Prioritizing a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Growth

It’s no longer a question if business leaders must understand their customers and be able to identify where they are navigating in their technology journey. Creating a solid CX is not a luxury, but an essential practice for ambitious businesses that want to connect with their customers in meaningful ways – and this starts with learning, and trying to understand the many dimensions of their customers.

In a digital-first world, data is widely available to businesses looking to improve their CX, and every interaction a customer has helped to paint a full, 360-degree picture of who they are. Stitching together this picture takes effort, research, and great diligence – and when done right, the rewards of building a deeper view of who these people are help businesses make the connection in more humanly, tailored ways.

A strong CX approach informs the frame of thought and strategic approach used to build out retention and growth strategies. It is worth addressing what CX is, why it’s important, and to how to work through the hurdles of creating an exceptional CX.

What is CX?

“Customer experience” may sound like a broad, ambiguous and simple concept, but it is important to understand the purpose that it serves. In an enterprise, businesses use CX to engage with their customers throughout the buyer journey. The experience and means of delivering CX is more than just having touchpoints with multiple business teams – including marketing and sales, customer service and UX.

CX embodies a curiosity to truly understand customers. In a business context, we often overuse the word, which can diminish the humanity of building a customer connection. Who are our customers and what do they need? What are they thinking about? What would a moment in time in their professional or personal life look like? How do our customers engage with our business – and what will we as a business do to make these connections possible? What will we do to keep learning about them? How will we make their experiences memorable and build their trust in us? Questions like these are just the beginning – but a significant start.

CX is not focused squarely on customer actions, as it also takes feelings and emotions into account to paint the full picture. Each interaction offers businesses the opportunity to learn more about their customers: their buyer personality, behavior, recurring trend on actions they take, and how they make decisions. All these things help to improve the experience for the customer.

A strong CX strategy is a vital goal to keep on top of mind for organizations looking to grow, and those efforts require steady effort, and creative ways to deliver on actions and test ideas for the sake of learning more about their customers (and prospects). As a result, siloed data that does not provide a holistic look at customers can sink a CX strategy before it even begins.

What Holds Back Positive CX?

One of the biggest barriers to an effective CX strategy is disparate data siloed across departments. Legacy CRM systems and data warehouses are ill-equipped to handle the vast amounts of new data generated daily to create a picture of the buyer persona.

CX managers need real-time access to data so that they can identify and search for touchpoints along the customer journey in any given moment. Customer profiles built on diversified data can come from any number of channels. With data that’s siloed across the organization, those channels may be hard to access, or completely inaccessible.

Another common hurdle with CX efforts is not being able to view all the data in one place. Having the data alone will not improve CX; it is how that data is analyzed, and how those insights are unlocked from one central location. When pulling from multiple data sources, if data can be viewed under a single pane, one can have an expanded view. Without that crucial aggregation, analytics tools will miss data and will not be able to convert it into actionable insights.

Painting the Whole Picture

Taking a 360-degree view of the customer and using data from multiple sources is one of the best ways to boost CX. Using data to create actionable steps will require businesses to have a cloud data platform that offers more than a view of the customer and data – it must help businesses have the right tools and capabilities in place to capture a full snapshot of their customers.

Platforms like the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform dive deep in the realm of analytics and open new data sets for marketers and other CX teams to analyze and turn into a 360-degree view. The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform helps businesses understand where their customers are now, and where they are going in the future by using analytics to interpret feedback. The platform also uses customer sentiment, helping businesses form a more thorough view of what their customers may need and feel.

Here at Actian, we are committed to providing integrated, 360-degree customer data that gives businesses the opportunity to have a comprehensive insight into who the customer is and how to reach the customer. Ambitious organizations that incorporate customer empathy in their business and prioritize a memorable CX experiences will come out ahead in capturing the hearts and minds of their customers.

Read all about the Actian Data Platform and how it delivers a personalized, consistent CX.

About Teresa Wingfield

Teresa Wingfield is Director of Product Marketing at Actian where she is responsible for communicating the unique value that the Actian Data Platform delivers, including proven data integration, data management and data analytics. She brings a 20-year track record of increasing revenue and awareness for analytics, security, and cloud solutions. Prior to Actian, Teresa managed product marketing at industry-leading companies such as Cisco, McAfee, and VMware.