Connected Customer Experiences (CX): Creating Engagement that Matters

Customer experience management (CXM) is all about transforming processes and capabilities driven by software, analytics, data management, and content management systems to nurture exceptional experiences and turn customers into ardent brand advocates. Businesses must ensure consistent, accurate, and more compliant data is teamed up with sophisticated web content management to deliver personalized experiences across channels, languages, and content types. CXM aims to deliver consistent customer experiences on any channel or device powered by high-quality data management. It ceaselessly improves brand loyalty by offering positive multichannel brand experiences, higher customer satisfaction to reach business goals and fuel personalization and contextualization by offering targeted, dynamic and consistent experiences.

Customers care about being seamlessly linked with information, individuals, services, and organizations, via any devices or information-sharing applications. They want to spell out what they like, and get themselves heard; their lifestyles are individualistic and digitally savvy. Connectedness from the customer’s viewpoint means a bouquet of things that center around attributes such as convenience, velocity, efficiency, empathy, empowerment, ease, authenticity, and support. For many customers, it has come to the point that seamlessness is a given since channels are secondary. They want to get what they want, whenever they want, and quickly. A few characteristics that define customers’ connected expectations are:

• They appreciate a sophisticated level of interconnectivity from mobile to IoT devices, which fulfills promises of pricing and product made to them. 
• They love the personalization tailored to their taste and style and want to see what’s in there for ‘them as individuals’.
• They expect immediate gratification but also look for meaning in what they seek. 
• They look beyond transactional interactions and search for authenticity, empathy, and security.  
• They want to share what they like when they like and experience interactions at any moment within their social circles. 

Connected customer experiences stand on a few foundational pillars that go beyond commercial success driven by shopping, ease of buying, recommendations, and even personalization or efficiency with which customers are served. They are the principles that make connections real and enable a human touch that appeals to multiple senses of customers and is also multi-dimensional.

• Integrity: With customers sharing more and more of their personal data with businesses in return for more personalized experiences, it is for businesses to be responsible with their data and maintain utmost integrity so that customer trust remains sacrosanct.
• Empathy: Interactions must exude relevance and human warmth and be significant to the customer. Understanding customers’ feelings, intentions, goals, and situation is part and parcel of a holistic customer experience.     
• Resolution: The guiding motive behind any customer interaction, experience, or journey is to relieve customer pain, lend them an ear by identifying the issue, and improve satisfaction rate with every interaction. Customer experiences that cannot resolve customer pain will eventually drive churn. 

Charting out impeccable customer journeys requires relentless effort and closeness with customers. High-quality data management, insights about customers’ interests, interpreting customers’ intentions are all building blocks of it. Delivering on promises requires high-end, sophisticated, cross-functional collaboration and critical competence.

However, the brand must display deep trust, authenticity, and omnipresence to get close to the customer and forge lasting connections with them. Any successful brand is a testimony to that. Adaptability and flexibility are a few attributes that brands adhere to in order to realign their offering around customers’ requirements. Strong forecasting engines, trends, and market undercurrents often power it.

Connectedness is central if businesses believe in valuing their customers and seeing them gratified.