Companies must understand the sometimes brutal realities facing their business from a customer, employee and market point of view.<\/p>\n
As we continue our business transformation blog series<\/a>, we share a few approaches to help you leverage the critical customer and business insights you need to fuel your agile business transformation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Customer requirements and expectations are evolving faster than most businesses can keep up. For example, 73 percent of people say their customer experience is one of the most important factors when making purchasing decisions, according to PWC\u2019s research. In fact, 32 percent of all people surveyed will walk away from a brand after one bad experience, even if they previously loved that brand.<\/p>\n The customer experience is transforming in many ways, ranging from how people engage with businesses to the availability of products and services they count on.<\/strong> To that end, many businesses look to customer experience management to help reassure consumers and keep the satisfaction of customers and employees alike top of mind.<\/p>\n And for good reason \u2014 transparency and the social influence of the employee experience are driving customer outcomes.<\/p>\n According to a study by Glassdoor<\/a>, each time collective employee feedback results in a one-star improvement in a company\u2019s rating, it correlates with a 1.3 percent increase in customer satisfaction scores. Today, your brand is accountable to both your customer and employee experiences. If the experience you create transforms without considering both, you don\u2019t only risk upsetting your customers and employees \u2014 you risk losing them.<\/strong><\/p>\n As they become more digitized, customer engagement and interactions influence all aspects of the customer experience and its associated business operations. This creates both opportunities and challenges for companies as they try to adapt while continuing to deliver innovative products, compelling value propositions and unmatched customer experiences.<\/p>\n To address such shifts and other future disruptors, you must dive deeply into current and prospective customers\u2019 wants and needs. You can\u2019t solely base this analysis on human intuition or even historical performance. Customer behaviors are evolving too rapidly.<\/p>\n You must leverage multiple data collection methods, including generative and evaluative research using qualitative and quantitative approaches<\/a>, to gain a better idea of your customers\u2019 perceptions and expectations.<\/strong> You can also adopt more progressive methods, such as social modeling and analytics-based research<\/a>. In order to achieve a complete 360-view of your organization, be willing to widen the scope to capture as much customer insight as possible. This curiosity about your customers\u2019 ever-changing needs is key to your survival.<\/p>\n You need to look both internally and externally to gain an accurate 360-degree view of your business and understand the opportunities and threats they face. Industry and company business models are changing rapidly, and those that can\u2019t keep up risk having to shut their doors. This means attaining an unfiltered view of your organization\u2019s strengths and weaknesses by using data-driven insights as opposed to gut feelings.<\/strong><\/p>\n Don\u2019t be afraid to talk with your customers, suppliers and other stakeholders and even employ the use of industry researchers and experts to learn where your business sits among the rest. The point is to garner the best possible insights.<\/p>\n When looking externally across the industry, don\u2019t only evaluate your current market and legacy competitors. Look at adjacent markets to learn about other opportunities and threats facing your organization, too.<\/p>\n DSW, for example, added nail bars<\/a> to a few of its retail locations to help increase foot traffic. Its transition from a traditional retail store to an experience-based company helped ensure its survival<\/a> even as it closed stores and reduced its real estate during the pandemic. In another example, T-Mobile led the charge in transformation by embracing opportunities and threats. In 2019, the company adopted banking, offering mobile checking account services while recognizing the value as an adjacent market for opportunities. While your own business model may not change as radically as these examples, you should embrace an adaptable mindset to prepare for making the best possible decisions for your organization.<\/strong><\/p>\n To enable a 360-degree view of your organization, you\u2019ll want to gather data and insights in real time so your organization can respond and adapt agilely. The good news is the emergence of integrated customer data platforms, AI, experience management platforms and predictive analytics tools have created opportunities to aggregate data. This allows you to collect a complete view of your organization and facilitate informed decision making.<\/strong> You can now more easily achieve real-time analytics \u2013 once a supreme technical challenge \u2013 with modern cloud technologies<\/a>.<\/p>\n As developers modernize data platforms, new capabilities become available. Companies are now looking beyond dashboards and reporting. They are extracting greater benefits from their data to enable process re-engineering, process improvement, automation and management accountability. Indeed, these more mature applications of data are necessary to differentiate and compete in the current market. When data-driven insights inform your every decision, you will be primed to chart your best path forward.<\/p>\n Without a 360-degree view rooted in real-time customer and business insights, you\u2019ll never establish an effective vision to guide your organization into the future. This guide is necessary to avoid going down a path of deploying the wrong strategies, making the wrong investments, focusing on the wrong projects, or even training your people in the wrong way.<\/p>\n When you know where you are on this journey, you can finally guide your team toward the future you want. Now that we\u2019ve explored the role of customer and business data, we\u2019ll look at how vision and strategy align to help organizations adapt to future challenges in our next post.<\/p>\n\n Understand Changing Customer Expectations<\/h2>\n
Attain a 360-Degree View of Your Business<\/h2>\n
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Aggregate Data in Real-Time to Make Informed Decisions<\/h2>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n