculcating the AR perspective in B2B marketing means revolutionizing both the online as well as the offline pursuit of digitization. AR-based apps will drive creative imagination in marketing, optimizing customer experience & making the deliverance of customer experience faster, more personal & user-friendly.

5. Articulating Omnichannel Reputation Management will More Important than Ever Before: 

Customers value brand experience only if they trust you. According to a prediction by Gartner, digitally trustworthy companies will generate 20% more online profit than those who don’t inspire enough trust. Another study by Forbes deduced that the next-gen customer experience endeavors driven by Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) could backfire if there aren’t accompanied by strong risk & reward management programs. Building an omnichannel presence & working on an omnichannel brand reputation can be the actual game changer for brands in the highly competitive arena of customer experience management (CXM). With CX being a priority for most of the brands in 2020, companies will increasingly be aware of their customers’ expectations & will leverage resources & invest in the latest marketing tools so that they can value the customers the experiences that they value most. Whether or not the customers choose to carousal those experiences will depend on their trust in a particular brand – its vision & deliverance. Wrapping Things Up Customer conversion is vital but it doesn’t stop then & there. Customer retention & client advocacy are things than can help skyrocket your revenue several times more than the actual sale. Client acquisition is easier but client retention requires B2B brands to infuse trust in their customers by optimizing the scales of their Customer Experience Management (CXM). Customer loyalty is a branding currency you need to venture into & earn. It’s the ultimate reward that requires optimizing your marketing efforts beyond selling to reflect on the value proposition of the products or services, primarily from the purpose of helping the customers. CXM is not a result of the multi-channel orchestration of marketing efforts. It’s not a result of working in silos but opting for an integrated & technologically sound approach to understand your customers, tap into their behavioral insights & figuring out ways to help them in a manner that optimizes their experiences across omnichannel, calling for brand advocacy. The year 2020 will be a year of experimental marketing & CXM will be a core ingredient of excelling at the game. Your prospects, existing customers & employees all count. Keep into consideration the above-enlisted reasons to bone up your CXM strategy to engage customers & scale up your revenue goals. Valasys Media is a top-notch B2B service provider & a trusted name to help marketers redesign their B2B marketing endeavors. Our services include lead-generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services to help marketers foster their marketing aspirations.