Simon Harrison is SVP and CMO at Avaya leading global marketing for the company’s dominant position in the digital communications market.
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Today, we are all part of an important shift to an experience economy that will continue to evolve. As I’ve mentioned previously, customers are demanding effortless experiences. My colleague captured the sentiment perfectly in a recent article: “It is imperative that companies focus on the experience of their customers—what customers expect and prefer—and then apply technology as and when needed. If they don’t, they’ll deliver an experience that’s just ‘okay,’ and that doesn’t create any sort of real connection or brand relationship.”
The employee experience is important, too. If you don’t give them a positive and engaging experience, they’ll find an employer who will. As workers around the world rethink their jobs and careers, there’s never been a more critical time to make sure to deliver an inspiring experience for your employees.
So, if your company isn’t already an experience builder, it needs to be. It’s crucial to design customer and staff journeys that really do elevate the employee and customer feel-good factor. Simply said, addressing experience expectations and preferences requires “experience thinking” to address a “total experience.”
The idea of a “total experience” is about making connections and providing a seamless link between customer, employee, user and multi-experience (such as personas, touchpoints and device modalities.) Organizations should be totally experience-oriented to succeed. The experience someone wanted five years ago is quite different from what is expected today.
Take online banking. A customer’s expectations of online banking once included checking account balances and paying a few bills. Today, banks spend millions of dollars a year to provide digital banking that offers the benefits of integrated AI, personalization and live, real-time assistance on more devices, such as a smartwatch or a home device. Or they may be helping someone on holiday in a different country, or a business executive who needs immediate assistance from a conversational intelligence solution. The experience economy guarantees that customer expectations will continue to evolve, and the banking industry will have to anticipate and plan accordingly while innovating faster.
The Future Of Experience Building
Experience building can only happen when the right platform, tools and integrated intelligence is made available. Large monolithic solutions aren’t flexible or responsive enough to evolve with the pace of business need and/or customer expectation.
Customers will look to competitors for more desirable experiences. However, technology has reached a point where companies can finally empower customers to create the solution they want, instead of just enabling a capability as defined by the manufacturer. Organizations are seeing a shift to “smart” technology on platforms, allowing for even better customer and employee experiences. And experience builders can be anyone who wants to create custom-build, flexible and innovative cloud communications and workplace solutions.
So, identifying the right experience platform—not only for your customers but for your employees—is the most important step in making sure your customers remain happy and engaged. There is no longer “an app for that.” More helpful use cases provided by self-customizable packaged business capabilities highlight the importance of experience building.
Find—And Foster—The Community In Your Experience Building
In addition to the brand or business providing information about services or products, customers are going to each other. And the brands that build the most effortless place to foster these types of conversations—whether via messaging, forums or peer reviews—are the ones that will find the most success in today’s experience economy. The voice of the customer (VoC) is crucial to building the right experiences.
Harvard Business Review captures the importance well: “The past decade brought many of the technical tools that were necessary to build communities. In the next decade, collaboration with customers will become both easier and more vital. To not just respond to this shift but to embrace it.”
The same is true for employees: today they expect the ability to communicate and collaborate with each other seamlessly whenever, wherever and however they want. The harder it is for employees to work together, the more attrition and loss of time and resources a company will see. The voice of the employee (VoE) enables a holistic view of how to improve experiences.
The experience economy requires a transformation in customer and employee engagement. That transformation is now powered by the crucial focus on experience building, and companies are investing differently in the technologies that enable engagement. Companies should focus on finding the right tools and people to create and deploy high-quality and memorable experiences for their customers. As PwC so aptly states, “Experience is everything. Get it right.”
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