Customer Experience Innovation: The New Battlefield For Businesses.

Jeff Bezos famously said, “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backward. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.”

The growth of a company in the present environment is due to various factors: services, products marketing, customer service, and brand loyalty. However, if you create an inventory of the top industry players who stand out from the rest, You’ll find an underlying theme: they embrace new ideas.

No matter if it’s new-age companies such as Amazon and Uber or industry giants such as Google and Microsoft, continuous innovation has been the key to their success and growth. Innovation isn’t just in services, products, or marketing but also in the customer experience.

If customer experience innovation is implemented correctly, this leads to lasting improvement in products, services, and even business.

What Is Customer Experience Innovation?

Building brand equity through simply achieving the basics isn’t enough in the constantly evolving world of mobiles, social media, and ever-changing customer expectations. It is essential to “out-innovate” the competition so that your customers will continue coming back to you. This can only be achieved by ensuring that we provide a consistent customer experience or CX, or innovation.

CX innovation revolves around your customers and providing them with unique personal, customized, useful, and enjoyable products and services that can help you distinguish your services or products in competitive markets.

Why CX Innovation?

A McKinsey report states that most corporate leaders believe that innovation is essential for their business’s growth. While innovation has been a hot subject in the C-suite’s discussion for quite a long, the old method of innovating products and services doesn’t suffice.

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Innovation in customer experience is better to differentiate businesses from their competitors. Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of personalizing experiences for customers. According to one study, companies that make $1 billion per year can make another $700 million in three years. This is by investing in their customer experience.

Key Elements Of CX Innovation And Their Interconnectedness

·         Workplace Innovation. By fostering the workplace, it is possible to offer all stakeholders in the companies a chance to create ingenious ideas.

·         Product Innovation. The ability to listen to your customers is essential to drive innovation in your current product or to develop new products that are innovative and can improve customer experience.

·         Service Innovation. If the product’s innovation is greater than its original, It can alter the services you offer or how you provide these services.

·         Business Innovation. A radical change in how you offer services may often result in fundamental changes to the industries or even create a completely new ecosystem.

What Is CX Innovation Not?

Contrary to innovations in product or service that can increase sales or reduce them, CX innovation is not focused on making your customers spend more, or at the very least, not as directly. Instead, it is about personalizing the customer’s journeys and experiences that create an aural connection between the company and its customers.

Combining these two routes allows a company to design or modify circumstances to speed up customer journeys. Traditional practices typically have customers adapting to the brand’s guidelines; CX innovation focuses on changing the brand’s image and products to meet customers changing requirements and needs.

Embracing CX Innovation To Drive Growth

What should an organization do to begin by implementing customer experience innovations? Begin with these strategies that have proven successful:

1. Understand Customer Needs

The key to CX innovation is in the customers you serve. Understanding your customers’ requirements, desires, needs, and issues and how they view your brand can be a great starting base. Surveys, analyses, reviews, and regular interactions through social media platforms can give valuable insights into your customers.

While CX innovation focuses on the customer, it’s not led by customers. Innovation usually comes from providing solutions to issues your customers haven’t yet voiced. Monitoring customer journeys at every interaction point and envisioning solutions that help them solve their issues better could result in the development of new ideas.

2. Build A CX-First Culture

The company’s culture is largely influenced by its leadership. If leaders aren’t paying attention to the customer’s needs in each decision they make, it could be difficult to implement the same strategy throughout the entire organization. Therefore, leaders must be mindful of customer metrics during their financial and operational meetings to build a CX-focused environment.

While customer service falls to CMOS, the responsibility of innovation in customer experience is the shared responsibility of the CIO, COO, CMO, and, ultimately, the CEO.

3. Improving Customer Touchpoints

A Zendesk report indicates that nearly 50% of customers will change brands following a single negative experience. Customer experience is impacted by nothing more than direct interactions with your staff. Therefore, you should analyze all of your touchpoints with customers to determine the areas where innovation could result in a better customer experience.

4. Innovation Lies In The More

Once you’ve identified all contact points with customers, it’s important to assess them to an established benchmark. The best benchmark is your competitors. Answer these questions to the most important:

What are they doing to make you different or better than you?

·         What can you learn from them?

·         What are you able to do better?

The goal is to provide the same thing that your competition offers, and even more. The secret lies in this.

5. The Second-Best To Your Customers Are Those Who Face Them

Based on this research, 44 percent of business leaders believe that they receive suggestions to improve CX enhancement from employees. The frontline employees of your company are regularly engaged with customers and are aware of their desires, needs, and issues. Engaging the employees and listening to their feedback is a good method to enhance customer service by introducing new ideas.

Build The Happy Organization To Drive CX Innovation

The connection between the happiness of a workplace and its clients in an earlier post. It goes far beyond making happy customers. Content people are more creative and productive, which is the basis of creativity and innovation. Creativity and happiness feed one another.

Companies that are constantly innovating are also more successful.

A happy workplace is a foundation for continual improvement, which results in better customer experiences that help make a more pleasant workplace.