Hi Swapnil, tell us about yourself, your background?
I am a strong believer that ‘Experiences’ make or break a brand and hence ‘Experience Design’ – The field of crafting memorable and engage-able experiences plays a pivotal role in innovating today’s businesses. Today, we are also in the most thrilling times. Digital as a medium enables us to look beyond the ordinary and constantly delight our customers with innovative digital channel & touchpoint experiences.
Moreover, a Digital Customer Experience Transformation & Innovation Business Leader, Design Management Strategist, recognized for incubating, driving, and mentoring strategic initiatives in the context of Enterprise- Consumer Digital Transformation, with over 24 years of strong industry experience. Proven track record of helping enterprise product engineering & design teams infuse a human-centered design thinking approach to advance deep business & stakeholders insights, innovate on product and service experiences, deliver business value, and differentiate.
Online commerce was booming in 2020, and so did consumer reviews. – How can brands better utilize this data to improve their customers’ experience?
Tracking & analyzing consumer behaviors, sentiments, and their journey experiences across all channels and touch-points are going to be the constant process of studying customer frustrations or customers’ journey tipping points. Instead of this, businesses/brands must use a mechanism to plot the new opportunities across the customer journeys to uplift their experiences and maximize the brand’s adoption, thus focusing on taping new customers and new market segments. Deriving futuristic insights through consumers’ ongoing behaviors will help brands/businesses to anticipate future customer needs and expectations. This will help brands to create contextualize experiences and long-lasting customer relationships and bonding. Businesses or brands must constantly track their intended customers’ current, ongoing, and futuristic needs to deliver contextual experiences. That helps to plot new opportunities in the customer domain.
What is one element that must always be considered when working on a CXM (customer experience management) strategy?
Well! Customer Experience management is an extremely serious business, and to persistently do that. The businesses must always define the strategies by keeping the customers and their current & future needs at the center of the strategy and must deliver tangible values across all customer touchpoints with proper CX governing & monitoring technology-enabled ecosystem placed around.
Do you think personalization and customer-centricity are going to become increasingly more relevant in the coming year? How so?
There is something beyond personalization, i.e., contextualization or contextual customer experiences. Personalization can only happen when you study & track the customer behavior and their journey interactions across touchpoints. And the new edge customer journey analytics tools are playing a good role in this context. However, contextualization requires the empathetic way of defining the customer’s journey experiences across all customers’ channels & touchpoints for all possible scenarios & instances, and that makes the customers happier. Just to give your practical example, if the running car alerts the driver about the sudden low air pressure of tire due to minute puncture and notify the close-by tire service shop, that’s the cars’ contextual assistance the experience for the driver.
What are some of the ways companies can strive to eliminate the CX Gap?
Ah!, putting the customer (human) first as a strategic approach across the business contexts, products, services, and internal ecosystem would be the key to take the business closer to the customers. Two ways to achieve the CX index, Have an in-house customer experience design and management leaders and experts to focus on strategizing and creating a measurable contextual experience for the intended customers. Businesses must utilize the new edge digital technologies to do so. Make each employee accountable for benchmarking your brand’s CX index and then experience the magic.
What’s the most insightful book you read in 2020?
One must read these insightful books for sure if you really seek growth in the CX service lines:
- The Power of Moments, By Chip Heath and Dan Heath
- The Disruption Mindset, By Charlene Li
What are your predictions for trends in customer experience in the coming year?
Well! I believe in creating than predicting the new CX trends. Smart use of technology to create futuristic, situational & contextual phy-digital (Physical + Digital) customer experience across touchpoints. The new trend should be to perceive CX as an outcome of your customer’s all-inclusive interactions with your businesses. And hence focus should be simplifying the journey interactions and bringing more ease, convenience, self-serviceability, and meaningful experience for the intended customers.
Last but not least, what is your favorite CX metric?
I believe that all CX metrics are crucial for the all businesses to be sustainable and competitive in the market. Net Promoter Score, CSAT, Churn Rate, Customer Adoption, Retention Rate, Customer Life Time value, Customer Effort Score, one cannot skip any of these metrics as all of them are interconnected. I recommend businesses making all of them your favorite ones.