Customers pay more for frictionless experiences:  how CPG can use orchestration to achieve it.

Touchpoint

Increasingly, CPG companies must serve customers in all locations across all channels. An omnichannel service approach integrates and orchestrates data from various touchpoints, such as online and offline sales, social media interactions, and contact channels. Advanced analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) systems then deliver insights into consumer preferences and behaviors, enabling you to tailor marketing messages and product recommendations accordingly.

This ensures that whether a customer interacts with your brand through a retail store, a website, or a mobile app, they receive a consistent personalized experience that reflects their individual preferences and purchase history. Overall, these improved service capabilities drive higher sales and better customer satisfaction while reducing costs.

An orchestra in full flow may seem effortless, but achieving such harmony requires years of training and weeks of rehearsal. Similarly, a great customer experience is so frictionless that you can almost fail to notice it, but all the moving parts behind it are carefully integrated to make this possible. Here, we explain why a customer-centric mindset is necessary to eliminate the bad experiences that kill sales and undermine customer loyalty; and examine the different elements you need to orchestrate to deliver great CX.

The Customer-Centric Mindset

The great truism about CX is that people only notice the experience when it goes wrong – and they are far more willing to talk about bad experiences than good ones. While happy customers will share that good news with 4-6 people, a dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience (!).  Most worryingly of all, you will probably never learn the true cost of those bad experiences as 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain: they will simply never use your service again. That disappointment goes straight to the bottom line.

So, the first step to delivering great CX is to eliminate those bad experiences. And that means adopting a customer-centric mindset. For example, PayPal understands its customers’ unwillingness to manually input personal details and their disinclination to hand over financial information to a retailer they may not trust – and has crafted an experience that overcomes these concerns. To top it all, if you need to complain about any transaction made with PayPal, their aftercare is exemplary.

This willingness to put the customer at the heart of service design and delivery is the hallmark of customer-centricity. The business case for these frictionless experiences is very simple: 70% of customers say they would pay more to receive a convenient experience (!), and Accenture found that customer-centric companies achieve 3.5 times the revenue growth of competitors with a more traditional mindset (!).

However, while the majority of businesses claim that they are customer-centric, only a minority of their customers would agree. This is the CX perception gap first identified by Bain almost 20 years ago: it found that, while 80% of companies believed they delivered “a superior experience,” only 8% of their customers agreed with them – and recent research doesn’t suggest that things have improved much since then (!): 54% of US consumers say the customer experience at most companies needs to be improved (!).

Orchestrating the Customer-Centric Mindset

CX is not just a strategy that should reside on paper, it is a philosophy of its own that needs to be shared throughout the organization. However, the fragmented and sometimes conflicting agendas at play make it easy for CX to become siloed.

CX means different things to different parts of the organization: the people creating the product or service, those responsible for selling it, and contact center managers working on the front line may all have different perspectives on the customer experience and conflicting ambitions for the organization’s CX strategy. In particular, marketing departments sometimes overlook their existing assets in the pursuit of the latest innovation: in many cases, the nuggets of information shared with agents in contact centers are never captured and their value is never realized.

Without orchestration, each department may seek incremental gains by implementing point solutions with no real understanding of the impact this will have on the experience overall – and this only serves to create new siloes. These groups need to take a step back and see the value of the puzzle pieces that are not under their direct control – and work with each other to build a true consensus around their CX objectives.

At a minimum, the CX strategy should involve the Operations, Marketing, and IT departments (with budgets aligned accordingly). This will ensure the customer experience becomes a driving force in the organization, the barometer for success, and a point of referral for decision-making. Also, the C-suite must recognize that they have a key role to play in sponsoring and driving the necessary collaboration: in the orchestration process, they must make sure that the right musicians get to the venue and know that their job is to work within the conductor's guidance.

With so many moving parts involved in the transition to frictionless CX, Customer Experience Management (CXM) is emerging as a standalone domain: the value of this market is expected to increase from $16.91 billion in 2023 to $52.54 billion by 2030 (!). CXM exemplifies a customer-centric and outside-in approach, focusing on customer engagement rather than internal processes and providing qualitative insights rather than quantitative data. CXM starts with gathering customer feedback and assessing the CX maturity of the organization to establish where the journey must begin, determine the desired destination, and develop a roadmap for getting there.

