We live in the age of unlimited choice, where consumers are empowered and their expectations are high. Organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver exceptional customer annoyance; it is now a serious business problem. Nearly one-third of respondents in a recent AppDynamics survey said they have taken their business elsewhere due to poor digital experiences, and a quarter would be less likely to use the service in the future.
So, what do the most successful companies do differently in terms of how they assess and improve their customer experience (CX) app?
The Key to Creating Loyal Customers
According to the research report, Using Real-Time Data to drive deep customer loyalty, bringing together cross-functional teams- and arming these teams with frequent, real-time app performance data and business analytics- is the key to delivering experiences that result in stronger customer loyalty and retention.
According to the latest reports the companies with the greatest amount of customer loyalty involve the largest number of functions- including customer service, IT, R&D, and product support- to assess and improve the customer app experience. While nearly 70% of leading companies say customer service/care is heavily involved in managing the customer experience, only 44% of laggards can say the same. And nearly 60% of leaders involve product development and R&D, compared to just 32% of laggards.
Rather than operating in silos, these leaders develop agile, cross-functional teams to optimize the customer app journey, driving deep customer loyalty and, ultimately, profitability.
How Cross-Functional Teams Offers a Competitive Advantage?
If you are noticing that your online cart abandonment rate is increasing, with most customers dropping off once they reach the shipping details page. There could be a lot of different things that play a crucial role in the marketing of businesses. If the online checkout process is too confusing for the users then it leads to abandonment of the cart.
Having access to real-time app performance metrics gives you part of the picture. In this manner, the user is being able to analyze the data with the cross-functional team that allows organizations to get to the heart of why customers are abandoning your cart, so you can develop an effective game plan to fix the problem.
Different functions also have their own goals and priorities. Without a cross-functional team in place, these priorities may conflict and cause poor trade-offs to emerge. IT may be charged with reducing web page load time, but marketing might need richer design elements and beefier functionalities to sell the audience on a luxury purchase like expensive jewelry or high-end automobile. If the IT support team wants to remove some of the content from the app just to meet load-time goals for the customer, then it will have disastrous consequences for the business. Without interdepartmental collaboration, the app experience suffers, as does the bottom line.
As these two examples demonstrate, a cross-functional approach is a significant competitive advantage when it comes to improving the customer experience. With a cross-functional perspective, organizations can better understand and troubleshoot the root cause of app performance issues, as well as evaluate and optimize any trade-off decisions that have to be made concerning an application’s performance and functionalities.
Eliminating Siloed Behavior and Thinking
While cross-functional is a word that gets thrown around a lot in today’s business landscape, simply telling departments to work together isn’t enough. It requires a fundamental change in an organization’s culture- driven by a shift in mindset-to put customer experience above all else.
This notion aligns with that of AIOps, which requires teams to shift their mindset away from soiled monitoring tools and embrace AI-based systems that help identify root cause, predict performance, recommend optimizations, and automate fixes in real-time.
Similarly, to create a nibble cross-functional team that can quickly and effectively work together to improve the customer experience, teams must embrace collaboration versus working in isolation.
To push organizations towards this mindset, it’s often helpful to build systematic plans around solving a specific problem and then give them full decision-making authority and control. An employee with expertise in a particular area can be put in charge and become the general manager of the team. As Gerard du Toit, partner and head of global customer experience capabilities at Bain&Co. “Companies can create cross-functional and agile teams to address a particular challenge such as setting up a new account or improving online check out.”
Creating a centralized analytics hub can also give cross-functional teams the real-time app performance data they need to make optimal business decisions. An analytics hub can track and report on data from across the organization, providing actionable insights into the best course of action when a trade-off decision needs to be made such as whether the budget is better spent on marketing or product support to solve the specific business problem at hand. An analytics hub can powerfully neutralize the effects of siloed behavior and its impact on the bottom line- by providing hard, objective data were unaffected by any corporate or group dynamics that might exist.
Winning the Battle for Customer Loyalty
When every click or swipe has the potential to help or hurt an organization’s bottom line, companies can no longer afford to deliver a mediocre customer experience when it comes to their websites and mobile apps. Building a cross-functional team and empowering it with the resources it needs to monitor, analyze, and improve the customer experience takes time and effort, but it is essential to delivering an app journey that strengthens customer’s loyalty. By creating agile cross-functional teams designed to address specific business challenges-and equipping them with easily accessible real-time performance data-organizations can finally win the hard-fought quest for customer loyalty.
Brands must estimate the best solutions for their respective customers not design and deploy mobile sites and apps based on existing capabilities or those that follow popular trends. Whether you need a mobile site, an app or both, ensure that your experience delivers what people are seeking, quickly, seamlessly and allow them to move their next step with minimal effort.
Conclusion:
This is a time for inner collaboration to deliver external unified mobile experiences. Aligning the roles of marketing, user experience, mobile/digital and customer experience, ensures the delivery of an integrated, intuitive and gratifying experience at every touch-point.
