How To Enhance Customer Experience And Cement Trust

How companies handle customer data is a foundational element of trust. Leading CRM software like Salesforce can help companies streamline and automate much of the activity around tracking and securing customer data — helping provide what you may need to work with this precious data in a smarter, more secure way to deepen trust and improve the customer experience (CX).

Business leaders understand the value of putting the customer first. But how well do they know their customers — and do customers and employees trust businesses as much as executives think they do?

In short, not so much. The PwC 2022 Consumer Intelligence Series Survey on Trust revealed a notable disparity between the extent to which leaders think their customers trust their organization and how much customers say they actually trust the companies they do business with.

Among business leaders, 87% told us they believe customers highly trust their companies, but only about 30% of customers agreed. Almost the same number of business leaders (84%) said they think employees trust their company to a high degree, but just 69% of employees agreed. If this sounds dire, consider that it presents a huge opportunity for companies to focus on trust as part of your overall business strategy.

Creating a positive, dynamic experience for customers starts with trust. Answering three key questions can help you shape a strategy to improve CX and bridge the “gap” revealed by our survey.

• Your customers trust you enough to share a lot of data with you, but are you making the most of these privileged insights to anticipate customer needs?
• How well do you safeguard the often sensitive data customers share with you? Securing their data — and protecting customer privacy — is no longer optional.
• How do you use data to create a more tailored, responsive customer experience (CX)?

1. Embrace privileged insights

To differentiate your company and better anticipate customer needs and expectations, we recommend that companies adopt an approach we call “privileged insights.” Privileged insights are those you draw from unique and relevant data you collect about your customers — as opposed to market research composed of broad data available to all. Collecting this information as your customers engage with your products, services and organization at large (on tech support or customer service calls, for example) is the first step. How you store, protect and analyze the data can help determine whether it can give you a clear view into your customers’ specific needs and desires, as well as an ongoing or point-in-time snapshot of their overall experience with your organization. The ultimate goal, then, lies in integrating these unique insights into day-to-day operations.

The more you can gain privileged insights and apply them to product development or targeted marketing efforts, the more you can clarify your value proposition and stay relevant.

Core to privileged insights is establishing a foundation of trust and value through transparency and clear communication with customers about what data you will collect and how you will use it to improve their experience now and in the future.

The National Retail Federation (NRF), for instance, reworked its member engagement model, which prior to the pandemic relied almost exclusively on in-person events as its primary revenue stream and as a means of maintaining a connection with members. Restrictions on large gatherings spurred the group’s leaders to rethink this model in favor of a more dynamic digital experience. The NRF enlisted PwC to help implement Salesforce and a customer data model that together provide a holistic view of its members so NRF management can monitor member engagement and make adjustments when necessary.

“Mapping our overall membership experience to personalized human touch points lets us use technology to directly connect, track and engage with our members.”

The trade group projected a 30% growth in membership engagement in the two years after implementation — not to mention the added benefit of freeing up time for its tech team to focus on strategic projects because business users now generate their own reports in Salesforce.

The NRF’s use of Salesforce is also an example of how to make privileged insights a byproduct of engagement and relationship with customers, not a separate process. If you can do this, you can integrate privileged insights into operations — revising processes, incentives, metrics, information flows and the like to enable every part of your business to make data-driven decisions aimed at serving customers better.

2. Trust baked in: Total Platform Security and Data Privacy

When it comes to securing data, it’s crucial to balance privacy concerns with your customers’ desire to have a positive, tailored experience. Salesforce Shield was designed with these concerns in mind. It provides enhanced protection, monitoring and retention of critical data stored in Salesforce through three key features.

• Platform encryption can keep sensitive customer data secure without impacting critical application functionality.
• Event monitoring provides access to detailed performance, security and usage data for Salesforce apps to help you monitor compliance with your security policies, get a picture of user adoption across your apps and troubleshoot and boost application performance. You can also build customizable security policies that help your security team identify and prevent malicious activity in real time.
• Field audit trail capabilities let you track changes to your data for up to 10 years and report on its value and state over time for forensic-level compliance and greater operational insights into your business. Having this capability can offer proof you are complying with various privacy laws as well.

Cybersecurity is critical today. Many companies understand this, with a significant contingent of executives reporting increased investments in cloud security (64%) and data protection and privacy (63%). In the most recent PwC Pulse survey, business leaders affirmed that cybersecurity investments remain a priority, even amid concerns about inflation, tax increases and labor shortages.

3. Customer experience is king

Making it a priority to provide customers with the best possible experience while earning and keeping their trust is an excellent goal. But it requires true commitment.

The tone from the top is critical. Leaders should infuse trust into company culture and make it abundantly clear that CX is paramount, which includes building and deepening customer and stakeholder trust.

For example, a leading beverage manufacturer needed to meet consumer’s increasing demands in less time. PwC and Salesforce worked together to reimagine business processes and implement a digital transformation, helping the company’s frontline team responsible for selling merchandise and taking products to stores with Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud and reducing frontline legacy applications by 80% while increasing sales. With analytics at the ready, teams can also make better recommendations to leadership.

In data we trust

Companies that put trust at the heart of their approach to customer engagement may do better than those that do not. This is borne out in our research and countless other surveys. The key is creating a value proposition based on trust in which you focus on creating the best possible customer experience through intelligent use of data, keeping that data secure and communicating clearly about how it is used. Salesforce and PwC have helped many clients transform their approach to CRM and customer data handling to build stronger, longer-term relationships and offer customers exactly what they want and need.

Learn how PwC and Salesforce are helping business leaders protect customer trust during digital transformations.

See how PwC’s Trust Leadership Institute is bringing together a diverse community of executives through immersive experiences and charting a course to earn trust, deliver sustainable outcomes and make lasting impact on business and society.