In today’s digital world, customers have more choices than ever before. Consumers are no longer limited to the local downtown brick-and-mortar bank and can easily compare rates, services and convenience between multiple offerings. With lower barriers to switching providers, customers can readily move their business elsewhere, which makes the overall customer experience more important than before.

An improved customer experience provides organizations with a number of benefits, such as increased sales from the higher retention rate and customer loyalty. In many regulated industries, the cost to acquire a new customer is in the hundreds of dollars. Therefore, each customer an organization can hold on to increases the lifetime value of the customer and eliminates the cost to replace them.

Research shows that providing clear communications and a good customer experience make customers roughly two and a half times more likely to spend more with the company. In addition, the good experience leads customers to share the experience with others and recommend the organization, thus increasing the number of customers. A credible reputation generated by word-of-mouth referrals is beyond the control of marketing and cannot be replicated by advertising.

The customer journey maps out the arrangement of interactions between the organization and the customer to complete a business process. For example, filing an insurance claim could start with a customer service call, uploading pictures of the damage from a phone, email communications to collect additional details, text notifications of the current claim status and, finally, a paper check mailed to the customer. In this example, the process crosses multiple channels and should not require the customer to repeatedly input personal information. The process also cannot require a large number of steps or repeated steps to get to a resolution.

The key to an improved customer experience is understanding the customer journey and changing the business process to automate interactions, reduce hand-offs and share data across systems to eliminate duplicate data entry and smooth out the transaction, keeping in mind that the most efficient process may not create the best customer experience.

The most common metric for measuring the customer experience is the net promoter score (NPS), which is based on an optional customer survey asking if the customer would or would not recommend the brand. However, since the survey is optional, the NPS does not provide a complete picture. The same applies to customer satisfaction and customer effort surveys.

Customer conversion, retention and churn rates provide a broader but more complete set of metrics against which to measure CX. While these numbers may be subject to seasonal sales or outages, they provide an overall perspective on the organization’s relationship with customers and a strong foundation for customer satisfaction. The customer lifetime value works as a counterpoint by allowing the organization to consider the value of a customer against the cost to acquire and retain the customer.

To make an assessment requires data, which organizations can collect in a number of ways. The best source for process data is from internal analytics that track system load, average response times and workload distribution. These data points enable organizations to identify potential bottlenecks within a process so the processes can be tweaked for efficiency.

In addition to integrated analytics, organizations can also mine customer service call transcripts to better form a more detailed understanding of customer needs and common issues. The call center data will provide the top customer issues, the percentage of first call resolution and average resolution time for incoming calls. Organizations can use this data to improve products and services, clarify or provide additional documentation and redeploy resources to meet customer needs. Comparisons against historical data can also be used to measure the success of changes to business process automation.

The analysis provides the opportunity to modify workflow processes for better efficiency, but more importantly, it enables the organization to track costs along the customer journey, understand how costs evolve as process improvements are implemented and gain a better understanding of the customer lifetime value as compared to the customer acquisition and onboarding costs.

To be successful, organizations must invest in customer experiences in the same way they would invest in a new product. Higher customer experience scores require investment to improve and sustain. Those within an organization responsible for CX need to allocate budgets to support staffing, data-driven research, improvement projects and technology to support their CX goals. In order to create better experiences, the organization must first envision and develop the new experience with journey mapping, usability testing and customer feedback loops. Establishing a team dedicated to CX enables an organization to focus its efforts and assign projects to dedicated individuals.

Organizations can improve the customer experience with new technology designed to support digital channels. Investments in call center technology, including voice over internet protocol (VoIP), will directly affect the ability for customer service operators to respond to requests. Customer journey orchestration tools work behind the scenes, allowing for real-time decision making across channels to create personalized campaigns that improve customer engagement. Both are examples of technologies that will enable organizations to improve the quality of customer interactions.

Other tools, such as unstructured data mining tools and AI-based call center analysis, provide organizations with a deeper understanding of customer needs than traditional surveys do. The robust view-of-the-customer data allows the company to make organizational and process changes to support better CX.

Ultimately, creating a better customer experience begins with a willingness to listen to the customer. Organizations of all sizes need to leverage the mechanisms used for customer communications to make the conversation bi-directional and make changes based on customer feedback. Digital communications offer new opportunities to hear from customers and increase revenue by turning that feedback into a better customer experience.