Getting stakeholder support in your CX initiatives: creating great CX – Part 3/3

Forrester has spent the last decade looking at how a brand’s customer experience translates into increased revenue and profits. Harley Manning’s groundbreaking studies show that CX leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards. CX leaders understand their brand’s “why,” and are able to effectively communicate it to their customers through their employees and from the products and services they produce.

A recent study by Forrester, commissioned by Capgemini Invent, found that although 86%¹ of customers are willing to pay more for brands that understand them, many organizations are not making the right investments to deliver valuable experiences to their customers. Further analysis by our Customer Engagement Practice has uncovered that while customers seek personalization and trust from brand engagements, most companies are investing in cost reduction measures that undermine those desires. This disparity can often be seen in implementations for AI where the goal is to reduce head count and not improve predictability and personalization in digital channels where employees are not present.

Using the engagement blueprint

We help our clients uncover the most important opportunities to create a CX ambience that manifests itself throughout the whole product ecosystem. We work with our clients to co-create actionable roadmaps to organize tactical workstreams for their employees and agencies. We help create a future-state vision that serves as a North Star for longer-term goals while enabling precise measurement of key performance indicators along the way.

Our Engagement Blueprint can help your company understand the macro and micro processes that unify all aspects of your business from consumer experience to product development and gives you tangible steps to reach the goals set out by clearly identifying and embodying the “why” of your company’s brand.

Creating signature moments

At the heart of a lasting customer experience is a standout moment of emotional connection. The challenge businesses face when competing for a consumer’s emotional connection is often due to expectations that are set by the consumer in terms of the last great experience they had. Consumers don’t differentiate market categories and sectors, so a retail checkout is often viewed in the same manner as boarding an airplane or using an electric scooter. In the mind of the consumer, a high tide raises all CX boats.

One construct Capgemini Invent uses to consistently create meaningful and memorable customer experiences is signature moments. A signature moment is an interaction point that makes or breaks the relationship; it often involves human to human interaction and stands out from the regular everyday actions. The novel components of these experiences drive home the emotional connection that will be remembered and shared.

We help our clients create signature moments that have the following characteristics:

• Ownable: able to become synonymous with your strategy, vision, and brand
• Memorable: effective at capturing people’s attention
• Lasting: still having an effect long after it has been experienced
• Shareable: people want to talk about and share it with others
• Repeatable: it isn’t a one-off experience, but must make sense in an omni-channel strategy
• Valuable: typically when your customers are emotionally vested in the outcome.

Delivering standout CX is an enterprise-wide transformation project, requiring collaboration across the organization. Improving day-to-day interactions and creating innovative points in product and service delivery are requirements, but to break through to leading CX in your category or for your target segment requires signature moments that resonate with your buyers long after the moment has passed.

Engineering great CX

To engineer a great CX, companies must develop Engagement Blueprints that map the territory to understand and prioritize opportunities. Brands must then dig deep into the minds of the buyer to craft signature moments that define the brand experience in an authentic interaction with the product or service that resonates as a positive lasting emotional connection.

To deliver excellent and consistent customer experiences, organizations need to assess and invest in:

• Clear research and strategy – to gain customer and employee insights and devise, deliver, and monitor experiences to the numerous customer touchpoints
• Customer-obsessed organization – to lead organizational restructuring in order to deliver great CX
• Integrated technology and data – to provide a 360-degree view of the customer and deliver consistent experiences across physical, digital, and mobile channels

Capgemini Invent, a marketing and technology partner to industry-leading organizations, helps assess CX shortfalls, and then strategizes, devises, and transforms customer engagement. Connect with Suzanne Lentz to learn more.

This article was co-authored by Daniel Davenport.

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¹All statistics are derived from the Capgemini Invent–Forrester thought-leadership paper, The Cost of Bad CX.
² Forrester report “Improving CX Through Business Discipline Drives Growth.”
³Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains. Loss aversion was first demonstrated by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Source: D. Kahneman and A.Tversky, “Choices, Values, and Frames,” American Psychologist. 39 (4): 341–350. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.39.4.341, 1984.