What makes a brand a leader in its market? Business leaders and analysts have asked themselves this question for decades.
Historically, companies typically focused on two specific areas: price and product/service features.
They assumed that customers picked particular brands to either enjoy the highest quality product/service or the lowest prices possible.
As a result, many business growth strategies revolved around innovation, internal cost-cutting, and price matching.
While many of these practices still prove beneficial to business leaders today, the influx of data in the CX landscape has also taught them something new.
Now, more than anything else, the experience businesses give their customers determines whether they will succeed.
The Rise of Customer Experience
Research conducted by Sabio and ContactBabel in 2022 found that businesses are changing how they compete against market rivals.
In the study, around 38 percent of B2B companies said their most competitive factor was their product or service quality, while just 15 percent stated that it was price.
The outright winner? Customer experience, with 48 percent of these businesses highlighting CX as their most significant differentiator.
In the B2C space, this trend is even starker. Indeed, 53 percent stated that they believe customer experience is what most sets them apart from their competition.
Here, 37 percent of businesses chose product/service quality and ten percent pinpointed price as their central differentiators.
These statistics show that many businesses no longer consider it enough to compete on price or product capabilities alone. Instead, they consider CX a mission-critical endeavour.
Metrigy research supports this assertion, finding that more than 65 percent of companies say they are increasing CX spending in 2023 by an average of 24 percent.
This increased spending – even during times of economic uncertainty may surprise many. Yet, bolstering their digital proposition and pushing the CX envelope allowed many businesses to navigate the last crisis: the COVID pandemic.
Moreover, moving the CX dial does not only result in better business results down the line. It can also allow internal teams to maximise efficiencies within the CX stack and do more with less.
Indeed, a business’s propensity to survive and thrive during difficult economic times often hinges on its capacity to wield CX technology to bolster customer, agent, and business results.
How Are Companies Boosting CX to Compete Today?
So, many business leaders now view CX as crucial to their profitability and business continuity. Yet, there are lots of approaches to using customer experience as a competitive differentiator.
Here are some excellent examples of how businesses have bolstered their CX proposition to move the needle and stand out from the crowd.
1. Lifeplus Uncovers the Barriers to Customer Satisfaction
To deliver on customer expectations, some companies choose to first understand the barriers to customer satisfaction. Much of this information sits within customer conversations.
Recognising this, Lifeplus leveraged conversation analytics tools to determine pain points within various customer journeys, which caused the customer to reach out to the contact centre.
Using these insights, the company increased its CSAT levels from 85 to 95 percent, lessened the load on service reps, and – as a result – reduced employee churn. Read the full case study here.
2. Marks & Spencers Implements AI-Powered Routing
As contact centre volumes grow and the labour market remains tight, companies must consider how to best leverage the expertise of individual agents. Doing so can balance effectiveness with efficiency, driving better customer outcomes in the process.
Marks & Spencers harnessed the power of AI and intelligent routing to achieve this aim, directing each customer to the best-placed agent to handle their query.
After deploying the technology, the company achieved a 95 percent customer engagement rate and increased routing accuracy by 70 percent. Read the full case study here.
3. Vodafone Turns to WhatsApp and Conversational AI
Consumers no longer interact with companies via the phone, email, and online live chat alone. Increasingly, messaging apps and social media channels are entering the fray.
Noticing this trend, Vodafone implemented a new WhatsApp integration for its contact centre, with an intelligent bot capable of managing and routing conversations.
In implementing this bot, Vodafone meets its customers where they are. As a result, the business claims to have increased the percentage of self-managed customer queries by 95 percent. Read the full case study here.
4. loveholidays Takes “Happy Employees = Happy Customers” to the Next Level
“Happy employees = happy customers” is an old contact centre expression. Yet, it remains a golden principle within the CX space.
loveholidays certainly agrees, reimagining the agent interface, call handling processes, and adding intelligent automation tools in a bid to bolster the agent experience.
As a result, the business improved agent productivity by 20 percent, which had a positive knock on effect to some of its most mission-critical CX metrics. Read the full case study here.
5. BGL Group Utilises Google’s AI Expertise
Google CCAI suite offers bots, agent-assist, and conversational analytics tools to contact centres. Harnessing this, BGL Group transformed its service operations.
With the analytics, the business assessed customer intent to better understand what drives contact center demand, identified upsteam issues, and isolated where bots would be best placed.
In following this process, BGL group removed friction points within various customer journeys. Read the full case study here.
Embrace CX as the New Battleground
As Sabio and ContactBabel’s research indicates, most businesses believe customer experience is their most critical competitive differentiator.
Yet, using CX as a differentiator is tricky, especially as competitors strive to do the same.
Thankfully, Sabio works with businesses to evaluate their customer journeys, pinpoint improvement opportunities, and implement the necessary people, process, and technology changes to drive better CX outcomes. Each of the case studies above exemplifies this.
Interested in joining that list of happy Sabio clients? Visit: sabiogroup.com
