In this modern business era, big businesses win the competition by providing exceptional customer experience. A McKinsey study of executive-level managers found that improving the customer experience was among the top three goals of the CEO. About 90% of respondents were united over this belief.

The study shows that customer experience (CX) executives know that their organization must provide quantifiable value to the customers. Call center executives who want to provide value must choose a customer experience strategy that can pay off in the long run.

Call center KPIs linked to return on investment (ROI) should be the direct focus of the strategy. More specifically, tactics that deal with keeping customers happy and satisfied clearly affect retention rates and CSAT.

Innovation, however, is a process that takes time!

The original McDonald’s restaurant layout resulted from years of research, planning, and testing by the company’s founders. Getting there will be challenging, but you only need perseverance and focus!

Continue reading for a list of strategies you can use to innovate the customer experience at your company.

Customer Experience Innovation – A Brief Introduction

The term “customer experience innovation” refers to developing and executing innovative tactics, methods, and tools to improve the client’s encounter with the products and services offered by a company. The goal is to find ways to make the customer experience more enjoyable and rewarding.

Customer experience innovation aims to revolutionize how customers engage with a brand. It is much bigger than just making small adjustments for mini improvements. 

Key Customer Experience Innovation Elements

• Understanding client demands, preferences, and pain spots with the help of customer feedback, market research, surveys, and other methods.
• With the help of “creative thinking,” companies are able to brainstorm new ways to improve customer experience.
• Integrating technology, such as digital platforms, advanced analytics, and emerging technologies like AI and machine learning, is important to customer experience innovation. 
• Customer experience innovation also involves customizing things according to customer preferences, for example, product recommendations, user interfaces, and personalized marketing.
• Integration across several channels is the key to providing a consistent consumer experience online and offline.
• Innovation in customer experience generally uses agile and iterative methods, such as making changes based on feedback and learning.
• Employee engagement is key to innovation because an improved customer experience depends on employees understanding and supporting the company’s customer-centric aims.
• Customer experience innovation uses data and analytics to make decisions. 
• Customer Feedback Loops allow firms to obtain customer insights continuously, resulting in refined plans based on genuine consumer experiences.
•  Successful customer experience innovation generally demands a cultural shift toward customer-centricity at all levels of the organization. 

Innovative Customer Experience Strategies 

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important factors that tell what others feel about your business. If customer retention grows 5%, corporation earnings will jump 25% to 95%.  

All you need to do to enjoy this jump is to follow the upcoming strategies that will help you in the long run:

1. Focus on Independent Assistance – Self-Service

Due to its widespread use, self-service has become vital to contemporary customer experience management. It’s a win-win situation because customers and businesses both love it. 

New developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) have made it simple for self-service to understand what customers are worried about and point them in the right direction to solve the problem. This lets customers handle the problem on their own without waiting any longer. 

Most businesses understand that their customer service departments are crucial to satisfying customers. Unfortunately, self-service support is often overlooked or undervalued.

While almost half of digital-first businesses believe their self-service support choices are sufficient, just a quarter of their consumers feel the same way. It shouldn’t be a surprise that 81% of buyers prefer self-service options because of this.

2. Promote a Customer-Centric Mindset

A customer-first strategy is established from the top down. The value of prioritizing customers is communicated to all employees by management. Success and happiness for customers, rather than only the rare encounter when a representative goes above and beyond, can result from a company-wide emphasis on customer service.

Amazon as a Business Case Study

Have you ever noticed that there’s always one vacant seat in every Amazon corporate meeting? 

Whether two people or two hundred are in the room, Amazon always leaves one chair empty to represent the customer’s voice. As a result, the customer experience becomes implicit in every choice that Amazon makes. That chair constantly reminds executives to think about the consumer and their experience with the organization whenever they propose a change.

3. Give Omnichannel Assistance

Traditional methods of interacting with brands, such as desktop computers, are becoming obsolete. Now that mobile devices account for over half of all web traffic, digital experiences that span several platforms are the norm.

