Increasing customer value and driving business growth through customer experience management

Customer expectations are on the rise. Today, both B2C and B2B customers are evaluating companies against the best customer experiences they have enjoyed regardless of the industry. This puts increased pressure on all companies to provide evermore personalised experiences, which are delivered through the seamless use of both digital and physical channels. In order to succeed, companies need to invest in capabilities for customer experience management and improvement.

During the last years, companies have put increased emphasis on customer-centricity. Statements from top management regularly highlight the importance of customer experience for the future of their firm. To reflect this, many companies have introduced "customer first" strategies and customer-centricity is often highlighted in company values. However, businesses are also struggling to put the ambitions for improved customer experience into action. According to Forrester¹, 72% of businesses communicate that improving customer experience is a top priority, but only 15% are able to provide a good customer experience. 

Managing and developing customer experience is difficult because it requires companies to build collaboration across a number of business divisions and functions. Some of the specific challenges include differing perceptions regarding the value of customer experience for the business, lack of customer understanding due to fragmented or unreliable customer data, inability to evaluate current customer experience across channels and customer life-cycle, and siloed customer experience management and development (e.g. per channel, business or product).

How to build a customer-centric organisation to deliver on your customer promise?

We have worked together with leading B2B and B2C companies on successfully building customer-centric organizations, which are able to deliver excellent omnichannel customer experiences and enjoy subsequent business benefits. Based on our experiences, companies need to have a company-wide customer experience target state, ability to deliver personalized experiences based on customer understanding and set-up models for continuously improving customer experience based on customer satisfaction and feedback.

Setting the target for customer excellence

Client challenge - A B2B industry leader had recently chosen customer-centricity as a strategic priority. The company had arranged management workshops to define a vision statement to communicate the target state. However, the organization had difficulties in interpreting the vision and different functions had varying interpretations of the customer and business goals that should be driven.

When defining the target for customer excellence, it is of utmost importance to define related business value drivers and goals. Typical business goals include increasing customer retention, growing share of wallet through cross- and up-sell and improving customer satisfaction. Top management needs to show to the organization that customer experience is a strategic priority and critical for the realization of long-term business targets. In many organizations, customer experience target state has been defined, but different functions are not supported in translating the target state to their context and define actionable business goals and concrete plans to achieve them.

Designing the experiences your customers expect

Client challenge - An international retailer had recently developed a high-level omnichannel vision, but lacked the ability to prioritize customer experience development. Challenges included lack of holistic understanding of customer needs and channel preferences across the customer lifecycle as well as inability to point out gaps in current experience against customer expectations.

Building and managing world-class customer experiences requires strong understanding of customer needs and behaviours. Customer experience leaders invest heavily on customer research and analysis (e.g. purchase history, channel usage, service usage and service interactions). Customer data is turned to actionable insights to provide personalized experiences through e.g. broad use of CRM systems. Customer experience leaders have a good understanding of customer lifetime value and measure what type of impact investments in customer experience have on the value.

Customer experience needs to be evaluated across customer lifecycle, journeys and interactions. We often encounter that businesses do have good descriptions of some specific customer journeys, but lack the ability to manage customer experiences systematically across the lifecycle. Businesses typically measure customer experience on relational level (e.g. periodical NPS surveys), but have less insight on experience delivered within the lifecycle and do not have adequate models in place for systematically carrying out corrective actions. High-quality customer experience management requires companies to set clear performance indicators and define processes to deliver excellent experiences on a consistent basis.

Engaging the entire organization for continuous improvement

Client challenge - An international car rental company wanted to make customer-centricity its key differentiator, but they needed better understanding of customer needs and journeys, set-up holistic customer experience measurement and develop ways to prioritize and speed-up implementation of most pressing customer experience issues.

Systematic customer experience management enables an organization to consistently deliver on made customer promises. However, it will only be successful if the entire organization is engaged. Customer experience leaders have been able to ensure that customer-centricity is deeply embedded in company culture. At these companies, all employees know what excellent customer experience looks like in all customer interactions and customer satisfaction has been widely embedded in performance metrics.

When customer-centricity is deeply embedded in an organization, businesses have typically also developed ways to identify anomalies in customer experience delivery through customer satisfaction metrics and feedback processes. Furthermore, these companies are obsessed about identifying customer experience improvements and prioritizing the ones with the largest value for customers and their business. Prioritized improvements are continuously implemented (e.g. using agile sprints) and results are followed-up to monitor impact.

Uncertain how to get started?

Understanding the current state of your customer experience maturity enables you to effectively identify gaps in your customer experience strategy, management models and actual delivered experiences. BearingPoint's Customer Experience Management Framework provides a holistic methodology to evaluate your organization's maturity and identify the most pressing customer experience management improvements to focus on.

Authors

Antti Maunula
Head of Digital & Strategy, BearingPoint Finland

Pyry Lehtonen
Business Consultant, BearingPoint Finland

About BearingPoint's experience in Customer Experience Management

BearingPoint has been recognized by Gartner among the leading global players as a Visionary consultancy in the Magic Quadrant for CRM and Customer Experience Implementation Services². BearingPoint also conducts the Digital Leaders study since 2013, which evaluates the digital customer experience of leading companies across Europe. BearingPoint supports its clients in Customer Experience Management from strategy to implementation leveraging global best practices and new opportunities arising from digitalisation and state-of-the-art technologies.

Sources

1) Forrester Analytics Customer Experience Index Online Survey, US Consumers 2018
2) Gartner “Magic Quadrant for CRM and Customer Experience Implementation Services”, Brett Sparks, Patrick Sullivan, Gilbert Van der Heiden, Jim Longwood, 7th April 2020

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Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statement of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About BearingPoint

BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy with European roots and a global reach. The company operates in three business units: The first unit covers the advisory business with a clear focus on five key areas to drive growth across all regions. The second unit provides IP-driven managed services beyond SaaS and offers business critical services to its clients supporting their business success. The third unit provides the software for successful digital transformation and regulatory requirements. It is also designed to explore innovative business models with clients and partners by driving the financing and development of start-ups and leveraging ecosystems.

BearingPoint’s clients include many of the world’s leading companies and organizations. The firm has a global consulting network with more than 10,000 people and supports clients in over 70 countries, engaging with them to achieve measurable and sustainable success.