Deliver products and experiences customers want
Companies can create experiences, products, and services that reinvent their relationships with customers and employees. Sometimes succeeding at customer experience is as simple as creating customer-centric products that work well and provide clear value to target audiences and segments.
Organizations should take a human-centered approach to product strategy, design, development, and services. Those organizations can accelerate innovation and transformation, producing positive results for both existing and potential customers and creating strong brand advocates.
Oil and gas company MOL Group wanted to expand beyond its core products and services into digital services like car sharing, fleet management and more. Working with IBM Consulting™ and Salesforce, MOL Group created a suite of new products, driving an average revenue uplift of 15–30%.
Hone the brand's voice
Some customers care as much about the company’s branding as they do the actual products. Purchasing from companies in certain industries, such as fashion or consumer product goods, can be as much about status as the effectiveness of the specific product.
While meeting customers’ needs through strong product design is important, cultivating and communicating the company’s brand perspective also adds value. Companies should consider their overall marketing campaigns and branding to be key components of any customer engagement plan.
Prioritize customer onboarding
The best way to turn new customers into loyal customers is to set them up for success through a strong introduction process. This onboarding process might include a video to demonstrate a product’s functions, an FAQ that anticipates questions, or a webinar where employees interact with key stakeholders.
Create positive incentives
Companies have several tools at their disposal to increase loyalty, including customer loyalty programs, free gifts, VIP packages and premium-tier customer service. Creating positive experiences through loyalty packages can lead to higher retention rates and more referrals.
AI personalization can help customize loyalty programs to customer segments or even individuals. For instance, on a customer’s birthday, a quick-service restaurant might offer a specific free item that the customer orders often. That offer might resonate more than a generic offering that does not appeal to that customer.
Optimize customer support through contact center optimization
Understanding and addressing customers’ pain points with products can help eliminate churn and potentially turn existing customers into strong advocates. Contact center optimization helps organizations serve more customers more efficiently and promotes consistency of engagements.
Organizations need enough resources to handle customer issues. Fortunately, technologies such as AI-driven chatbots, virtual agents and other forms of conversational AI can answer simple customer questions. In fact, the IBM Institute for Business Value found that 85% of CEOs believe that generative AI will be interacting directly with customers by 2026. This frees up human agents to handle more complex questions and issues. For example, IBM watsonx Assistant uses large language models (LLM), large speech models (LSM), natural language processing (NLP) and more to better understand contact center conversations with customers.
Brazilian bank Bradesco wanted to give each of its 65 million customers an enhanced personalized experience. IBM trained IBM watsonx Assistant in Portuguese and trained it on Bradesco’s 62 products. The virtual assistant now answers 283,000 questions a month with a 95% accuracy rate.
Become a data-first organization
Structured and unstructured data, including customer data, can power new tools and provide new insights that improve customer interactions at scale in near real time. Organizations can ask customers to provide their data through surveys, forms, or API connections to other sources of data. They can also collect data from public presences, such as social media and forums where individuals discuss organizations and their products. They can collect this information in a customer relationship management (CRM) database and use AI to analyze and visualize the data. This important data can affect product design decisions, advertising segmentation and new product opportunities.
Encourage customer feedback
To strengthen customer relationships, organizations should offer opportunities to provide feedback across every touchpoint. Customers often provide free feedback on social media platforms. But organizations can also conduct outreach to customers to learn more about their experiences with the product.
Asking customers for their perspectives might draw some criticisms about a product’s features. But those types of criticism are valuable feedback that can help organizations produce better products, and the act of listening creates a stronger emotional connection with those customers.
Pursue targeted outsourcing
Organizations have several options for supplementing their internal workforce and processes to free up internal HR representatives and customer success teams to work directly with customers. They can explore whether outsourcing several manual processes that occupy employee time is a better strategy than handling all responsibilities internally.
