The cover story of January's PS Magazine provides a road map for delivering the right customer experience.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review titled "The Truth About Customer Experience," defines the customer experience as your customer's end-to-end journey with you, not just the key touch points or critical moments when customers interact with your organization. The customer experience is the cumulative impact of multiple touch points over time, which results in a feeling of a genuine relationship — or lack thereof.
Businesses of all sizes have good reason to focus on the customer experience. Whether improving direct customers’ experiences or the experiences of your customers' customers with better communication products, a better customer experience delivers bottom-line results. Studies have indicated that a better customer experience can:
- Improve customer satisfaction.
- Foster repeat customers and customer loyalty.
- Increase customer advocacy and referrals.
- Reduce customer churn.
- Create a competitive advantage.
- Increase revenue and sales.
- Build stronger customer relationships.
In the year ahead, serving customers, enhancing the customer experience and driving business profitability will require print service providers to focus on serving customers and improving internal operations. This article outlines the top areas that InfoTrends believes print service providers should focus on in the year ahead.
1. Deliver the Right Customer Experience
Delivering a great customer experience starts with understanding what your customers want and taking action to deliver it. The hard part is taking what you've learned and adjusting the way your company works so that your teams, processes and technologies are capable of delivering on the experience that the customer expects. According to InfoTrends' 2015 study, "Customer Engagement Technologies: The State of the Market," North American and Western European enterprises' top objective for communication investments was improving the customer experience.
In another InfoTrends study titled, "Micro to Mega: Trends in Business Communications," enterprises with 500-plus employees reported that the critical factors for selecting a print provider were providing the best value, offering the broadest range of services to enable "one-stop shopping," quality output and access to expert advice. These factors all contribute to the customer experience.
Read the whole article starting on page 18 of the January issue.
