The Importance of Customer Experience and the Cost of Doing Nothing

When done right, prioritizing CX as a core business strategy offers a competitive advantage in today’s crowded market, builds positive brand reputability, and empowers brand loyalists and advocates – clearing a path for strong organic growth.

And yet, for myriad reasons, many companies are still not prioritizing CX. One common reason is that it’s daunting to even begin addressing questions like, “What do we start with?”, “What will this cost us?”, and “How will we measure the return on our investment?” – let alone come up with answers that appease every department, executive leadership, and a strict budget. Fear of so many unknowns can lead even the most customer-centric brands to delay investments in a holistic CX strategy in favor of, seemingly, more pressing business needs.

The thing is, there is no business need more pressing than meeting the needs of your customers. Customer experiences are happening every day – whether you’re deliberately guiding and investing in them or not. And the price your company is paying as a result of these fragmentary, less-than-stellar experiences is costing more than you realize.

By understanding these hidden costs, you will be better equipped to make the business case and develop the buy-in your business needs in order to prioritize customer experiences and secure the enduring health and profitability of your brand.

The cost of underserving your customers

It’s no secret that failing to meet your customer’s needs can negatively impact your brand. Falling short on expectations for personalized, efficient CX erodes customer confidence and retention. And in today’s saturated market, with the effort of a quick Google search, your brand will either stand out for its ability to delight and awe – or it will be passed over for another that does. In fact, in Zendesk’s CX Trends Report 2022, 61% of customers reported that they would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. After two bad experiences, that number jumps to 76%. The biggest challenge with these stats is that often customers won't tell you that they’re leaving, let alone why. They disappear in silence – leaving your company in the dark about what went wrong. Losing a customer means also losing a vital, internal source of feedback on how to improve.

Through purposeful design, CX can help your brand attain and sustain competitive differentiation to stand out in your field. By predicting and preparing for the needs of customers – including those who have never even met you yet – curious visitors are positioned to become new customers, and one-time customers to become brand-loyal advocates who support your brand at higher levels. In a Capgemini report, 70% of emotionally engaged consumers say they spend twice as much or more on brands they are loyal to, and 81% say they promote these brands to family and friends. By overlooking CX, you could be missing the chance to reach business goals simply by connecting deeper with current customers.

The cost of underutilizing your staff

Employees are the frontline of your brand. They’re the ones designing and delivering the experiences that will either attract customers or push them away. By ensuring that your staff has the tools and training to effectively complete their jobs, and that those jobs align with your business’s goals, you can improve the employee experience (EX) in a way that enhances the experiences of everyone who interacts with them. In short, their EX can impact the CX your brand provides.

On the flip side, overlooking the insights that CX provides can squander the talent of your employees by having them work on projects that lack a tangible impact, or inundating them with repetitive, low-value tasks that might be better served by self-help resources or a chatbot. Higher workloads and misplaced efforts often lead to burnout, lower morale, increased turnover, and reduced institutional knowledge – all of which impair your brand’s reliability, responsiveness, and reputation. For better or worse, it’s all interconnected. But with incremental, intentional investments in CX and the resulting sightline into customers’ needs and wants, employees can hone and focus their skills in a way that contributes to greater experiences both for them and the customers they serve.

The cost of underestimating your brand's potential

An investment in CX is an investment in your brand’s biggest assets – your customers and employees. Executed well, these investments in their success can create big benefits for your bottom line. Take increasing and improving self-service solutions for example. These solutions might come in the form of self-checkout options or step-by-step how-to videos. Self-service not only meets customers’ preferences for quick, autonomous resolutions, but it also reduces the demand on employees so they can focus on high-value matters – all while reducing the cost of service. And happy customers and employees make for longer-term ones.

Conversely, the cost of not investing in such solutions can be far-reaching. Higher rate of customer churn, lower lifetime spending, higher cost of customer acquisition, higher customer service staffing costs, higher instances of repairs/refunds, lower staff efficiency, and increased staff turnover, to name a few. Taken together, these losses can inflict lasting harm on your brand’s standing that can prove difficult to overcome. According to BrightLocal, 87% of consumers rely on online reviews when making purchases – and less than half of these respondents said they would do business with a company with less than a 4-star rating. That drops to 19% when considering a company with 3 stars. In addition to the fact that it takes roughly 40 positive reviews to undo the damage of a single bad one, it’s never been more important than ever to invest in CX that leaves customers feeling heard, known, and valued.

Avtex Knows The Importance of Customer Experience

At Avtex, there is nothing more important to use than creating efficient, beneficial relationships between customers and brands. After all, it’s humans working with humans. The cost of putting off investments in CX any longer is too high. Your customers’ loyalty, your employees’ engagement, and your brand’s standing are at risk. Don’t let the fear of the unknown stop you from getting started. For more than 40 years, Avtex has helped hundreds of companies just like yours design and implement total CX transformations that get results and drive growth.