The customer experience on the next level is now limited only by your imagination.

Good customer experience provides a great competitive advantage for businesses of all sizes.But good customer experience can be complicated and time-consuming. It involves internal adjustment, IT support, and specialized partners. Fortunately, technology has evolved beyond these obstacles. Achieving the next level of customer experience has become more manageable and accessible than ever. Real-time computing from all systems, automated workflows, and all-channel communication provide new capabilities. Each business can now activate a personal experience for each customer.

1. Stay ahead of the curve

It has been said before, but this is the Age of the Customer. Saturated markets and access to products, services and information online have put the customer in control, leading to an all-time loyalty low. Brands and businesses need to show how much they value their customers by offering the best possible customer experience. If not, it inevitably leads to churn.

2. Know that customers expect more

The challenge is to achieve a moving goal as customer expectations evolve rapidly. Customers benchmarking a product or service against what they feel is standard with tech giants such as Netflix, Amazon, or Spotify. These expectations raise the bar to impeccable delivery and expectation of needs and just-in-time services and solutions. Staying ahead requires your organization to deliver more engagement than usual transactional, snippet-based communication. Customers expect real-time interaction, communicated through social and other channels of their choice. Mastering the right technology to do this has become a decisive factor in winning the game.

3. Customer communication: Digital prioritization

Customer Communication Management (CCM) has been around since the late 1980s. But only after moving into the 21st century did the changing pace of the CCM software accelerate. New social and interactive communication channels and the cloud are playing an increasing role.

A significant trend is "digital first", a shift in priority from traditional print and voice channels to social, web and mobile content. This is driven by the fact that consumers and B2B buyers are starting to shop for most products and services online. An estimated 50% to 70% of the buying experience happens online before engaging anyone in the sales company. Other important changes to CCM include the introduction of AI, monitoring online behavior and providing relevant information, built for ccm solutions in the cloud, and – last but not least – significant improvements in connectivity and configurability. This means that business users can manage changes and tests without interruption in their IT organization.

4. Technology with a human touch

Customer experience management requires a clear understanding of each point of contact in the customer journey and a good insight into how to connect these touchpoints. It makes systematic consistency between politics, process, personnel, support and IT indispensable. And that means a broader view of what constitutes a good experience.

Recent research supports the need for a more human touch in customer experience development. The current focus on just cognition (brain) leaves great potential untapped in the other two dimensions of CX: devotion and senses. The first generation of CCM solutions has brought efficiency and scale with a "one size fits all" approach. Although this shift in the service industry from human to digital interaction has provided great efficiency, it lacks human touch. Now it's time to deploy next-generation solutions that incorporate IoT, (large) data, cloud, and real-time processing to add more of this human touch, rooted in devotion and senses, the two remaining elements of good customer experience.

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