How to adapt to customer expectations and market shifts

Today’s customers have set a high bar for the experiences they expect when engaging with a business – and these expectations only continue to expand. In fact, according to ZenDesk, 61% of consumers would switch to a competing brand after just one bad customer experience.

Companies that remain laser-focused on customer experience also focus on flexibility, adapting continuously to meet their customers’ needs. They place their CX tools at the center of their strategic priorities, ensuring the tools they have enable this experiential agility, and measuring the capabilities of these tools as the litmus for their success.

Businesses today can emulate this behavior by changing their mindset from a focus on optimizing individual experiences, to a focus on adopting tools, processes, and operations that encourage rapid iteration and innovation. Here are three to focus on:

1. Flexible business methodology

An agile methodology will enable a continuous stream of improvements to your customer care capabilities, shortening time-to-value for emerging patterns within your customer base and allowing you to quickly respond to changing customer and employee needs. This kind of investment can really pay-off: according toPwC, 73% of customers say that a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties.

2. Cloud-based technologies

The agile and adaptive nature of cloud technology allows companies to quickly react to new demands and experiment with new technologies. Cloud-based systems need less frequent maintenance and patching than infrastructure-based systems, allowing companies to focus time and resources for the unique, higher-value needs of the business.

3. Intelligent automation

More advanced than ever, automated technologies can learn and evolve alongside the needs of your business and customers. Investing in these flexible technologies, especially in your contact center, can help you be more adaptive and responsive to your customer’s needs on a faster timeline. And with 51% of businesses using at least eight channels to interact with their customers, intelligently applying automation can help you reserve employee-power for where it’s needed most.

Investing in innovations like AI, machine learning, flexible methodologies, and automation will inform your decisions and power-up your ability to remain adaptive, so you can exceed expectations and outcomes in every customer interaction - even if something unexpected like a global pandemic threatens to disrupt operations.