Is your CX ready for the Black Friday test?

Denarkin Naidoo Customer Experience: Solution Sales Specialist from Altron Systems Integration explains how customer experience should sit at the heart of the digital transformation strategy.

As a business owner, your ultimate aim is to increase revenue. You want to gain more customers. You also want those customers to return and give you repeat business. All of this is possible when the customer experience sits at the foundation of your operational strategy.

With Black Friday around the corner, eCommerce businesses are going to need to seriously prioritise their customer experience if they are going to cut through the biggest and busiest sales day of the year.

Customer Experience, or CX as we call it, is the newest frontier for businesses to gain competitive advantage. It is not just about re-skinning a website, it is something that needs to form an integral part of the digital transformation strategy to gain competitive advantage.

Most markets are already oversaturated, and consumers generally have more options than they can count when it comes to where they spend their money. How does a business stand out from its competitors through a CX-led mindset?

With the right Customer Experience Management (CEM) system, a business can manage current and future customer relationships in a way that prioritises creating more efficient and seamless customer interactions.

It should work with all your customer-facing touch points by organising, automating, and synchronising them so that you can service your customers and respond quickly to issues, as well as new business requests and opportunities.

When Black Friday comes around, eCommerce brands overlook CX as they turn their attention to the flood of potential sales in the pipeline. What they don’t tend to remember is the fact that negative feedback is bound to come with this customer engagement, which is the unavoidable consequence of intensive crowds.

You simply can’t please everyone, but you can do your best to earn their loyalty and increase your revenue over the long term by giving them a customer experience that works for them.

With increased traffic and sales, Black Friday is the perfect opportunity to harness the power of data. Companies generally have a ton of data, but it isn’t organised around the customer, and it doesn’t show where customer satisfaction may be suffering.

Through a CEM, you can leverage customer data to reveal critical insights into customer behaviour and expectations so that changes and new customer experiences can be created and tailored to different customer segments.

Consumers need to know that you know them otherwise they will take their business to someone who gives them that experience. They expect easy, personalised interactions with businesses who essentially know who they are, what they want and can quickly resolve any disputes as and when they arise.

This means businesses need to meet customers where they want to engage. Many corporates have enhanced their customer experience journeys to include all sorts of popular platforms and tools from chatbots, to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – turning these into official customer-facing channels.

This is a challenge for companies who have had to rapidly adapt and evolve their contact centres, with varying degrees of success. Many corporates have moved quickly to incorporate Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger as customer-facing channels but, more often than not, consumers report a frustrating experience. Contact channels are siloed rather than seamless, agents are unavailable rather than accessible, and consumers have to give the same information over and over.

The customer is always going to form the heart of your digital transformation strategy. For those in eCommerce, Black Friday is the true test of the customer experience strategy, because those who get it right will stand out from the crowd and will remain top of mind come next year’s big day.