Customers will get irritated if they require a prompt answer but can only contact you through one channel, such as email. Customers (and problems) vary; therefore, you should have customized solutions for their utmost satisfaction. 

Customer assistance is available through several channels, such as social media, chatbots, email, and phone calls, known as omnichannel support. These channels are then merged on the backend so that customer service personnel may have a complete picture of each customer’s journey.

4. Aim for Proactive Customer Service

When you practice proactive customer service, your support staff is always on the lookout for any issues that could impact your customers’ experience. Your staff is always one step ahead of every new problem, fixing it before it impacts users or warning them so they can be ready. 

You may show your clients how much you care about their achievement and how dedicated you are to seeing it through by doing whatever it takes to eliminate barriers from their way.

Customers will have less need to contact your customer support team for common problems when you implement proactive customer service. A customer service representative is only sometimes necessary while offering proactive customer service. 

According to estimates from Kindly, self-service chatbots are predicted to save enterprises worldwide a total of $75 billion by 2030. Not only can cutting down on customer support employees save money for your business, but proactive customer support solutions can lighten your support team’s burden, allowing them to devote more time to key conversations with customers. 

5. Take Action Based on Consumer Feedback 

To optimize the customer experience and implement open innovation, someone in your business needs to take charge of the agreed-upon projects. A customer experience manager or innovation manager could be in this role, guiding interdisciplinary teams to develop and implement concrete plans. 

The greatest strategy to increase client loyalty is to provide outstanding customer service. You should incorporate training on interpersonal skills, such as active listening and using positive language, within your customer experience framework.

Listening to a customer’s desires and problems is the best way to learn about them. You can better meet their expectations by tailoring your services to them.

To help transform ideas and initiatives into worthwhile customer experiences, invite members of your online customer community to participate in further co-creation sessions.

6. Take Full Advantage of Technology 

AI and ML (machine learning) are perfect for customer experience. New digital technology has accelerated time-to-insights and made scalable and inexpensive new levels of personalization and service. With the rise of chatbots and natural language processing, which can understand people’s meaning in free-form text messages, technology has taken over the customer experience (CX) industry.

Industry giants are increasingly utilizing these technologies, which shows their value. For example, Domino’s Facebook Messenger chatbot allows users to place pizza orders, and eBay’s marketplace search function allows customers to find the greatest deals available, similar to a personal shopper. 

AI and associated technologies can simplify consumers’ lives and unleash your product creativity like never before!

How Southeast Asia is Leading the Way?

Any company serious about making it in the ever-changing global market must take an example from the Southeast Asian (SEA) market. Having a firm grasp of the region’s customer behavior trends is the key to success. 

In this intricate approach, let’s discover some of the most significant patterns in consumer behavior throughout the Southeast Asian region, which have propelled SEA customer service to the forefront:

1. Overcoming Poor Customer Service

Providing an exceptional customer experience is crucial in the cutthroat Southeast Asian business climate for retaining customers and attracting new ones. Customers in SEA have grown accustomed to high expectations of service quality due to companies’ persistent efforts to meet their needs through innovation and service improvement. 

Half of all Southeast Asian customers would go to a rival if a company failed to meet their expectations for customer service. This data came from a poll that asked people to rate their likelihood of shopping elsewhere in the event of subpar service. 

Maintaining happy and loyal consumers in the Southeast Asian region mostly depends on providing outstanding customer service. It shows that the goal of meeting the highest expectations of the customer has made SEA companies experts in the industry.

2. Timely Updates on Product Location is Key

Logistics relies on tracking so consumers can always see where their goods are, from the warehouse to the doorstep or collection point. Customers are more at ease, and purchases are more efficiently fulfilled when they can track their products in real time. 

Among the many monitoring aspects, 36% of Malaysian respondents ranked receiving timely updates on the whereabouts of their packages as the most vital.  

