Keeping customers at the core is the key to a profitable business in today's business landscape. Yet, achieving this goal demands hard work. It requires meeting the ever-evolving customer expectations.
With the advent of various digital and social media channels, customers demand more. Everyone expects a more interactive and personalized path for themselves. They expect a brand experience that is smooth and uninterrupted across all channels.
Yet, even larger companies find it challenging as it becomes difficult to keep track of interactions across all channels, leading to lower customer satisfaction.
That's where Unified Customer Experience (UCX) comes into play.
In this blog, we'll guide you through everything you should know about Unified Customer Experience (UCX) and how it can help you meet your customer's needs more effectively.
Let's get started!
Table of Content
What Is Unified Customer Experience (UCX)?
Unified Customer Experience, or UCX, is a strategy to provide customers with a consistent and seamless experience. It helps you maintain a coherent personality across all your communication channels and customer touchpoints.
UCX involves integrating your different communication channels into a single cohesive platform. Additionally, it requires tracking and storing customer interactions and preferences in a profile that's updated in real-time. Such a strategy helps provide customers with a more personalized and valuable service.
Here's an example to understand it better:
A customer buys a product from you and faces a problem. He then tries to reach you via different mediums like your Instagram profile, customer service channel, and email to convey his issue.
With UCX in place, it ensures that all your customer's touchpoints deliver the same branding, messaging, and level of service to your customer.
Different Components Of Unified Customer Experience
Different components work together to achieve a UCX. Below are 3 such components that you should also focus on:
1. Creating Unified User Profiles
An important component of developing a single comprehensive profile is gathering customer data. It includes collecting information such as the buyer's history, preferences, service inquiries, etc. Real-time access to this data and insights helps improve operational efficiency and reduce decision-making time.
2. Data Mining
Analyzing the collected data is another valuable component that involves identifying patterns and trends in user behavior. It also helps you tailor products, services, and marketing strategies to better meet your audience's needs.
3. Customer Feedback
Feedback involves collecting customer input to understand their preferences, needs, and expectations. It helps identify improvement areas and make necessary changes to processes and policies.
Benefits Of Unified Customer Experience (UCX)
A well-implemented UCX strategy can provide several benefits. Some of them are as follows:
1. Reduce Operational Costs
According to a report by Oracle, 74% of businesses believe that a UCX plays an ideal role in reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction.
As a business owner, one very well knows that the cost to acquire new customers is always higher than retaining an existing one. UCX significantly helps lower costs by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. It plays an important role in reducing churn rates and associated costs of acquiring new customers.
Another way it lowers costs is by optimizing all your processes. Streamlining customer interactions and reducing friction points saves up time and resources. Furthermore, it provides self-service options to your customers, thus freeing your customer service reps to handle more complex issues, ultimately reducing the need for additional staff.
Well, that's not it. It also helps lower your marketing costs by helping you exhaust your marketing budget on the targetted audience, which further helps improve the ROI for your business.
2. Boost Customer Satisfaction
Who does not like to receive fast responses and conclusions to their issues? Well, a UCX helps a business achieve exactly that!
It is a powerful tool that focuses on quicker and more effective responses and understands customers' needs well enough to extend tailored offers on products and services. All of this together increases customer loyalty and advocacy towards your brand, thus leading to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
3. Improve Internal Collaboration
UCX also helps your business break down silos between different departments and teams that deliver customer experience.
It helps to create a shared understanding and vision of the customer experience. It helps cross-functional teams to work more effectively together. It makes identifying and solving customer pain points easier and improves processes and policies to deliver a consistent experience.
4. Increase Employee Satisfaction
According to a study by Forrester Research, 57% of employees report feeling more satisfied with their jobs when companies use UCX technologies.
The AI-powered UCX technologies tend to take over monotonous tedious tasks such as customer support and free up more time for employees.
Hence, they can focus on more engaging and complex jobs, increasing customer satisfaction. It also improves work-life balance for employees, allowing for more flexible working arrangements.
