In a world that’s engrossed in virtual interactions, making meaningful connections is vital.
- Health and well-being go beyond the absence of disease. We must focus on prevention, better outcomes, lower costs and more seamless patient experiences.
- This idea requires change by individuals, systems and communities—the future is centred on people. Individuals hold the key to their unique path to health.
In the last two years every business became digital, and every customer, regardless of age or demographic, became a digital customer. Organizations raced to understand this new digital customer, be it a consumer, employee or partner, and pivoted quickly to provide personalized experiences.
In the same two years, organizations also realized how quickly they transformed to digital business, and, just like that, speed became the norm.
Organizations also realized how interdependent we all are, from the well-being of factory workers and delivery pros, to supply chain partners, customer support representatives and technology providers. Customer experience (CX) is an ecosystem, and each link must be safeguarded in an increasingly mutually dependent world.
In our Innovation Index report, two-thirds of the executives we surveyed said increasing customer satisfaction was a top goal over the next two years, and the demands of customers (or constituents and patients) were a primary driver of strategic and operational change.
Creating and nurturing empathetic experiences is critical. And in a world that is increasingly encompassing physical, digital and hybrid spaces, success will mean customer lifetime value and an organization’s ability to continuously reimagine itself to provide those experiences.
Today, finding ways to accelerate transformation strategies continues to be critical, and a matter of survival. And to succeed, organizations will need to pivot from a cost-saving mindset to a growth mindset. Speed will continue to be a critical factor for success.
Companies that accelerate their digital transformation efforts to completion can expect 17% increase in ROI in the first year. Apart from adopting a growth mindset and accelerating digital, organizations will also need to continuously reimagine their business to stay relevant to their consumers, employees and partners.
Key steps that will enable success, include:
- Enabling and accelerating digital experiences with a goal-oriented vision
- Using data-driven strategies and agile frameworks for hyper- personalization
- Delivering persona-driven, differentiated experiences that create lasting value
- Managing and measuring experiences at real-time speed
Growth and Customer Loyalty
How to Drive Customer Lifetime Value
Compelling customer experience is simply good business. According to the 2021 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report, CX is moving to the world of added value. Some 90% of organizations agree that CX is a primary differentiator, and almost 60% of global consumers strongly agree that CX is a way to differentiate from the competition.
The pandemic has helped make consumers more emotionally invested in their favourite brands, and this trend is going to continue, especially with rapidly evolving global changes. According to The State of Brand Loyalty 2021: Global Consumer Survey, 68% (compared to 59.8% in 2019) will go out of their way to purchase from brands they're loyal to, and 56% (compared to 34.5% in 2019) of those people will do so even if there are cheaper options.
There is no playing catch-up. An NTT DATA financial services study revealed that 35% of Gen X and millennial customers want hyper-personalized services to help them meet their life goals, and are willing to share their personal data and pay more for those services.
While customers are willing to give organizations their data and trust, it means organizations have that much more responsibility to value and nurture it to sustain loyalty.
Customers and employees alike are more informed, loyal and have higher expectations from their organizations; they are not only looking at what you do, but how you do it, too. This means that one wrong step, and all the good that you’ve built over months and years can pass on to your competitor in a flash.
And that loyalty is not a steady state; a well-informed customer is quick on the uptick and has no qualms switching over to a competitor. Because today it’s not just what you sell, but what you stand for and how you conduct yourself—because the socially aware and morally responsible customer is constantly watching. Corporate stance on issues like diversity or social justice aren’t mere marketing, they’re promises, and your customers will call you on them.
3 Steps to Drive Customer Value
Step 1: Think Value Drivers
Deliver persona-driven, differentiated experiences that create lasting value; start with customer need and thread it back into the value you can provide—if it doesn’t solve a customer need it’s not a value driver
Step 2: Think Long Term
Look beyond short-term acquisition or technologies, and focus on key indicators of lifetime customer value and be innovative; use data-driven strategies to guide you
Step 3: Incorporate Ethics
Gather the data that you will use to provide mutual value, and always ask what the consequences to the customer will be
Designing an Ethical Future
Rewrite the future with ethical design
Delivering Digital Experiences
Building trusted digital experiences is the key to success. While revenue growth can happen via cost-saving measures, lasting business value can happen only when you build those digital experiences that earn your organization lifetime loyalty.
Connect
business goals to customer measurement to demonstrate value and ROI on experience investments
Measure
and optimize experiences across channels to drive the highest level of engagement
Accelerate
the process to enable continuous improvement at real-time speed
For healthcare providers, this could mean a smiling and caring staff with the right medical records at hand. For banks, it might mean hassle-free and quick digital transactions. And for retailers, it could mean a seamless experience from browsing and selecting a product on line, to customizing the final selection in store, and then completing the transaction with a payment made via an app at the point of sale.
And in the constantly evolving world of work, organizations have an increasing responsibility to look out for their internal customers, a.k.a employees, and they need to look at the whole employee—their professional and personal well-being—and focus on human-centric, empowered work.
Creating digital experiences that guarantee loyalty begins with understanding your customer needs, incorporating empathy as you build the experiences, and using data-driven technologies to build and deliver those experiences securely.
And successful organizations are able to connect their customer experience programs to business goals, drive high levels of engagement by continuously measuring and optimizing experiences across channels and continuously improving and fine-tuning their processes.
Managing, Measuring, Continuously Reinventing
The massive pivot to hyper-personalized digital and speed came together to change the very ecosystem in which we all engage. Our experiences, whether we’re banking, shopping or doing our jobs, are no longer individual moments in time, or single touchpoints and channels. It is the entirety of the ecosystem in which we’re all interacting, and that ecosystem is alive and changes from moment to moment, driven by the interactions that are happening within it. This new experience ecosystem is constantly being shaped and reshaped by the multitude of data behind every action and micro-action.
To be ahead of the game, organizations need to be increasingly data-driven to deliver, manage and measure experiences at real-time speed. This entails:
- Gathering the data that will help you build those experiences
- Securing the data at every customer touchpoint
- Leveraging data on the cloud; using data analytics technologies to enable a real-time predictive view of the customer, and using orchestration platforms to act on those predictions in real time
- Keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer with real-time journey management, and enabling continuous measurement and optimization of their channels
Equally important is the ability to connect your experience metrics to business goals. And as needs of consumers, employees and partners continue to change rapidly and constantly, the most critical determinant of success will be the ability to continuously reimagine and reinvent yourself.
More than 50% of insurers say that changing customer behaviours and demands will have a significant impact on their business, with almost 75% of carriers shifting business models.
We predict that by 2025 banks will offer experiences that are intelligent, anticipatory, and capable of recommendations via any channel, while automating key decisions and tasks.
Watch a lively client and analyst panel share CX predictions, best practices and lessons learned through the lens of business, marketing and technology for the NTT DATA IndyCar Series—all applied to your industry.
How to Own the Insurance CX in 2022
Watch a panel of clients discuss what’s stopping insurers from meeting new customer expectations—including which industries are succeeding at elevating CX and where insurers are lagging.
