Customer experience is a moving target. What a customer expects from your business is not only based on their past experiences with you, but also on experiences they’ve had with other businesses in general. As a society, the bar is raised on CX as soon as another organization succeeds in delivering a consistently exceptional, replicable experience.
While we might silently cringe when the customer in line ahead of you asks to speak to a manager, we all know we’re empowered to do the same: to demand an outcome we know is within the realm of what should be possible for a business to deliver.
Consequently, many business leaders now consider it a high priority to “excite and delight” customers, knowing that their competition is chasing the same goal. The bar is raised, customers adjust their expectations accordingly, and the race to reach new levels of customer satisfaction races on.
Striving for Exceptional CX
It’s worth noting that even the definition of what constitutes a great customer experience continues to evolve. The push toward delivering “mindblowing” customer service that was popular in the mid-2000s—in which brands were encouraged to go well above and beyond to find new and surprising ways of leaving customers ecstatically satisfied (if this was ever even a thing?)—has given way to a more practical and down-to-earth desire for:
- Consistency
- Consistency
- No, really: Consistency
A customer who is seeking resolution to an issue or looking for a specific outcome is more likely to rate an experience positively if the journey was predictably seamless, pleasant, and effective. Up to 60% of customers who experience an inconsistent customer experience will switch brands, even if some of their experiences were positive.
Feedback like this is critical to understanding what customers expect, and it’s a big reason CX must be reexamined and fine-tuned on an ongoing basis.
A Customer-Centric Perspective
This process of continually iterating on improvements based on customer experiences may feel very familiar in terms of Agile planning. CX does not exist as a separate increment; rather, the customer is central to every story and should be driving every potential release or shippable product. When business leaders talk about improving the customer experience, they may not even realize how in sync they are with their Agile development teams. (We’ll just call that a happy accident of terminology and take the win.)
Automation is key to keeping pace with customer expectations, simply because it enables teams to move faster while remaining focused on the right things. Companies have leveraged the Cyara Platform to achieve significant gains in the way they interact with customers, with automation playing a role in overcoming challenges like these:
- One globally recognized technology leader was tasked with deploying a new cloud contact center solution in under half the anticipated timeframe.
- A global financial institution mapped the customer journeys taken by its +2 million customers and determined the need to adopt and test technology that would span seven communication channels.
- One of the world’s largest health benefits organizations set a goal of automating at least 70% of its IVR test cases to increase the speed-to-market of member-centric improvements. At last check, they had achieved over 98% test coverage.
Competitive Advancement of CX
When I called customer experience a race earlier, that’s because it truly is. Developers are no doubt feeling more pressure than ever to ship faster and meet shorter release cycles in order to deliver more value to the customer. If your update ships in six weeks but your competitor ships in two, your business will always be at a perpetual CX disadvantage.
Reducing the amount of manual testing a team performs is one of the easiest ways to improve efficiency, tighten up release cycles and ultimately shorten time to value for customers. It also helps reduce the risk of introducing human errors and improves the overall quality of your brand.
