Customer experience (CX) has evolved from a buzz phrase to a guiding principle for businesses as they seek to differentiate themselves in highly competitive and rapidly evolving marketplaces. Regardless of the particular market segment, customers today are demanding superior service, ease of purchase, and a feeling of belonging. If service industry organizations – from retailers to restaurants and utilities — can deliver in these three core areas then they will lower churn, enhance ROI, boost customer satisfaction rates, and deliver business success.

Analyst firm, Forrester, explored the importance of an effective CX strategy that deliver on those goals in a recent case study with ScottishPower. In terms of improving CX and meeting their business goals, ScottishPower was facing some significant challenges because of the deregulation of the power industry in the United Kingdom. As a subscription business with little opportunity to differentiate itself from a myriad of competitors, being able to deliver exceptional CX was identified by the organization’s leadership as an important way to differentiate themselves, retain customers, and have a positive impact on their business.

To deliver an exceptional customer experience for their customers ScottishPower invested in the Alterian Real-time Customer Experience Platform to align its interactions with customers to demonstrate tangible value at every touchpoint through the customer lifecycle.

As Alex Thompson, Director Product Management for Real-Time CX at Alterian shared in a recent interview customer experience is a vital differentiator in today’s competitive marketplace. “Customers today define a successful interaction with an organization by immediacy and personalization. The more that brands are able to demonstrate they understand the customer and provide them with that exceptional experience, the more likely they are to retain that customer and grow their life-time value.” he said. “To be able to use data to understand each customer’s journey and be timely and relevant is no longer a luxury, it’s essential.”

Based on the success demonstrated by ScottishPower once they put Alterian’s real-time customer experience platform to work, here are three best practices that all customer-centric organizations should consider:

• Resist the one-size-fits-all approach to technology investment: Customer experience professionals face many choices when it comes to choosing a CX-platform to propel their organization forward. An important consideration is to evaluate how much disruption you – and your organization – is willing to tolerate. While you might think you need to rip and replace an entire tech stack in order to become more customer-centric, look for solutions that are plug-and-play or can slot in to an existing infrastructure. Being agile and demonstrate positive ROI is a must for CX professionals. An important consideration here is finding a solutions partner that can “slot in” a CX platform without the need to rip and replace. With that, the time-to-value increases rapidly.
• Build a use case, be agile: The most important goal for CX professionals is to demonstrate business success quickly. Definitely get executive buy-in, but because the industry-leading real-time CX platforms are designed to be agile and don’t require rip and replace you can build the use cases, test them out, succeed or fail fast testing use cases and then move forward to demonstrate the RIO. This model accelerates internal change and will deliver organization-wide success.
• Align CX to all stages of the customer life cycle: A successful CX solution relies on real-time insight into customer engagement. When building the use case identify the customers. The needs, and the path you want them to follow to a successful conclusion. And don’t forget to measure the impact of customer actions across their lifecycle. Clear demonstration of ROI, particularly where it demonstrates an improvement in customer retention and increase in customer lifetime value.

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