The Customer Experience (CX) discipline has been around now for long enough that most brands are aware of customer centricity and the need to put it at the heart of their business. It is well understood that if you aren’t seeking customer feedback and insight you are going to be falling behind.
However, with customer expectations continuously evolving, companies need to move beyond managing experiences and get closer to aligning business and customer purpose to deliver genuine, excellent experiences. Brands who make emotional connections with their customers are the ones that are leading the way in adding value to their business.
In our experience there are several factors that these organisations have in common. Typically, they have an intelligence plan, aligned to their customer experience vision, which outlines what intelligence and insights they are going to collect and how are they going to use it to deliver the emotional moments that matter to their customers.
These best in class companies have looked to align their brand purpose and promises with their customers’ purpose and needs. Connecting with customer purpose is the sweet spot that brands are seeking across their customer journeys. It goes beyond the purely transactional and through to a deeper understanding and connection with customers that allows your brand to deliver the emotional experiences that will retain customers, grow genuine loyalty and increase lifetime value.
During my career I’ve worked with senior management in many well-known brands (including Pizza Hut, Waitrose and Caffè Nero) helping them develop their CX approaches and advising them on how they can better understand their customers. Out of this experience I have come to the conclusion that customer insight needs to go beyond the measurement of experiences and get to the heart of customer purpose as you only deliver genuine value to your business and your customers when you make powerful emotional connections with those customers. To do just that is one of the primary reasons I set up Intelligent Purpose.
If you are considering your customer research needs, why not check out Intelligent Purpose and see how we can help you with your current customer challenges.