I recently attended the “Total Customer Experience” event in Chicago to gain some insight on how enterprises are creating optimal customer experiences and how we can improve our approach at OpenMarket. It’s clear that companies that are delivering exceptional customer experiences see increased loyalty, elevated brand strength and differentiation among their competitors – all of which sound encouraging to me!
These companies also provided validation for what OpenMarket is seeing in the mobile engagement space and what we are offering to our enterprise customers. Many industry experts believe that customer experience is one of the top enterprise business priorities:
“Customer expectations continue to increase as they continue to be empowered by new technologies.” (Gartner 2014)
“Customer experience is the single most exciting opportunity for 2014, mobile is the second.” (Econsultancy, 2014 Digital Trends)
At the event, companies identified three key elements to enabling differentiated customer experiences:
- Engaged employees – Employees need to clearly understand the experience that your organization wants to deliver and how to deliver it.
- Optimized processes – Processes around customer feedback, outbound engagement, contracts, onboarding, problem resolution and any other customer touch points should be optimized for efficiency and to gain insight into the entire lifecycle.
- Technology to enable it – Leverage today’s technologies to deliver timely, relevant and personal experiences
With regard to “technology to enable it,” nearly every company in attendance mentioned using mobile apps or mobile messaging as a core part of their communications strategy. The most popular use cases included:
- Order, shipping and delivery alerts
- Scheduling reminders for service technicians
- Instant customer feedback and satisfaction surveys
- Directions to nearest location
- Prescription renewal and pick-up notifications
The event provided some new ideas and perspective on how to approach customer experience here at OpenMarket. I also found it very inspiring to see how many companies were already leveraging mobile to deliver superior customer experiences. It turns out that more and more businesses are discovering that the answer to delivering a great customer experience is already in their customers’ hands.