9 Ways a Customer Experience Platform Helps Drive Business Growth

How a Customer Experience Platform Fuels Business Success

While your customers may not always be right in the literal sense, their collective experiences will always point the way forward for your business. This has always been true, but it has become even more important in today’s globalized and hypercompetitive markets. And with everyone using data to drive marketing and pricing decisions, prices and feature sets between close competitors are often practically identical, with the final choice often resting on whoever offers the better customer experience (CX).

Managing CX can be tricky. Market preferences, technology adoption, and many other factors that affect it are dynamic, requiring a continuously evolving approach that not every organization can commit to. Adopting a customer experience platform to manage and make sense of customer feedback helps solve these longstanding CX challenges, allowing for a data-centric way to develop positive customer experiences. Just as importantly, these systems can also contribute to a truly unified understanding of customer sentiments within a business.

CXM technologies have existed for some time, but it’s only recently that they’ve been able to offer speed, accuracy, and depth in processing feedback data, at a scale and cost any organization can afford. Integrating the right CX platform does the following:

1. Improves Customer Retention

As a rule, acquiring new customers is far more expensive than simply convincing an existing one to buy again. Depending on your industry, gaining a new customer can cost anywhere from five to 25 times more than keeping an existing one, according to a report by the Harvard Business Review. For that reason, any business that is set on sustainable growth will need to prioritize customer retention.

With a CX platform, businesses can more easily track and analyze customer feedback, improving the baseline CX as well as the odds of repeat sales. Customer-facing personnel, such as branch managers and members of the customer service team, can immediately be alerted of negative experiences at the level of individual customers.

This forms part of the “inner loop” of customer service management, an area that is focused on addressing individual feedback as soon as they arise. Immediately closing the feedback loop with the right corrective measure allows businesses to not only recover dissatisfied customers but also foster loyalty, enhancing long-term retention rates.

2. Enhances Customer Acquisition

CX platforms provide businesses with hard data regarding customer preferences and trends, allowing them to build more effective top-of-the-funnel strategies and increase conversions. With these insights, businesses can optimize everything—from advertising and product positioning to product or service quality—to guarantee that they are meeting the needs of customers. A business’s upper management or people in the higher levels of leadership can leverage these insights as part of the “outer loop” of customer experience management.

Unlike the inner loop, which addresses individual customer concerns or feedback, the outer loop aims to tackle broader, more systemic improvements, like those that are directed toward addressing wider market needs and enhancing customer acquisition. Identifying recurring pain points or emerging trends, allows companies’ leadership teams to implement much-needed changes to processes, policies, and offerings that will help enhance customer acquisition and overall customer journeys.

3. Boosts Brand Advocacy

Implementing a CX platform allows businesses to consistently close the feedback loop or complete the communication circle, minimizing the time between a customer sending feedback and the business’s response to it. Generally speaking, the faster the feedback loop is closed, the better the experience for the customer, particularly if they send in a complaint.

In the Net Promoter Score (NPS) scale, the power of a promoter is tenfold. These are your loyal, enthusiastic customers who not only continue to engage with your brand but actively recommend it to others. Promoters are the driving force behind your organic growth. After all, word-of-mouth is one of the most effective marketing tools. According to a Nielsen report, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over other forms of advertising.

Promoters amplify your brand by referring new customers, increasing lifetime value, and building a positive reputation. These recommendations tend to carry much more weight than conventional ads and endorsements, making them especially valuable for the business. Identifying your promoters will also drive revenue growth, which we will get into on the next point.

4. Drives Revenue Growth

Better customer retention and acquisition can help bring down a business’s sales and marketing costs, freeing up more revenue and strengthening its cash flow. This is where identifying your promoters becomes invaluable. Knowing your promoters is like having your own sales team. How? Promoters often leave glowing reviews, enhancing your online reputation and influencing potential customers.

Through advocacy and word-of-mouth, promoters act as your organic ambassadors, spreading the word about your business to their friends, family, and social circles. Their recommendations are trusted more than traditional advertising. A proper CX platform will help you build more promoters by helping you resolve issues within the platform and close the loop rhythmically.

It serves to continuously deepen these benefits, not just by giving businesses an idea of how to address retention and acquisition as they are but also by providing insights into ongoing changes within the customer base and the wider market context. As customers’ sentiments change, a CX platform can help businesses keep abreast of these sentiments to keep revenues flowing and trending upward.

5. Streamlines Operations

As touched on earlier, a CX platform helps build a unified understanding of the customer experience, not just across all customer-facing teams but also among the higher management and other important stakeholders. Such a platform can streamline operations by helping a business facilitate the swift implementation of organization-wide changes and improvements.

When recurring issues or opportunities for enhancement are identified, the insights derived from customer feedback by the CX platform can be shared seamlessly across departments, ensuring that everyone is aligned and ready to act. Advanced AI-powered CX systems are able to automate labor-intensive tasks like surveys or customer feedback analysis, saving businesses a significant amount of time when identifying sentiments, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement.

6. Improves Product Development

A CX platform gives businesses data-backed insights to better align product offerings with customer sentiments and existing market demands, even as these sentiments and demands shift with time. It can also provide a more realistic picture of customer preferences so that product development teams and key decision-makers can better avoid creating negative experiences.

Automating survey feedback gathering and analysis through such a platform also helps businesses spot trends and preferences early, simplifying adjustments to product development plans. Additionally, real-time feedback gathered within the inner loop or frontline of customer experience management allows businesses to address product issues quickly to reduce the impact of individual negative experiences.

7. Enhances Employee Engagement

CX platforms can help businesses create a winning customer-centric culture, wholly supported by data-driven insights. Once the system is set up, businesses have a means to truly help their employees understand customer needs, helping them succeed in meeting customer expectations. This invariably leads to better morale as well as reduced turnover, saving the business on employee hiring and development.

8. Facilitates Data-Driven Decision Making

The use of AI in modern CX platforms has finally allowed more areas of CX to be broken down and turned into useful data. In particular, written survey feedback, which once required significant human labor to collect, clean, and break down can now be processed instantly to provide insights that consistently move the business forward. The CX successes facilitated by tools such as text analytics solutions can be the impetus for any business to shift to a meaningfully data-centric culture, from employees on the frontline to the top decision-makers.

9. Supports Market Expansion

Using a CX platform can also help mitigate many of the risks associated with market expansion, including efforts targeting new domestic market segments or international customers. By gathering feedback at scale, such a system lets businesses instantly learn sentiments and readjust approaches to better meet the preferences of a still-unfamiliar audience. This greatly reduces the initial costs of gaining a solid foothold in new markets and helps avoid blunders that could degrade the brand.

Conclusion

Far from being just a way to automate survey feedback processing, a customer experience platform can drive meaningful business growth in multiple areas and potentially change an organization’s culture for the better. Counterintuitively, the expanded data processing capabilities offered by CX platforms are now creating a better, more human way of doing business—one that your customers are likely to respond to with greater loyalty and stronger engagement.