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Customer Experience - Pain Points
Customer experience platforms/products are important in managing the interaction between a company and its consumers, both current and potential; they help in organizing, synchronizing, and automating data to create a personalized consumer experience. However, some of the pain points that consumers experience when using such platforms/products include data ethics and privacy, friction in employee-consumer interaction, disintegrated data silos, consumer expectations are not met, and overwhelmed network resources affect the consumer experience.
Data ethics and privacy are major concerns TO CONSUMERS
- A report filed by CIO New Zealand revealed that customers are increasingly concerned about how brands are using their personal information, both in the private and public sectors. Digital ethics and privacy is a critical concern for consumers using consumer experience platforms.
- In a survey conducted by ClickZ, involving over 5000 consumers and 500 companies across the globe, only 37% of consumers feel confident that their preferred brands have their best interest in mind when accessing personal data. Also, only half of the surveyed consumers are willing to share with brands their personal information, even in the case where the information is used to improve their experience or establish personalized offers.
- In a roundtable held by Econsultancy and Epsilon involving client-side marketers in the field of customer experience, it was found that Hong Kong companies are bound by the strict privacy and data compliance policies, which affect consumer experience improvement.
- During the discussion, one eCRM specialist stated that his company is aware of customer pain points. However, they are unable to introduce initiatives that improve customer experience because they spend most time and resources to justify the methods of data collection they can use without violating the regulations.
Friction in employee-consumer interaction (Lack of employee experience)
- Most companies that have adopted consumer experience platforms focus majorly on external audiences, particularly customers, but forget about the staff who interact directly with the customers. CMS WiRE reported that there is a strong relationship between consumer satisfaction and employee satisfaction; as such, less investment in the employees translates to customer dissatisfaction.
- In the latest PwC report, Experience is Everything: Here’s How to Get it Right, it is stated that excellent customer experience begins with superior employee experience since employees are the ones interfacing with a brand’s potential consumers and creating the expected experience.
- The report cited that almost 58% of all consumers feel that organizations have lost touch with the human aspect of customer experience while only 38% of US consumers think that employees of their brands meet or understand their needs.
Omnichannel strategy results in data silos
- The rapid rise in the adoption of omnichannel strategy by customer experience platforms has resulted in the generation of large amounts of consumer data which has enabled businesses to attain in-depth insight of customers. However, the greatest challenge presented by this opportunity is the collection and storage of this huge data to improve customer experience.
- As customer experience companies continue to implement the omnichannel strategy, many of them continue to silo their data, which only serves as a frustration rather than simplify consumer journey. (source 3).
- In the survey conducted by ClickZ, more than 83% of company respondents reported data silos in an attempt to ensure connectivity. According to the survey, while 86% of companies believe that they can capture customer data in real time, 83% stated that they capture data through multiple systems.
- Without centrally accessing or storing this data, customer experience platforms may miss valuable information about consumers and their purchase behavior patterns which could be used to establish personalized marketing initiatives.
- Silos may also result in data discrepancies across organizational departments, which would, in turn, lead to a disconnection between brands and customers as well as slow response times to consumer complaints or requests.
- What's more, the risk of using or storing data against customers’ permission has heightened with GDPR and the associated fines. Thus, unifying consumer and organizational platforms to operate seamlessly is critical. Lack of visibility and transparency, companies lack the information needed to provide customers with the right information.
- In a recent report by Oracle, many companies end up purchasing a patchwork of products as they attempt to improve customer experience. However, the disintegrated approach only makes data management complex. Business processes such as email marketing, speaking with customer service digitally, and generating sales quotes can only be achieved with single vendor solutions rather than departmental silos.
Consumer expectations are not met
- Over the years, customer experience platforms/products have focused exclusively on technologies and processes, rather than people and humanity. According to Bruce Temkin, the managing partner of Temkin Group, many organizations fail to meet the needs and demands of customers. He claimed that it is not possible for customer experience platforms to understand what motivates customers without having a clear idea of what fulfills their needs.
- In a 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings, it was found that only 8% of 300-plus companies have earned a “good” rating for understanding the emotional needs of their customers.
- In the ClickZ survey, both consumers and marketers admit to the fact that customer experience products do not meet customer expectations. More than half of the consumer respondents agreed that their brands do not understand how to interact with customers in both online and offline platforms.
- Additionally, almost 49% of consumers stated that brands do not meet their expectations to enhance their experience. This trend held true in various countries across the globe with several consumers having difficulty recalling the last time their brands truly impressed them.
Overwhelmed network resources affect the consumer experience
- With customer experience platforms, companies can achieve flexibility and convenience due to network convergence. However, the demand for bandwidth rises as more users exchange data and applications get more sophisticated thereby interfering with the efficiency of the consumer experience platforms.
- Customer experience products operate in an Internet of Everything (IoT) ecosystem which involves several users from different fields such as automotive, security, communications, and other industries using devices like modules, SIMs, and sensors. In addition, the systems involve different connectivity environments, industry-specific M2M services, and enablement platforms; this means more connections, applications, transactions, and services which may result in technical challenges.
- According to CX Network, having a simplistic view of customer experience management may result in failure by having investments that do not contribute to the consumer experience. The process may create poor analysis and insight into customer needs due to a lack of collaboration in the existing metadata that currently exist in department silos.
RESEARCH STRATEGY:
In order to identify some of the major challenges consumers encounter when working with customer experience platforms/products, we began our research by looking for industry reports, surveys, and market research that have preexisting challenges. We were able to find survey reports and precompiled challenges listed by large data companies such as Oracle, CIO, PwC, and CMS WiRE. We also found information from credible customer experience websites such as eConsultany, CX Network, and ClickZ detailing the major challenges consumers encounter when working with customer experience platforms/products. We, therefore, considered the most mentioned challenges in the multiple sources.