What is really involved in the customer experience?
Customer experience is “the set of emotions and feelings experienced by a customer before, during and after the purchase of a product or service.” (source: Marketing Definitions).
For several years, companies have understood that customer experience is a key issue to improve the perception of brand values. They are thus constantly innovating and showing creativity to ensure the best CX (Customer eXperience).
If this subject is so much talked about, it is because it represents a real path to profitability for your business. In this article, we will focus on the personalization of the offer through technology. We will introduce you to innovative tools that will change the way you interact with your customers.
SPOILER ALERT: we introduce our morphological customization solution accessible via smartphones in this article.
It is no longer up to the customer to conform to the conversion tunnels you had designed, but now it’s up to companies to adapt to the behaviors of their users/customers. The need for companies to fit their customers is a result of a market observation. Indeed, according to the study published in August 2020 by McKinsey & Company, well-being is now the most important factor in the purchase decision. In other words, the consumer is looking for a product that provides well-being.
As a result, for 79% of the people interviewed in this study, the search for well-being has become an essential criteria in the search for a good and even “an absolute priority” for 42% of them.
The “customer experience” strategy
What is the answer of the companies to this market evolution?
Individualized marketing!
This is the end of mass marketing strategy. Today we face its antonym: the individualized marketing or one-to-one.
What does it mean?It is a marketing strategy based on the personalization of the customer relationship, which implies individualized marketing actions.
Each customer develops his own relationship with the brand. Indeed, he does not receive the same offer, the same experience and the same response to their needs.
In theory, one-to-one marketing enables you to provide personalized support and offer.
A differentiation strategy can be decided at the beginning of a company’s activity or to drive its growth. In addition, some companies have started their business by fully exploiting the notion of customer experience as the basis of their business models.
To illustrate this, let’s take the example of the Uber phenomenon. Who would have dared to touch the traditional cab market? How can you challenge a leader such as G7 in Paris, established in 1902? If Uber has conquered millions of people, it is above all because it has responded to an unmet need: to find a cab easily and quickly, wherever the consumer is. But that’s not all! Its customer focus also made the difference. Thanks to an ultra-intuitive mobile app, Uber has revolutionized an age-old market by offering an unexpected customer experience.
Others use individualized marketing through digitalization because they need to innovate to boost their growth. This is the case of the German brand Adidas which optimizes its online customer journey. Adidas is getting closer to its customers in order to know them better and offer them the most individualized customer experience. For example, the 3-stripes brand goes as far as making its customer a co-creator, by offering high-end, personalized and connected experiences like the custom-made soles of the Ultra 4D models.
From strategy to action
How to move from strategy to action in “phygital” mode?
In the age of digital, it is impossible to bring brands closer to their customers without a combination of adapted technologies. This will significantly improve their ability to advise their customers as closely as possible to their needs. Thus, there are different ways to implement an effective “customer experience” strategy:
There are at least three ways to implement depending on your goal:
“I want to know my customer”
It is important that the customer feels considered by the brand, this is the key to individualized marketing and loyalty.
To achieve this result, it is essential to know your customer well:
- His preferences
- His previous purchases
- His satisfaction
- His way of consuming
Obtaining such information will help you to directly recommend what corresponds to his expectations.
Industrializing with artificial intelligence software is a good way to facilitate the recommendation process and the customer experience.
But be careful! It is important to combine the customer’s emotional expectations with the technology’s ability to meet them.
“I project my customer” – the prowess of new technology
Augmented reality is a tool that is becoming increasingly popular. Indeed, it allows the customer to project himself which ensures a better conversion.
Brands are adopting this technology since digital has become essential in business. It is necessary to innovate and find a way to offer the best online customer experience. In other words, it’s important to keep your marketing individualized even at a distance.
However, even if augmented reality allows a virtual fitting in real time with an ultra-realistic rendering, it does not provide the necessary elements for a precise recommendation. For example, it is impossible to recommend the right size for a pair of gloves or shoes.
“I recommend my client’s size” – and even from a distance!
XS, S, M, L or XL – What size fits your customers?
There is now the possibility to recommend a product size thanks to a scan. This is indeed the solution developed and proposed by our start-up, MyFit Solutions. The patented technology allows scanning areas of the body, to extract measurements and match them with a precise size.
In a store or online, this technology is available through a mobile application. It is therefore accessible to all your customers!
Results
Why implement an optimized customer experience?
Whatever the actions you put in place, focusing on the customer experience allows you to acquire different success factors:
- Obvious but essential, acquiring a satisfied and loyal customer base.
- A loyal customer becomes a prescriber. What could be better than generating word of mouth? A positive notoriety that can only be beneficial for your business.
- Reduce your return rates. Indeed, one of the most recurrent problems since 2020 is the increase of return rates. This rate correlates with the inflation of online purchases in the last year. Ensuring the right product for your customer reduces the chances that they will initiate a product return.
Moreover, putting technology at the heart of the customer experience strategy is a real success factor:
- Adopting a technological solution allows you to obtain added value in your market. This is the case of Alvis Audio, which is revolutionizing the French personal protection market (PPE) by offering custom-made earplugs to its customers via 3D scanning.
- Once the maturity phase is reached, some sectors are faced with the need to innovate in order to keep growing. Research & Development therefore becomes an essential component of the company’s strategy!
Which industries are the best adopters of these new technologies? Find out what strategies these industries are implementing in our next article.
