Differentiated Customer Experience: Easier Said

By: Rick Kieser,
Ascribe

This post was recently
published on Ascribe's
blog.

Differentiated customer experience (CX) is a deceptively
challenging goal shared by growing numbers of companies. In a recent presentation on Digital
Marketing Trends by Mike Corak to
the Cincinnati AMA,
we heard a lot of valuable insights, but one statistic in particular caught our
attention. On slide 36 in his presentation, Mike quoted an
independent study that said '89% of companies plan to compete primarily based
on customer experience in 2016.'

It sounds smart and admirable, but what does really
mean to compete on customer experience, and what does it really take? One
thing it means is 'something different for every company,' because to compete '
to differentiate ' means that you are setting yourself apart as better,
special, even unique.

Easier Said Than Done

In order to truly compete on the basis of differentiated
customer experience, you must:

So how do you tackle the differentiation challenge and turn
it to your advantage? The answer is this: ask, analyze, act and ask
again. Simple, right? Well asking can be, but what comes next can
set leaders apart. If you process your open-ended feedback in context
with the rest of your survey data, you can very quickly generate actionable
insights to identify, understand, deliver and monitor your unique customer
experience.

Build on Customer
Feedback

In our own independent research, 91% of respondents said
they collect some kind of unstructured comments, but only about 60% do anything
at all with that feedback and a mere 30% drive their data all the way to real,
actionable insights. That's a far cry from the 89% who recently claimed
they would be differentiating based on customer experience!

To us, that translates tremendous opportunity for companies
to capitalize on assets they already have (survey data and open-ends) to
generate insights that can reveal and strengthen their own differentiated
customer experience proposition.