The second most popular tracking aspect among SEA customers, as selected by at least 24% of respondents in each nation, is easy access to detailed purchase and delivery information. Customers who shop online much appreciate this data’s ease and openness. 

People can see where their orders are in the process, get a good idea of when they will arrive, and deal with any problems as soon as they arise. As a result of this transparency, SEA customers have greater trust in the e-commerce platform, which enhances their purchasing experience.

3. Considering Good Customer Reviews is Vital

The number of shady e-commerce companies has grown in tandem with the popularity of online shopping. South East Asian companies have understood that trust remains important in the online business world. This is because consumers are naturally afraid of falling for e-commerce scams or funding e-retailers who provide poor service. 

Customers consider many things while making this choice, but the most crucial is the price of the products when determining where to buy. On the other hand, SEA leaders also analyzed that online ratings and customer reviews are the most important criteria for buyers to consider when deciding whether to shop at a store again.

In short, the conclusion shows that Southeast Asian customers place a premium on reading reviews posted online to determine a store’s credibility before making a purchase. With paying closer attention to this aspect, SEA giants are leveling up their business game daily!

Examples of Southeast Asian Companies – Real-World Leaders

Below, we have discussed how some leading SEA companies bring innovation to their customer experience strategies and enjoy massive growth. Let’s dive in:

Luxstay Case Study

Using segmentation and customization, Luxstay increases engagement by 60%

Introduction

Luxstay, founded in 2016, is a service provider for online short-term rentals and hospitality. Efforts made by hospitality service providers to connect homeowners with tourists allow homeowners to earn more money from their properties and allow more individuals to experience independent travel.

Challenge

The company’s marketing team ran a simple interaction campaign using a marketing automation tool. However, this platform was limited, so the brand saw fragmented channels, improper engagement, and inconsistent segmentation.

Their Customer Experience Strategy

The team’s original aim was to boost user engagement as it will help them gain the right knowledge about user behavior. This would allow them to increase conversions via segmentation and personalized communication. Luxstay increased conversions by 5X and MAUs by 1.8X using the customer engagement platform for bespoke segmentation and targeted intuitive engagement.

Blibli Case Study

Blibli experiences a 43% increase in repeat purchases!

Introduction

One of the first examples of an online shopping mall was Blibli, an all-in-one platform for online shopping in Indonesia. From food and clothing to electronics, home furnishings, and automobile parts, the company sells thousands of items across 16 different categories. Their services include travel packages, utility bill payments, and vouchers.

Challenge

Whenever a consumer made a purchase or added an item to their wishlist, Blibli engaged in micro-moments with them. While concentrating on other product categories, the brand’s team failed to seize a chance to engage these customers with timely and relevant product positioning.

heir Customer Experience Strategy

While celebrating their anniversary, the Blibli team used one of the top customer engagement platform to conduct data-driven campaigns that were meant to target their most engaged clients. With time, they were able to increase both new and repeat business from their current clientele. 

Conclusion

Customer experience innovation is a challenging path. You need to design a smart combination of the best working strategies to walk on this path. The ideal strategies will combine an in-depth analysis of client needs, your original ideas, and the use of innovative tools. It starts with understanding client wants and ends with nurturing a customer-centric mindset.

Luxstay and Blibli are two real-life examples from Southeast Asia that have grown substantially by increasing consumer engagement via innovation, segmentation, and personalization.

When the companies go through this CX transformation, they need to work on adopting technology, providing omnichannel assistance, caring about employee happiness, respecting customer feedback, and being proactive with customer service. Because people in Southeast Asia’s markets always change how they act, it’s even more important to put trust first, give regular updates, and consider how online reviews affect customer loyalty.

In today’s competitive world, your business growth depends on how you focus on new ideas, use the latest technology, and pay close attention to your customer’s needs and behavior!

Author: Greg.B

Executive with 25 years of proven success in call center management and revitalizing business units. Proven career record of producing multimillion-dollar profits through pinpointing operational inefficiencies and encouraging the revitalization of employee morale and corporate culture change.