Picture this; after receiving a product from an e-commerce website, you promptly receive an SMS, a call, or an email requesting your feedback. This holds true, even in the case of food delivery apps like Zomato or Swiggy, which actively solicit your reviews for the food, the delivery experience, or the restaurant from where you have ordered.
While the business landscape has turned quite competitive, customer experience (CX) has become important. Companies now understand that even if their product or service is not extraordinary, it is vital for them to offer good customer service. This change in focus has given birth to Customer Experience Platforms (CXPs).
What is a CXP?
CXPs are powerful tools that let businesses optimize and facilitate effective customer interactions. This is done through in-depth data analysis, automation, and personalization via multiple channels. CXPs play an important role in most customer-centric businesses like that of e-commerce sites and others.
They help in initiating personalized, and engaging interactions with the customers. When customer interactions are effective, they lead to better customer satisfaction, and loyalty that ultimately results in the success of the business.
Key features of CXPs
So, how have the CXPs gained significant importance in today’s business landscape? Well, this is because of the important role that they play in driving customer interactions and business success.
Here are some key features why CXPs hold immense significance:
- Beat the competition: The market competition is only increasing with each passing day. In such a crowded market, often businesses find it difficult to survive. They need to look for differentiators to survive the competition. This is where CXPs come to their rescue. CXPs offer the businesses to create their niche in the market through exceptional customer experiences. In this way, companies excel by attracting and retaining customers.
- Unified Data: CXPs act as a centralized source for storing and managing customer data. This customer data is derived from different sources such as CRM systems, marketing databases, and customer support interactions. This collation of customer data allows the business to comprehensive understanding of the customers.
- Customer Segmentation: With the help of CXPs, businesses can segregate their customers based on demographics, behaviour, purchase history, and preferences. This bifurcation is important when it comes to targeted marketing and creating personalized customer experiences for future reference.
- Marketing Automation: There are many CXPs that let businesses automate their marketing campaigns, customer segmentation, and email marketing. Marketing automation ensures the delivery of timely and relevant messages to customers.
- Brand Reputation: Creating a strong brand reputation is important for any business. A strong reputation is built on consistent positive customer experiences. CXPs enable businesses to deliver their promises on time and in turn build trust among the customers. When a business has a good reputation, it helps to attract new customers and prompts brand loyalty. For instance, when you make a purchase on Amazon or any other e-commerce platform, you prioritize reading product reviews and checking its rating. This is where the significance of a CXP becomes evident.
- Changing market dynamics: CXPs compel businesses to stay alert and help them to adapt to the changing market and customer choices. CXPs also enable businesses to make data-driven decisions and initiate marketing strategies to stay abreast of the competition.
- Real-time Insights: There are some CXPs that offer real-time insights and data that prompt the business to respond proactively to any issue or grab opportunities that may arise. For example, the usage of chatbots to respond to customer queries.
- A/B Testing: This feature of the CXPs allows the business to experiment with different types of content, and try initiating new offers or discounts to figure out which of the marketing tactics work the best for them.
- Compliance Management: Safeguarding customer data is one of the most important aspects of any business. CXPs have several features that can be used for data encryption, access controls, and compliance management.
- Measurable ROI: Businesses may come up with many marketing tactics, but in the end, it is important for them to know the effectiveness of the marketing strategies. CXPs help them to track the impact through different metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) among others. By using these tools, businesses can measure the return on investment (ROI) and explain the capital used to improve customer experiences.
- Customer Journey Mapping: CXPs have tools that can be used for customer journey mapping. This will help businesses to understand the various touchpoints and interactions customers are having with their brand.
These features together help businesses to deliver excellent customer experiences, drive customer loyalty, and achieve their objectives. However, these features of a CXP can vary as per the software provider and business needs.
Benefits of CXPs
Here are some of the important business benefits that CXPs bring along:
1. Customer Loyalty and Retention
Customer loyalty is the backbone of any business. A CXP helps in building strong customer relations by offering consistent and positive experiences. Besides, it also lets businesses collect data like customer preferences, feedback, or behaviour. This allows businesses to offer personalized interactions and address the customers’ needs proactively. All these lead to better customer satisfaction and help build loyalty by bringing down churn rates and promising repeat business. For example, if you are a regular customer at a local shop if that shopkeeper extends discounts each time, you are more likely to visit his shop than the others.
2. Better Customer Satisfaction
CXPs help businesses to get a deeper understanding of their customer’s needs and expectations. By analyzing customer feedback and other related data, businesses can identify the areas for improvement. This leads to improved customer satisfaction, which can lead to positive referrals and increased brand promotions. For example, if Amazon offers good customer service for a recently bought product like a hassle-free exchange or money refund, the customer is bound to go back and shop again and consider Amazon as a preferred e-commerce site.
3. Reduction in Operational Costs
CXPs automate processes that in turn help to streamline aspects like customer inquiries, order processing, or issue resolution. Automation helps in bringing down operational costs and reduces errors and response times. This will provide a faster and more accurate service for the customers.
4. Data-Driven Decision Making
CXPs collect and analyze customer data and provide valuable insights into customer behaviour, and preferences. With the help of this information, businesses can make decisions regarding developing products, amending marketing strategies, and exploring ways to engage customers. This type of approach keeps the companies alert and responsive to a dynamic market scenario. For instance, when you write a review for a restaurant on Zomato, it contributes to the fine-tuning of both the restaurant’s rating and the delivery person’s performance, thus enriching Zomato’s understanding of the restaurant.
5. Personalization
We feel so good when we receive a personalized message. This is exactly what the CXPs do! CXPs help in delivering personalized experiences to a large customer base. This is done by way of data segmentation and advanced analytics. This enables businesses to customize their communications, offers, and recommendations based on the customer’s preferences. Personalization increases customer engagement, facilitates high conversion rates, and boosts revenue.
6. Uniqueness
When a business has a well-implemented CXP, it helps in attracting customers who prefer exceptional customer service. Moreover, the insights and data provided by the CXP can help the business stay ahead of market trends and cater to changing customer expectations. This will give the business an edge above the rest and act as a differentiator in a competitive landscape.
7. Omnichannel Engagement
Modern customers interact with businesses through a variety of channels, including websites, social media, mobile apps, email, and more. A CXP helps a business streamline and manage these multiple channel engagements in a unified place. In this way, the customers will have a consistent experience, regardless of the channel they choose. Also, the CXPs offer a unified view of customer data and communication history. All this improves the customer experience and boosts operational efficiency.
8. Better Employee Productivity and Satisfaction
CXPs provide easy access to customer data, insights, and tools which makes the jobs of the employees better and organized. As a result, the employees will be able to deliver better service and make informed decisions at the same time. This will increase employee satisfaction and engagement as they can monitor their efforts that are pumped into customer experiences and business outcomes.
We live in a decade where customer is the king and his satisfaction is of utmost importance. Having said this, implementing a CXP is no longer an option but a necessity for every business that is aiming to survive. Customer expectations just like our technologies are only evolving with each passing day and hence having a robust CXP has become crucial for businesses of all sizes and industries.
Sources
What is a CXDP? Customer experience and data platform (dotdigital.com)
How to use a CXP – customer experience platform | Voyado
Ultimate Guide to Digital Customer Experience Platforms | elcom
7 benefits of customer experience management | TechTarget
The Benefits of an Intelligent Customer Experience Platform | SugarCRM
