Hi Ricardo, tell us about yourself, your background?
I am the managing director of Eglobalis, a boutique consulting working globally, helping organizations enhance their experiences and the European Customer Experience Organization founder. With over 24+ years as a CX transformational leader. My focus is to help organizations changing complexity into simplification and reigniting real innovation, CX and EX in B2B. A transformational customer experience strategic global leader – adviser, a keynote speaker, serving top brands worldwide such as Samsung, SAP, VW, Ericsson, Vodafone, O2, SK Telecom, Oracle, and others.
Online commerce was booming in 2020, and so did consumer reviews – How can brands better utilize this data to improve their customers’ experience?
Well, 2020 was a great year for digital transformation and online commerce. It was a good time for companies to introspectively analyze themselves and define how they manage customer interactions and experience and probably the best year to improve their digital experiences and design. Ecommerce, as mentioned below, needs to be easily adaptable and straightforward in its experience from the customer perspective. To better utilize e-commerce to generate adoption, I suggest companies start to design their products, eCommerce platforms, and experiences easier, intuitive, and clear to generate your goal…. That customers return and become loyal.
Collecting data analytics with good tools can help and is helping several organizations to understand their customers and their shortcomings in digital experience; this is a fact. However, to obtain and benefit from the accurate data about your customers, your team still needing to ask the right questions to extract and create models that will generate adoption for your eCommerce and cloud-based technologies. During this last year, the issue that I observed is connected with questions that companies want answers for being poorly elaborated and, in that way, preventing them from getting the necessary information to become better. Reviews are the best honest tool and a great way to learn about yourself as an organization, and a great tool to understand your company’s areas that need improvement. Critic and feedback are great tools to make organizations and humans better.
What is one element that must always be considered when working on a CMX (customer experience management) strategy?
Several factors are essential, but here are two that I feel super important to include in CMX strategies with an actionable approach. In my opinion, making sure your company has a clear understanding of who your customers are, aligned with an ability to simplify your digital or physical experience, would be two pillars that can help companies. These often generate more adoption, usage, loyalty and ensures customer successful outcomes, which means growth and retention.
Do you think personalization and customer-centricity are going to become increasingly more relevant in the coming year?
Personalization since the 90’s become increasingly crucial for all organizations in the physical and digital world. With the help of data analytics right now, we are achieving a remarkable capability of hyper-personalization. Therefore, I believe that this one element of a customer experience “overall map” is and will become even more critical as data analytics evolve and our ability to extract the correct data.
Regarding customer-centricity, it was and is by now a key topic around the globe. Companies that are not transforming themselves into real customer-centric organizations will follow behind their competitors. However, I must highlight that I never spoke with a company that did not have a tremendous focus on their customer during the last few years. Some of them were in different phases of transforming their self’s further to become customer-centric, but it is a marathon worth taking to retain and grow with your customers. As ore your organization understands customers’ needs and mindset, the better you became.
What are some of the ways companies can strive to eliminate the CX Gap?
By eliminating complexities and hurdles for customers, and their perceptions of your company products and services would be a good starting point. In both worlds, the digital and physical.
Develop a continuous capability for your talent, of listening to customers well, and using that to solve their problems. It is not enough to say you hear unless you use the collected information for benefiting your customer, partners, and employees.
Enhance your digital and physical technology to enable easy understanding for customers and their users. As easy it is more adoption you will get. Meaning higher MRR and ARR 😊
Design technology, products, and services, to generate adoption, and people wanting to work with it, instead of turning them off, I could go on and on here.
What’s the most insightful book you read in 2020?
A great book, Culture Your Culture: Innovating Experiences @ Work, provides the much-needed “how-to” with the Design of Work Experience (DOWE). Organizational culture isn’t just a hot topic – it’s an untapped asset and potential liability for all businesses. And yet, for all it’s potential to make or break, few know how to manage cultures with proficiency. This is an evergreen kind of book – one that you can always return to again and again. An amazing read authored by Karen Jaw-Madson or those included in my best reading list of 2020
Ricardo’s predictions for the future
What are your predictions for trends in customer experience in the coming year?
After Covid19 and after the globe being vaccinated, I predict a happier world. By now, all the world and especially here in Europe, all companies understood the benefits of a great customer experience, simplification, and helping the customer achieve their goals, with an essential human touch. In the years to come, people will remember how your company helped them or not to thrive during this nightmare pandemic. In other words, I believe that my trend is depending on what your organization did during the pandemic– you will reap what you planted. Customers in any sector are looking for simplification, great digital experiences, and I believe this will continue to focus on many organizations across the globe. The trend is to keep transforming ourselves and evolving together. As I often say, CX is an evolving art, not a static number of pillars or frameworks.
Last but not least, what is your favorite CX metric?
CSAT and CES, both aligned with customer analytics and some other metrics and measurements, enable companies to obtain a close to accurate 360 degrees view of their situation and how they can improve.
