2021 has served up a lot of shifts in consumer trends and behaviours, with the Covid-19 lockdowns giving people time to evaluate everything from their work-life balance and their personal value systems to the way they like to shop.
One of the main emerging trends is the shift towards a qualitative approach, rather than a quantitative approach, in which consumers would rather pay extra for a quality product or service than be purely price-driven.
As part of this shift in mindset, there has been a major focus from businesses on raising their customer experience offering, with ‘CX’ as it’s referred to overtaking price or service delivery as the number one priority.
In a recent survey by SuperOffice, nearly 46% of business professionals surveyed revealed that delivering the best possible CX was their main priority for the next 5 years, based largely on a broader research set from PWC showing that improved CX can help you double your revenue within 36 months.
Fast CX Survey Facts
- 86% of customers are will to pay more for a great customer experience
- The more expensive the item, the more customers are willing to pay for it as long as the CX is of the highest quality
- 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases based on a positive in-moment personalized customer experience
What is Customer Experience, exactly?
Simply put, CX is the way a customer feels about the way you treat them in the immediate and in particular the longer term.
The more a customer feels you actually care about them, and create experiences that match their preferences, the more loyalty they will feel and the more they will spend with you, rather than moving to an alternative.
The goal for businesses should be to develop honest, value-laden relationships with their customers across the entire customer journey, ensuring that every touchpoint – digital and real-world – connects seamlessly to deliver the customer exactly what they are looking for.
Putting CX into a digital context
Most businesses engage their customers at multiple levels, from a website or social media through to a phone or physical shop so it’s essential that each of these touchpoints delivers the same experience for a customer.
This ‘omni-channel’ experience is where companies are truly able to differentiate themselves – research conducted earlier this year by Adobe revealed that those businesses which invested in improving their omni-channel customer experience enjoyed 10% year-on-year growth, a 10% increase in average order value and a remarkable 25% increase in sales conversions.
Within the omni-channel customer experience there is nothing that ranks more highly than the digital touchpoint – your website, in other words!
Just a snapshot of statistics from customer surveys reveals that:
- 57% of customers won’t recommend a company with a poor website
- 50% of customers will stop visiting a company’s website if it isn’t mobile-friendly
- 66% feel that a poor website affects the overall brand image
The most common complaints from customers include:
- Hard to navigate (90%)
- Poor communication channels and response times (90%)
- Unhelpful or ineffective search functionality (75%)
- Slow load times (40%)
The good news is that these issues, along with the other aspects of offering customers an excellent digital experience (shopping process, easy site navigation, good visual quality, strong and informative content) are really easy to achieve.
Having the right digital partner who works with you to understand your customer using data to drive decision-making, who is able to interpret their preferences and align those with your product and service offering, and who is able to connect your digital platforms to your other touchpoints effectively to complete the customer journey will help you give your customers exactly what they’re looking for.
Find out more about what Realnet’s team of website designers and content and digital marketing experts can do for you today. Call us on 01223 550800 or email info@realnet.co.uk for more information.