Innovation Basics: 3 key reasons for improving customer experience

Changing the world, one idea at a time has to start somewhere. Even the organizations that regularly bring about revolutionary change had a first step to take on their journey. In the Innovation Basics series, we focus exclusively on what that first step could look like for newcomers to the innovation world. Follow this guidance to achieve faster, better innovation.

Customers are the lifeblood of any business – certainly any business that wants to keep competing. Overlooking the concerns of those who buy from you can have disastrous implications on growth plans and an organization’s ability to become an industry leader.

This is why innovating in this area often drives quick and sizeable progress for a business, with 77% of companies listing customer experience as a key differentiator.

Before starting, though, a key distinction does need to be made. Far too many organizations fail to differentiate between customer experience and customer service. The former – which we’re discussing today – has a much broader scope than just service. Customer experience refers to every single interaction a customer has with your organization.

Key reasons for improving Customer Experience:

After more than 20 years of running innovation Challenges for businesses around the world, Wazoku has seen a number of customer experience problems. However, while every business thinks its problems are unique, we find that the reasons for improving customer experience fall into one of the three following categories:

• Reducing customer churn: a key metric that businesses measure success against is a low customer churn rate. This refers to the amount of customers who shop with you and then don’t return. Addressing faults in your overall customer experience keeps the chances of churn low.

• Driving revenue growth: when customers aren’t churning, they’re spending. In providing an experience that customers want to come back for, organizations future proof their business by guaranteeing future custom. This leads to a natural growth in revenue.

• Building brand loyalty: as revenue grows, so does your network of returning customers. This cultivates a customer base which is loyal to your brand, with some loyal customers even becoming ambassadors for your products.

What are businesses already doing?

With customer experience being such a necessary area of focus, organizations are already moving towards building a better overall proposition. Even businesses that already have low churn rates, growing revenue, and established brand loyalty need to find ways to optimize this.

By capturing pain points direct from their customers, improving processes that get in the way of a seamless experience, and running competitions with different crowds to identify and solve problems, companies are in a better position to drive customer experience innovation that lasts.

In this blog, we’ve taken a look at customer experience. We’ve illustrated how this differentiates from customer service before showing how the reasons for improving customer experience often fall into three distinct categories. We’ve also discussed some – but not all – of the ways in which organizations are innovating in this area already.

To read more about how you can produce a customer experience to be proud of, check out our Innovation at Scale guide here!