Orchestrating your CX Implementation

Orchestration is complex. It not only addresses customer needs and expectations but aligns tools and technology accordingly. Today there are 11,000 companies in the MarTech landscape (!) which can be grouped into four principal CX pillars – Customer Relationship Management, the cloud-based Contact Center, the Customer Data Platform, and Communication and Collaboration suites. Each of these pillars has its own ecosystem: yet they are also required to interoperate, creating an ‘ecosystem of ecosystems’.

While designing and selecting your own unique CX ecosystem, it is helpful to consider the qualities that make up a frictionless customer-centric experience. 

Appropriateness

To meet the market's rising expectations for customer service, human interaction must be provided at the right time and via the right channel for each step in the customer journey. Even if the technical landscape has been properly researched and the best solutions have been implemented, it is impossible to deliver a frictionless experience without orchestrating each customer interaction across all relevant departments. The level of interaction provided should also align with the brand promise.

Personalization and Insight

Customers are more informed and empowered than before. Their familiarity with digital leaders like Amazon, Meta, and Netflix can mean they expect instant communication and personalized experiences. Moreover, consumers know the value that Generative AI (Gen AI) can add and assume that all companies can use it to create more meaningful experiences. Today, hyper-personalization using real-time data is no longer a nice to have. It is indispensable for a brand to remain in the CX race and retain its competitive advantage.

A cornerstone in providing state-of-the-art customer experience is therefore the ability to collect, store, and use data to gather valuable insights about your customers. For example, Orange Business recently helped a national airline create a more immersive travel experience by consolidating all the sources of customer data with all the points of customer engagement., To do something similar, your CX solution must have access to all resources and information you have about the customer – in whatever data repository that might be stored. This enables the organization to customize interactions based on customer preferences and behaviours, leading to more relevant and engaging experiences. Orchestration is paramount when building the technology backbone that will enable this personalization effort.

Omnichannel

Customers may well start and finish their journey on different channels and using different devices, but they will expect the same experience and the same level of engagement from each of them. Switching from WhatsApp to the contact center or visiting a shop should be considered as part of the same journey with the information provided in one channel captured and seamlessly reused in the next (to avoid the frustration of repetition). In that sense, Customer Journey Analytics play a big role in shaping the best experiences by helping you to better understand the customer’s likely next move and by identifying and eliminating pain points. 

As we move forward, CX will likely become much more "immersive" – ask yourself how your brand should engage with the Fortnite generation. Also, the ubiquity of WhatsApp combined with location awareness will blur the line between physical and digital spaces; for example, in-store staff could be alerted to the fact that a ‘click and collect’ consumer is approaching the retailer, allowing staff to ensure that their product is waiting for them when they arrive.

Benefits of an Orchestrated Experience  

Done properly, your CX system will enhance customer satisfaction – and therefore increase revenues –by anticipating the customer’s next move and furnishing information accordingly – providing answers before the question even arises. Because the transaction is seamless and customers have access to the help they need whenever they run into difficulties – bounce rates will be lower and abandoned shopping carts will become a distant memory. Customers will also have every reason to come back to the site whenever the need arises, so loyalty is enhanced, leading to more repeat business.

So, the key benefit of great CX is enhanced profitability. Customers are willing to pay up to a 16% premium for great service (!) and Customer Lifetime Value increases by between 8 to 14 times. Collectively, this means that companies delivering great CX will see their revenues grow at rates of 4-8% above their market (!).

However, just as importantly, making the investments necessary to deliver great customer experiences will, in effect, create a platform for growth by simplifying your business and making it more effective. Eliminating siloed, spaghetti-like architectures opens up the possibility for continuous innovation that builds competitive advantage by allowing you to incorporate cutting-edge features and advancements. It shines a light into the shadows, enhancing convenience and productivity and bringing the flexibility and resilience necessary to adapt to volatile trading conditions.

Your path forward

Today, we are failing our customers – and inflicting untold damage on our bottom lines. They deserve a customer journey that plays out beautifully but, as we have seen, the majority think that the service delivered by most of the organizations they deal with simply isn’t good enough. With consumer expectations of the service experience rising fast, you must now move forward just to stand still. And, of course, the job is never really finished: no matter how streamlined your CX ecosystem becomes, there will always be a need to orchestrate the key players and resources in your CX ecosystem in order to remove those frustrating points of friction.

So, closing that CX perception gap is getting harder and cannot be achieved while the different departments that influence the customer experience are operating in siloes. The only way to succeed is to orchestrate your technology and business stakeholders and create harmony across the four pillars of your CX platform. That will serve as a platform for change and the delivery of frictionless experiences – something that will be music to the ears of customers – and shareholders – alike.