The customer experience (CX) is unique to each customer and each interaction, which makes it very complex to define. What delights one customer may not satisfy another, and different situations require different experiences. How, then, does a business ensure its customer experience is consistently good?

Mark Wilson, MD of SYSPRO Africa, says: "The customer experience is all about an end-to-end customer journey. It starts with what you deliver today and how you improve on that tomorrow. What does CX represent to you and what does it represent to me? It could be very different things, but we need to find a common thread if we're going to deliver great customer experiences."

CX is about human behaviours and emotions. In the CX model, a business needs to find different ways to deliver simple yet engaging and innovative approaches to its customers across multiple touch points – and the latter is the essence of the CX today – whether the customer chooses to interact using social media, a phone call or even e-mail, the CX must be consistent.

Human behaviour and emotion and what matters

As an organisation on a customer-centric journey, you needs to consider many things, including your staff's ability to adapt to the journey that you want to take them on, as well as whether you have the necessary tools in place to deliver great CX, as well as where your customers are and who they are – you need to make sure that you cater for your customers' business needs as well as the demands of the industry that they're in.

Wilson says: "As you take your staff on a customer-centric journey, it's vital that you make the customer feel that they are the most important part of the journey and that your business is responsive in giving customers answers to their queries in the manner in which they wish to receive them. If necessary, your organisation needs to adapt so it can engage with customers and answer their queries in a way that speaks to them and isn't hampered by your organisation's limitations.

"To this end, you have to employ people who are agile, flexible and happy to be challenged. You are effectively inviting people into your house. It's important to be transparent and to put processes in place to ensure this. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help track the types of queries coming into the organisation, allowing you to put methodologies in place to enable you to be more responsive to customer queries and to process them more quickly.

"Once you have a motivated team on board, the next step is to make sure you have measurable and transparent tools in place to track performance and how you're doing on the CX front. You need to continually improve the customer journey and understand it. It's not just about putting people and AI in place and then trying to understand the customer's environment and their industry, this all has to run in parallel."

Businesses need to consistently drive all of these areas. One way to understand your customers' environment is by doing industry-specific research to uncover their key business drivers, which will help you understand what you should be trying to achieve with the customer.

For instance, the food and beverage and metal fabrication industries are quite different areas of business, and you need to take that into account as well as understand how ready they are from a maturity point of view. Different customers are on different automation journeys. Some are happy to remain in maintenance mode, while others want to be thought leaders on the CX journey.

AI is really starting to proliferate in certain industries, with online stores like Spotify and Netflix starting to predict what people want and proactively engaging them on those fronts. This is possible simply because today there is so much more information available about consumers.

"Businesses have (and need) a 360-degree view of their consumer base, including when they shop, what they buy, what they search for and even their mood while interacting online. This enables the organisation to be able to better predict what business that customer will do with it downstream. If you can understand your customers now and predict the future, it will help companies plan for both short- and long-term demand. But even with a 360-degree view of the customer and the intelligence to better manage your customers, businesses still need to find ways to add more value to their customer relationships on a day-to-day basis."

The dos and don'ts of CX

The number one rule that all business must adhere to is don't ever let your customer down. CX must be placed as a top priority in your business, otherwise you'll be reduced to competing on price and commodity.

Wilson is a firm believer that in South Africa's current business environment, CX will overtake price and product quality as priorities for customers, and that companies that provide excellent CX will have good customer retention rates and also increase their upsell because customers will see the value of doing business with the organisation.

CX done right entails differentiating between different channels of contact and having a multichannel approach that encompasses voice, social media and e-mail – as well as between different types of customers. Some organisations struggle to get CX right across all of the channels that customers like to use to connect with them.

"CX needs to be regarded as a holistic journey and deliver an experience that is seamless, delightful and engaging," says Wilson. "Customer communication needs to take them on a journey that really makes them feel that they engage with the brand."

He continues: "I believe most organisations don't fully understand their customers, and until they understand their customers, their markets and their business drivers, they can't start their customer journey as they won't be able to add value. They need to add consistent and clear messaging across all channels, regardless of who chooses to engage with the brand and how they want to do so, it must be seen as one experience. On this journey, organisations mustn't forget all of the stakeholders – the entire business needs to align to create that experience for the customer across all divisions, regardless of who they interact with. You have to place front and centre what the brand represents, in terms of credibility and quality.

"It's also vital in this fast-changing world to realise that the standards you set for yourself and your team today will become the norm in the future, so you need to continually improve and reinvest in and evolve your CX to ensure you keep up with demands. Today's customer service will be outdated in a couple of years, largely driven by the changes that AI is bringing to this environment."