‍Customer expectations are morphing faster than companies can keep up. Investing in a cutting-edge Customer Experience Management platform (CXM) is becoming an urgent imperative for companies that want to survive. In this blog, we delve into why customer experience technology has become a must-have for 2024.

Customer Experience Management Technology - A Must-Have or Nice-to-Have?

Companies can’t deliver customer experiences the same way they always have. While 8 of 10 corporate leaders believe their customer service quality is excellent, just 1 in 10 customers agree. This perception gap highlights a massive disconnect.

If that’s not enough, consider the heightened expectations all of us have now that advances in technology deliver what we want when we want it with little effort on our part. And little patience when things go wrong. Companies must recognize that if customer experience is a priority as they say it is, it needs investment in infrastructure to back up that claim.

Rolling out beautified client-facing platforms isn’t enough because it doesn’t solve cookie-cutter, clunky customer experiences that take too long and ultimately require too much work from customers to achieve their goals. Companies that deliver poor customer experiences also have significant negative business outcomes that include drops in profit and even stock market valuations and jumps in customer churn risk.  

The Consequences of Poor CX

The following customer experience statistics show how poor CX affects financial performance:

Impact of One Bad Customer Experience: 32% of customers will quit doing business with a brand they love after ONE bad experience.

Public Shaming on the Rise: Dissatisfied customers that publicly shame brands increased from 3% in 2020 to 9% percent.

Poor CX Led to Negative ROI during Recession: The worst-rated CX companies had a negative 57% ROI during the 2007-2009 recession, with many not surviving.

CX Leaders' Positive Returns: During the 2007-2009 recession, while the stock market was negative 16%, CX leaders posted a positive 6% return.

NPS Leaders Have Higher Shareholder Return: NPS leaders delivered 510% shareholder return, compared to just 0.4% from companies praised for financial performance alone.

Pace of CX Change is Fast: 88% of executives believe customers and employees are changing faster than businesses can adapt.

Customers Don't Always Feel Understood : Just 38% of consumers feel a brand’s employees understand their needs.

Abandoned Customer Onboarding Can Be Costly: 76% of business banking customers have quit onboarding a financial product or service out of frustration, costing up to $25,000 per customer.

CX Is the Main Competitive Factor: Over two-thirds of companies compete primarily on customer experience – up from 36% in 2010.

CX Perceptions Vary Between Companies and their Customers: 87% of companies said they provide excellent CX, but only 11% of customers agree. Worse, 72% of companies did not think the gap was important.

These customer experience statistics are compelling and make the case for the importance of customer experience investment. What the CX research tells us can be summarized in six truths.

Six Truths of Poor CX

#1: Unhappy customers leave and don’t usually tell you.

#2: It’s expensive to attract customers and costly to lose them.

#3: Unsatisfied customers who walk away tell a lot of other people.

#4: Poor customer experience affects stock prices and earnings in addition to revenue and retention.

#5 Companies with a CX focus outperform companies known only for financial performance.

#6: Existing technology or manual workflows won’t keep up with customer expectations for better, faster, smarter engagements.

CX Technology Example - How it Improves Customer Experience

Happy customers are less price-sensitive and more open to additional products.

They also need less support and refer others, driving down acquisition costs, according to research from the Watermark Group. In contrast, even loyal customers will go elsewhere if it’s easier and more satisfying than doing business with you. We know because we’ve seen this with our clients.

‍KeyBank was losing merchant services customers out its back door and didn’t know why. After doing an in-depth journey mapping session with us, they learned their customers were receiving 13 emails from multiple companies and teams in one week, with different messaging and branding. They were also being bounced around when they called for help. It was chaotic, and customers felt as if they were dealing with five or six different companies instead of KeyBank alone. This didn’t match their brand promise, so they invested in our AI-infused customer experience management platform, CXMEngine^Ⓡ.

Using it, they connected to their core provider, Fiserv and other departments and providers and unlocked the bidirectional flow of information back and forth. When they could finally see all customer interactions in real-time, they could orchestrate the precise journey they wanted merchants to have, from end to end, and then use our Journeys drag-and-drop builder to create it.

In 13 months, their merchant services business line was transformed. NPS scores jumped by 60%, employee satisfaction by 50%, and revenue by 10%. Operational costs dropped by 26% and call volumes by 25%!

KeyBank leveraged our network of ecosystem connectors to aggregate its customers’ information siloed in different systems, teams and partners so it could see at any moment what was happening with a customer and their journey progress.

“You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?” – Annette Franz

The Urgency of Customer Experience Management Technology

Just as CRMs were launched for sales and marketing to get their arms around the buying process and take control, OvationCXM's CXMEngine platform was launched to solve the growing gap in customer experience perception between client and companies. We help companies gain visibility and control over their entire customer lifecycle across multiple product, teams and customer journeys. Our platform automates and optimizes your internal and customer-facing workflows, leading to greater customer satisfaction with your service.

If you believe customer experience is the most important differentiator today, even over price, then investing in customer experience technology is a no-brainer.  We've seen the success stories and know CX technology is as vital to business operations as are core systems. CXMEngine also provides business leaders with agility to respond to emerging use cases that haven't even been thought of yet, future-proofing your customer service.

In this pivotal moment, the question isn’t whether to invest in a customer experience platform, but instead, how soon can you harness its transformative power for your business?

We can help, by auditing your current customer journeys and your existing technology and showing you how our customer experience management platform complements and expands the value of those existing technologies. Learn how we eliminate data silos and ensure your company can see your customers at every touchpoint in a journey and act on the AI-powered insights to grow loyalty and profits.