We live in an era of customer experience dominance.
While most business leaders are rallying behind the idea of providing a great customer experience, the obstacles in customer experience management seem to slow them down.
But how important is customer experience?
According to a recent study, 84% of consumers say that they’ll go out of their way to spend on better experiences.
Image via Gladly
That’s why CX is taking a prominent position in every company’s marketing strategy. Businesses are already spending a considerable budget to ensure customer satisfaction.
Grand View Research says that the customer experience management market in the US is currently worth $2.9 billion. Until 2030, it is expected to grow at a 15.3% CAGR.
Image via Grand View Research
This being one side of the coin, the obstacles in delivering a flawless customer experience are real too. Before businesses can achieve stellar customer satisfaction and loyalty, they need to address these obstacles and overcome them.
In this post, we will touch upon the 7 most important customer experience obstacles and how you can strategize to overcome them and up the customer experience levels.
Let’s get rolling.
7 Key Obstacles of Customer Experience and How to Overcome Them
Great customer experience is the need of the hour for businesses. And the only way ahead is to tackle the obstacles that the companies is facing. The good news is that most obstacles can be transformed into opportunities for growth.
Here are the 7 most prominent customer experience obstacles and actionable solutions to overcome them.
1. Developing a Customer-First Mindset
Let’s face it — traditional marketing techniques are focused on promoting products and services. One of the biggest customer experience obstacles companies face presently is to move away from the traditional approach and develop a customer-first mindset and CX culture.
To tackle this obstacle, you should learn to step into the shoes of the customers and understand their expectations. A resourceful customer experience workshop is a good place to begin. Have CX experts talk to your team regularly to change their perspective.
By providing your sales team with relevant training and equipping them with the right tools for text analysis, you will be able to overcome such obstacles and achieve operational excellence.
2. Accessing and Managing Data
There is a plethora of customer data that businesses can leverage for their growth. But we are hardly doing anything about it.
Why?
Because one of the fundamental customer experience obstacles is our inability to access and manage this unstructured data. While only a tiny percentage of organizations are data-mature, others are still far behind when it comes to organizing customer data to improve customer experience.
The solution may lie in hiring expert data analysts. Several ZoomInfo alternatives and analysis tools are readily available to help data analysts with both customer experience and prospect conversion. They can dive deep into unstructured data and extract valuable insights to gain customer knowledge.
That’s how you can stay one step ahead of your customers and confidently meet their expectations.
3. Organizational Silos
If businesses want to deliver a seamless customer experience, it’s essential to break down one of the major obstacles, which is organizational silos.
Yes, the customer service department is the one that handles customer queries. But when it comes to delivering a great customer experience, several departments need to work together. Organizational and technical silos may act as a barrier to such collaboration.
These silos hinder the integration of customer data and may even end up distorting your view of the customer. Besides, they can hamper your productivity too.
To eliminate this disconnect, there should be a conscious effort within the organization to bring all those departments together that play a role in customer experience management.
Measures like making data accessible to all, easy exchange of information, enhanced collaboration, and so on can help create a unified view of the customer and how best to satisfy them to increase customer loyalty.
4. In-House Communication Gap Regarding Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is invaluable for any business. By analyzing the Voice of the Customer, businesses can make relevant changes in their CX strategy to achieve the best results.
While we are discussing customer experience obstacles, the next one is all about communication. But it’s not about the customer but rather about in-house communication.
A business may be receiving strong and consistent customer feedback, but it may never reach the people who need to analyze it due to poor in-house communication. This directly bears an impact on CX analytics and creates gaps in the insights you generate.
To get over this challenge, businesses should streamline the notification process to ensure that customer feedback is consolidated and shared with the concerned team in real-time to improve their pre-sales and post-sales customer experience.
One way of going about this is by making videos that communicate all the relevant information to the concerned departments. This way, everyone will be on the same page.
5. Unclear About Customer Experience ROI
Among the common CX obstacles that we have come across is unclear ROI for CX projects. Creating a stellar customer experience is no easy task. Businesses invest time and money to meaningfully engage their customers. But when it comes to measuring the success of their strategy, they fail badly.
It is commonly seen that organizations do not set specific goals for their customer experience strategy or do not track the right metrics to quantify their success or failure. They also seem to be unclear when it comes to measuring the ROI for customer experience projects.
To successfully quantify CX ROI, you need to correlate marketing metrics that are related to customer behavior with customer journey analytics and draw conclusions. This process can be streamlined if you use a tool like Feedier that can track KPIs in real-time to help you identify your CX ROI.
Along with this, you also need to consider the budget spent on CX training, digital marketing tools, tools for e-commerce and running costs.
6. Struggling to Deliver an Omnichannel Experience
The pandemic has pushed most B2B and B2C customers to go online. Shopping in person, however, has not lost its importance, and the same applies to customer feedback.
In fact, today’s generation has become an expert in hopping between ecommerce sites, mobile shopping apps, social media platforms, and even brick-and-mortar stores to find their favorite products at the best prices. They even look for customer feedback on various platforms before deciding to purchase from you.
That’s where one of the predominant customer experience obstacles can be found. Businesses are struggling to provide the same high-standard and consistent customer experience across multiple shopping channels.
You can address this obstacle with a CRM-based omnichannel solution that tracks and consolidates the history of customer conversations across all touchpoints. Take their feedback into consideration to understand their expectations and tweak your approach accordingly. This can ensure that you’ve got good feedback everywhere.
When flawless customer service is offered to your customers irrespective of how they connect with you, it leads to improved satisfaction levels and turns them into loyal customers.
7. Outdated Customer Information
Businesses regularly collect customer information through different means. While this invaluable information is documented by organizations, the database might become outdated at times.
You may have all customer-related data in one place or may have made it accessible for different teams, but if it is not updated regularly, this data won’t be of any value to you.
And that’s one of the biggest customer experience obstacles. When you create campaigns based on outdated information, they fail to engage the customers. That’s because customer preferences change regularly.
The best way out is to keep your customer data fresh. Information like contact details, demographics, interests, buying patterns, online behavior, and so on should be updated periodically.
But updated demographic data isn’t enough. It just gives you a surface-level idea of who your customers are and what they want.
To get a deeper understanding of your customers, it’s important to look at customer feedback. It can tell you about their motivations, needs, and issues. You can use a tool like Feedier to stay up to date with customer feedback. By analyzing this feedback, you can derive insights that help you deliver a more satisfying customer experience.
Get Ready to Overcome Customer Experience Obstacles
A more proactive approach by organizations to tackle customer experience obstacles is what is needed to win the CX game. The required changes may initially disrupt your workflow, but if you want to tear down the obstacles and create a strong customer base, changes are essential.
Go ahead and use this list of CX obstacles to check which issues you need to address in your CX management. Consider the solutions we have suggested and move a step closer to creating a spectacular customer experience.
Author Bio – Gaurav Sharma
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Attrock, a results-driven digital marketing company. Grew an agency from 5-figure to 7-figure revenue in just two years | 10X leads | 2.8X conversions | 300K organic monthly traffic. He also contributes to top publications like HuffPost, Adweek, Business 2 Community, TechCrunch, and more.
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