5. Enhance Customer Engagement
A unified CX platform also enhances your customer engagement by providing personalized experiences that are targeted and relevant to them.
It is made possible by leveraging customer data to create campaigns and experiences that resonate with individuals, which can further strengthen relationships and increase loyalty.
It also allows engaging with your customers across various touchpoints, including web, mobile, and social media, to create a seamless and memorable customer journey that drives satisfaction and business success.
Technology To Achieve Unified Customer Experience
UCX requires a combination of technologies to provide a comprehensive experience across all touchpoints. Some of the key technologies are:
1. Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is one platform to level up your Unified CX game. This powerful tool provides a complete view of customers across all touchpoints.
It collects demographic, behavioral, and transactional data to personalize experiences. Moreover, it helps you create targeted campaigns with analytical and segmentation capabilities.
2. Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
The DXP market is projected to grow at a jaw-dropping CAGR of 12%, from $7.9 billion in 2019 to $13.9 billion by 2024. This technology is a vital cog in the wheel of Unified CX.
It offers a seamless and uninterrupted experience by integrating various channels such as voice, video, messaging, and email, making communication smooth and improving productivity.
Moreover, it also streamlines and automates processes, cuts costs, and enhances your digital presence. With DXP, you can leverage the full potential of UCX, driving your business forward and staying ahead of the competition.
3. Customer Experience Platform (CXM)
CXM is another powerful system that uses advanced marketing strategies like surveys and analytical tools to collect valuable customer insights.
With it, businesses can identify customer experience inconsistencies and take proactive steps to address them, ensuring that every touchpoint is optimized for maximum impact.
Whether improving product offerings, streamlining customer service, or enhancing website functionality, CXM empowers businesses to deliver enhanced customer experience.
4. Customer Feedback Platform
Another vital ingredient needed for delivering UCX is a customer feedback platform. Such tools help leverage advanced feedback mechanisms such as surveys, sentiment analysis, and social listening and gain deep insights into customer needs and preferences. It further helps identify areas for improvement and deliver personalized experiences that keep customers coming back for more.
Olvy is one such tool that builds a feedback loop and increases your customer lifetime value (LTV) by providing valuable insights into customer preferences, pain points, and expectations.
Olvy helps gather, analyze, and report on customer feedback data quickly and efficiently - thus allowing you to identify areas for improvement and take action to deliver personalized experiences to keep customers engaged and loyal.
How To Deliver Unified Customer Experience?
Businesses must take a comprehensive approach encompassing all customer journey aspects to deliver a unified CX. Here are some UCX best practices:
1. Create A Coherent Brand Identity
Often, silos act as a major hindrance to UCX. Different departments and sales channels end up working separately. It leads to impeding organizational functions and displaying a fragmented brand identity.
To deliver a Unified CX, you must break down silos and streamline communication so that your customers encounter the same message and tone of voice whether they are browsing your website, interacting with your customer service team, or receiving marketing emails.
2. Follow A Customer-Centric Approach
The only way to make a UCX model work is to embed a customer-centric culture amongst the employees that keep the customers' needs first. From the product development stage to marketing and sales, every action should be taken, keeping your customers in mind.
3. Personalize Experiences
While investing in technology can make your life easier, you should remember to strike a balance between using automated technologies and human interaction to deliver efficient yet personalized experiences to your customers.
Leveraging data analytics and user feedback to gain insights into user preferences and behavior can help deliver memorable experiences. You should use technologies like AI and machine learning to personalize interactions.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, businesses should prioritize Unified Customer Experience (UCX) to build long-lasting relationships with customers in today's highly competitive marketplace.
Adopting UCX as a key strategy and embedding it as a mindset in the culture of a business is essential.
Additionally, deploying the right technological infrastructure, including marketing automation, omnichannel communication, feedback tools, and data analytics, is crucial to meeting customers' expectations and delivering a seamless and personalized experience.
By focusing on UCX and deploying the right technology, you can improve customer satisfaction, increase customer loyalty, and ultimately drive revenue growth.
