In today's era of an empowered customer with access to multiple choices and technology laden platforms, the quality of customer experience has become key factor for the success of brands, as tech-savvy customers do not buy just products, but experiences. The need today for every business is to ensure a right mix of human talent and technology, to have a digital-first enterprise wherein every revenue and growth strategy is aligned to customer satisfaction.

PwC in its recent survey of 15,000 consumers on "The Future of CX" found - "1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.

However, the world that has been disrupted by COVID-19 faces a turbulent challenge of meeting customer expectations with rising demands for omnichannel delivery and prompt response anytime, anywhere!

Businesses need to offer relevant & contextual engagements across platforms and devices every time at a breathtaking pace and responsiveness - to be ahead of the competition & earn customer loyalty for life!

In this blog, we will discuss the top 5 qualities of the next-gen CX enterprise in the post COIVD world:

1. A digitally mature Enterprise:

Consumer habits, attitudes and behaviors have seen a complete transformation with the rise and diffusion of digital technology. The growth of smartphones, tabs and laptops with the concurrent rise of machine learning, artificial intelligence, automation and big data has created avenues for businesses to offer customers with plethora of choices, to have what they want and at a speed and ease they prefer.

Constantly connected, app-native and empowered customers of today, are forcing businesses to reinvent, rediscover and deliver in no time. COVID-19 led lockdowns, restricted mobility and work from home routines have created an exponential demand for online transactions, online delivery of goods and services resulting in increased interactions between brands & their customers.

A post COIVD world is certainly not going to be poised to old normal anytime soon, as today's new normal has now moved to the next normal where- to be digital-first and digitally mature ranks as the top qualities for next-gen CX ready enterprise of the future.

2. Being Agile on Social Media

According to Statista, 48% of consumers expect a response to social media questions and complaints within 24 hours.

There are roughly around 3.9 billion social media users across the globe, which would translate into half of the world's population. There is no denying to the fact that users of all class from the Gen-X to millennials to baby boomers- are all actively available and engaged on social media platforms. It thus would make perfect sense for businesses of the future- to be agile on these platforms for not just to reach more customers, but also for huge opportunities to get to know their customers better, to understand their likes and dislikes, to understand their pain points and to know what is being spoken about them. Businesses will continue to find opportunities on social media to share interesting and relevant content with their customers, to educate them, to offer discounts and display advertisements along with sharing news about their business and hence deliver relevant and delightful customer experience. To achieve this & more, future enterprises have to be agile in handling such interactions and make enduring connections with their customers.

3. Ability to Track and Respond To CX Metrics

Unless measured, you can never know the results of your CX initiatives. It is crucial for every business to develop and design customer focused metrics to both- understand the outcomes of your strategies as well so to realign and reinforce them.

Next-gen CX enterprises will continue to stick to the basics of ensuring that they have the right measuring tools- to understand and monitor the success of both their efforts and the costs involved. Businesses of all sizes, need to have a set of customer-centric metrics which can either be focused on Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction or Customer Advocacy, that covers the entire business and can be shared & discussed in detail with the leadership teams regularly.

These metrics go a long way in promoting a customer-centric culture in organizations, as employees and teams associated with varied range of roles- are redirected and assessed on their delivery towards customer-oriented goals.

4. Enterprise with Agile IT Environment

Digital transformation is not possible today without leveraging right technology and skills. Enterprises of today, that lack digital transformation strategy of the future will not be able to develop into a next-gen CX enterprise in the post-COVID world.

It is, thus imperative for all businesses striving to meet the burgeoning customer expectations to implement agile technology and systems with right deployment of cloud computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Cloud adoption is critical to digital transformation as it enables faster, more flexible, and dynamic environment- helping businesses to test new projects that are low-risk and cost-effective for meeting customer demands faster. Connecting Big Data Analytics, website, and mobile applications as well as customer databases helps businesses unlock 360-degree view of their customers- by recording all digital-touchpoints of their customers. This enables brands to understand their customers preference, behaviors, browsing patterns and purchase decisions better and craft an impressive digital customer experience across all channels- giving you an edge to be the next-gen CX enterprise in the next normal.

5. In-built CX oriented Culture

Customer experience transformation and impressive CX delivery cannot happen in isolation with just the marketing or customer experience departments doing all the work. Customer experience covers the entire organization as it is all about how your product and services as well as their delivery, communication and after sales interaction is being received and felt by the customer. So, a siloed approach to CX transformation or a CX strategy working in vacuum is bound to end up into a mess. Thus, a CX strategy is highly unlikely to succeed without the right organizational culture.

"Customer service shouldn't just be a department, it should be the entire company." Tony Hsieh - CEO Zappos

It requires the involvement of the whole organization, which needs to be so aligned- that the customer is at the heart of the business. CX departments and designated CX champions must be empowered and motivated to go extra mile, with a clear understanding of not pushing towards immediate sale but careful consideration of the entire customer lifetime value. Employees at the back-end must also be inculcated with customer-centric culture- with a top-down approach where the entire organization seems to walk on the lines of leadership’s understanding and strategy for CX transformation.

Next-Gen CX Enterprise: Digital-Ready

The ongoing new normal brings with itself- a new set of customer trends, behaviors, and demand patterns. With post COVID-19 world, remaining in uncertain times- the businesses must be prepared to face, adapt, and offer the newly elevated customer service levels. The next normal, would find brands focusing on- safety of customers with more contactless solutions as they prepare and think ahead to serve customers and forecast a changed customer behavior.

Forward thinking and future-proof enterprises today, will not just think of offering simply seamless digital and omnichannel experiences, but also about integrating and deploying new services that are ready to understand, manage and tackle future customer demands and patterns.

Espire Infolabs offers best in class data driven solutions for brands - leveraging our transformative Customer Engagement Hub framework in collaboration with our strategic partnerships to empower decision makers to effortlessly unlock enterprise data to study business patterns, predict risks and identify growth opportunities. We make it simple for business users to marry insights with credible business actions. You can reach out to us at  marketing@espire.com  and do subscribe to our blog for latest insights and updates.