We all know that customer satisfaction has a strong influence on retaining customers and driving loyalty online. Studies have suggested correlations between brands with higher customer satisfaction ratings achieving higher trends in stock market performance. Other research has estimated that every customer you keep represents at least 3 that you don’t have to attract and that the cost of acquiring a new customer is higher then keeping an existing one.
Digital commerce strategies like having multiple return options, providing loyalty perks and special return shopper promotions, and providing seamless security are all table stakes. A priority in 2017 should be to focus on customer retention and delivering the customer experiences needed to improve loyalty.
The bad news? Digital commerce is getting more difficult.
The once idealistic linear customer journey now looks more like a honeycomb of options with online and offline channels and devices galore and the customer in control of which brands they choose to interact with. Layer in today's hyper-competitive digital commerce market where the average consumer is not increasing their online spend year-over-year, and most ecommerce brands and brick-and-mortar retailers cannot hope to survive without addressing their CX strategy. Not only has the web grown increasingly useful and fluid, but the experiences have evolved to a point where for many brands it seems impossible to predict the way consumers will interact with them.
The good news? You own the customer experience.
The silver lining in all this is that brands still own the customer experience and they have access to better technology today -- that was once only available to enterprise brands -- to help them gain more customer intelligence, automate personalized experiences, and scale growth.
I believe that in order to drive higher customer satisfaction you need to start upstream and develop an empowered business culture where your ecommerce or digital team has the ability and capability to innovate, strategize and ultimately act on their vision. Without this agile culture it's hard to realize a high performance potential because the team will tend to be more reactive versus proactive as they continue to struggle against internal technology barriers, development bottlenecks and business bureaucracy. This requires investing in modern technology. We all know today's modern cloud commerce technology for example, is not only more advanced, but it's more affordable than ever and therefore more accessible. This also requires investing in education and changing the culture of your business.
This April Oracle will host it's third annual Modern Commerce Experience conference in Las Vegas. This conference is quickly becoming a cornerstone digital commerce event to help executives educate themselves and build high performance brands. If you have a goal in 2017 to keep more customers and implement modern customer experiences that will earn more sales, this is the event for you. Here are 8 reasons why I'm excited for this year's Modern Commerce Experience event as part of Modern Customer Experience 2017:
Go beyond digital commerce and think about how you'll drive the company's digital transformation. We'll see you at the event.
The early bird rate of $999 (a $1,000 savings) ends January 22, 2017. If you attended last year, use the code DALM17 for a rate of $899.