Customer experience is defined as the perception a group of users or consumers has about a particular company or brand. It is the culmination of all the interactions a customer has with your business, from visiting your website to listening to a recording to interacting with your social media accounts. Each one of these aspects helps a customer to paint a picture of what exactly your business is and does. At the very core, your customer experience depends on your platform, which will ultimately decide whether an experience is good or bad. In this article, I will explain what a customer experience platform is, why any modern business should have one and then I’ll highlight some good experience platform tools and software.
What is it?
A CX platform is software that allows a business to piece together the type of experience they hope a user will encounter online. What does this mean exactly? Basically, it is a company’s online portal that houses information and resources about what that particular business and the services that they offer. Now, you might be thinking “Isn’t that just a company’s website?” For some, yes it is but nowadays a lot of businesses also have accompanying mobile applications and for ride-sharing, companies such as Uber or Lyft, their mobile application IS their main experience platform.
A customer experience platform is comprised of several core aspects; Survey engine, CX dashboards, Customer response, Integration, and Analytics. A survey engine helps track valuable customer feedback. CX dashboards provide a single view of what’s happening depending on who is using the platform. A customer response system makes it easy to relay the requested information back to the customer. In 2020, your platform needs to be able to integrate with other tools or you’ll be forced to reinvent the wheel. Lastly, collecting and reviewing analytics is crucial to making sure your business practice is fielding positive results.
Why is it important?
In the world of business, businesses constantly fight among one another for the attention and patronage of the public. A bad CX platform can lead to the following scenarios:
- Long wait times
- Employees who do not understand customer needs
- Unresolved issues/questions
- Too much automation/not enough of a human touch
- Service that is not personalized
- Rude/angry employees
Whereas a good CX platform can avoid those problems as well as providing:
- Increased customer loyalty
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Better word-of-mouth marketing, positive reviews, and recommendations
Be it retail, telecommunications, fast food or even car rentals, your goal as a business is to have your information is readily available and easy to access for the end-user. In layman’s terms, quick and easy is the name of the game and your customer experience platform should reflect that while being visually pleasing and technologically secure at the same time.
What are some good Customer Experience Platforms?
There are tons of different platform software out there such as:
It all depends on how big your company is and how big your target audience is as well. But here at Anant, our preferred software platform is Sitecore. If you wish to learn more about Sitecore, check out this blog post by our CTO, Eric Ramseur.
On top of helping our enterprise clients with DataStax and Sitecore projects we also provide companies with project planning workshops and Virtual CIOs.
We build and manage business platforms. Is your project going south? Did your vendor screw up again (that never happens)? Let’s talk for 15 minutes.
Photo by William Iven on Unsplash
