How Connected Apps Result in a Strong Customer Experience

How Connected Apps Result in a Strong Customer Experience

Good customer experience is the core aspect that contributes to the success of any business. Several times organizations fail to offer robust customer experience even with the monumental amounts of service enhancing applications that they put in practice. This results in incoherent customer experience. One of the main reasons leading to this fiasco is the improper integration of each of the varied tools that are supposed to effectively deliver a seamless experience.

Present-Day Customer Experience The world revolves around technology now more than ever. In the early 70s, the cost of storing 1GB of data would amount to almost $250 million, today, this costs 0.03$. In just 50 years, the price of storage has dropped 8 billion times! With so much technology in the market today, products and services are getting cheaper by the minute.

While the inability to keep up with changing times has driven several businesses to bankruptcy, others are looking for ways to stay afloat and make a mark. This is where customer service as a strategy comes in. 88% of service professionals agree that customers have higher customer service expectations today than ever before.

A study conducted by Capgemini shows that 81% of customers throughout the market are dissatisfied with their customer experience and are willing to increase their spend with an organization in return for a better experience. There are several tools available that can enhance the experience of customers. Customer

Relationship Management (CRM) tools are at the helm of customer service today.

Tools that have proper coherence with each other increase the completeness and decrease errors in the data.

54% of marketers say that lack of data quality or completeness is the biggest obstacle to success.

The Basics of Customer Experience Good customer experience is about giving your customers a favorable and enjoyable service before, during, and after the buying process. Netflix, the Over The Top (OTT) media giant, uses big data to create detailed user-profiles and personalized customer experience. They collect not only generic data such as shows watched and genre, but also acute data points like where a show was paused, whether it was resumed and the frequently watched scenes. Integrating this collected data with their recommendation engine has enabled them to give customers the experience that they want by sitting in the comfort of their homes.

This effective customer service has allowed Netflix to capture 80% of the streaming market.

Individualized Applications: The Problem A bad customer experience stems from an inability to integrate your resources.

Companies often collate several tools, different departments, many teams within the departments and hundreds of employees in each team. Controlling all these variables is quite a large feat in itself. Providing exemplary customer support on top of this may seem an impossible task.

Best Buy, a computer retail store, lost $1.7B in the last quarter of 2011 due to poor customer service. The store observed that customers would browse electronic parts and ask around, but eventually return home to make the purchase online.

Fortunately, the market is abundant with customer-centric applications.

From CRMs to call centers, the market is filled with innovative solutions. The global customer relationship management market size was valued at USD 40.2 billion in 2019 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 14.2% from 2020 to 2027. But unfortunately, this abundance has caused several problems.

Sifting through the World Wide Web in search of the application that best fits your company is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Furthermore, several applications with strong marketing campaigns have risen to popularity. While they meet the company’s needs individually, they fail to perform when integrated with other tools. Once you have narrowed down the list into your favorites, each one’s features are so similar that they are almost impossible to tell them apart from each other.

Let us suppose you do find the perfect application. You have installed it into your system. But you are unable to integrate it with the existing tools in your roster.

Maybe your employees can’t handle it, or another application that you have isn’t able to connect to it, or yet another application is rendered dysfunctional due to the integration. This is a major problem in delivering great customer experience. A Siftery report says that companies use an average of 37 applications daily for their activities. The time spent in managing and integrating all these tools is immense.

Each resource aims to work in accordance with each other to provide the most beneficial result for your company. Merging all your tools to streamline your business is the top priority in any company and creating an ecosystem where your tools and workforce perform hand-in-hand and can drive your customer service through the roof.

Integrating different technologies consists of 6.5% of the major challenges faced in IT currently. So, while having the best apps in each sector is a good start, they mean nothing without the appropriate inter-connectivity. Set your sight into having complete applications with strong inter-operability between them for a business model your customers will keep coming back to.

How Do I Connect The Dots?

An Integrated App ecosystem allows bi-directional data flow between them. The output of one application is the input of the next. With a data flow like this, streamlined customer experience can be constructed. Customer experience management (CEM) systems are a must-have to provide holistic customer service.

Two of the top three reasons why businesses invest in CX are increasing crossselling and up-selling opportunities (40%) and improving customer retention (31%).

These create the ecosystem needed to manage the applications you have and intertwine them for the best results.

For example, an integrated ecosystem may consist of your email marketing software to collect customer data and dump it into the CRM, while the CRM crunches the numbers and builds email templates for your email marketing tool to use for better marketing. There is bidirectional flow in this structure, where the data goes from one software to another and back to the first one.

Connect Your Apps and Say Goodbye to Your Worries Research shows that happy customers are more likely to repurchase, forgive minor errors, and try new offers from your brand. Installing popular and market-run apps are helpful, but faulty connectivity will not yield fruitful results. Instead, focus on the apps that not only meet your company’s needs but complement each other.

This small selection of integrated elite apps will lead to better overall performance.

With this business plan, your business can be sure to provide the finest customer service. So, for any business looking to scale up, successful integration of tools is the key.

Source experience/

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