This is a guest post from Nikhil Pereira, Customer Experience (CX) Practice Leader at Tech Mahindra.

What is customer experience and why is it important?

Customer Experience (CX) is an end-to-end journey that a customer experiences with a product or service throughout its lifecycle – pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. These experiences are divided in to Primary and Secondary stages.

There are critical parameters that define the ‘WHY’ CX is important:

• Improves customer satisfaction
• Enhances Revenue Generation
• Builds customer trust and loyalty
• Boosts customer retention
• Increases Brand Value

Some noteworthy insights on the importance of CX:

• 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience – PWC
• 25 Percent of Customer Service Operations Will Use Virtual Customer Assistants – Gartner
• 8 in 10 customers saying they’d switch to a competitor due to poor customer service – NICE
• 67% of customers prefer to self-serve than call the contact center – Nuance

Key Customer Engagement Channels and their benefits:

• Conversational AI: Chatbot, Conversational IVR to offer instant support 24x7x365
• Smart Speakers: Provide customers with a “Always-on handsfree” support
• Asynchronous Messaging: Support customers on their channel of choice and convenience
• Social Media: Build brand’s social presence, awareness, and customer trust
• Community Support: Enable customers to interact and support each other
• Online Self-Service: Empower customers self-serve to aid the best possible solutions

Future of Customer Experience

Providing a ‘personalized’ service is what companies have and should continue to deliver across the customer journey. The technology companies are now focusing more on delivering the best in class digital customer experience that can transform overall business outcomes. Artificial Intelligence is the key to deliver predictive and proactive service and will help drive insights via Analytics from Big Data. Looking back to move forward is the stepping stone for predicting the future of customer experience. In today’s post-COVID world, B2C is shifting to D2C where companies need to have their finger on the pulse of the end customer with a razor-sharp focus on end CX.

The response to the million-dollar question – where does the future of CX lie? It is no longer reactive but predictive customer experience. The shortcomings of traditional CX measurement must be identified and reworked using predictive analytics methods and models. Let’s throw light upon some important predictive analytics techniques:

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: AI and ML are the two eyes of predictive modeling. Machine Learning allows to define a pattern from millions of observations. The predictive model further uses the defined pattern recognitions to train its algorithm and identify data patterns that were not seen yet.
• Data mining: Unlike traditional data mining wherein focus is laid on finding solutions from data insights, the process of data mining involves use of statistical information, correlation and different patterns to define a solution.
• Clustering: Another important data mining technique, clustering involves identifying a fixed number of clusters in a particular dataset based on a target number ‘k’ wherein each data point is allocated to a cluster reducing the in-cluster sum of squares.

Predictive Analytics is the Future of CX Marketing

Predictive analytics has the potential to transform the way we conduct impact analysis and customer experience. However, the field is not developing at a fast enough pace. Businesses may decide the best method to respond to individual client wants and surpass expectations by using predictive analytics supplied by phone calls, emails, social media sentiment, customer escalations, and other data from other critical touchpoints. Predictive analytics can even assist businesses assure precise and dependable deliveries by anticipating probable complications in the journey or occasions in which delivery may be hastened. By using predictive analytics into your customer experience and operational activities, you can better serve and understand your consumers while also increasing productivity and efficiency.

In summary, considering today’s fast-paced digital-first world, to be able to build, retain, grow customer relationships, customer experience is “paramount”.

This is a guest post from Nikhil Pereira, Customer Experience (CX) Practice Leader at Tech Mahindra.

Author Bio
Nikhil Pereira is Contact Center expert with 20 years of end-to-end contact center expertise. He has experience across the Contact Center spanning Hiring, Training, Quality, Workforce Management, Performance Management etc. Nikhil comes with deep expertise in Contact Center Transformation leverage Digital-First tools and technologies. Conducted multiple Contact Center consulting studies across the globe for some of the leading brands across North America, UK, Middle East and Australia. He is a certified “Design Thinker”, UiPath and Microsoft certified.

Thanks to TranQuangKhai on Pixabay for the image.