Executive Thought Leadership

Creating the Total Customer Experience

Looking for a sustainable competitive advantage? Make each customer feel like a market of one.

Take a quick survey of today’s most successful companies and you’ll find one thing in common, a large and loyal customer base. Loyal customers are indeed the holy grail of business because they are less sensitive to price, contribute a larger share of wallet to favored brands, increase their spending as they move through the purchasing lifecycle, and refer new customers at a higher rate than casual customers.

Today, it’s more challenging than ever to maintain or grow a loyal customer base, largely because customers have so many choices before them. Look again at today’s successful companies and you’ll find that many have earned their customers’ loyalty by providing a total customer experience.

By a total customer experience, we don’t mean great or improved customer service. We are talking about a major shift in the way in which organizations interact with customers from pre-sale queries to post-sale support and more.

What is a total customer experience? It starts, naturally, with a great product or service. It continues with easy transactions for the customer. And—most importantly—it is made satisfying by personalized interactions with company service representatives, subject matter experts, and other knowledge workers. These three things—a great product, easy transactions, and valuable interactions—add up to the total customer experience.

A Market of One

We live in an era in which customers want their individual needs and preferences fulfilled. Customers want companies to know and anticipate their personal preferences, and to provide products and services tailored to those preferences. For customers, a satisfying interaction is a personal one.

The goal for companies—and it’s lofty—is to get to know each customer by name, behavior, product preference, and communication preference, to essentially create a market of one with each and every customer. Companies can help to meet these challenges by:

• adapting business processes to capture customer information
• investing in collaborative technologies that get experts in front of customers
• engaging in interactions above and beyond the traditional buy-sell relationship
• creating better ways for customers to communicate with you
• encouraging collaborative problem-solving by involving customers and suppliers in product development
• deploying a system to measure and improve the customer experience.

For a great example, take a look at retail innovator REI. The Seattle-based outdoor adventure retailer has embraced an array of retail technologies that deliver product information to customers and employees on the store floor, including network-enabled kiosks and handheld devices. If retail or Web sales associates don’t have the answers, customers are quickly connected to category knowledge experts in other stores or company headquarters. And the company has made the shopping experience seamless across its three major channels—retail stores, online stores, and mail-order catalogs—by combining its customer information into one integrated database accessible by all qualified employees.

Enhanced Interactions Across Industries

You’ll find a renewed interest in customer interactions in virtually every industry. For example, healthcare providers are improving the customer—or patient—experience with wireless medical-grade networks deployed inside hospitals and across entire campuses that allow caregivers to access information anytime at any place so they can be more responsive in providing treatment and information tailored specifically to patients’ needs.

With integrated data, voice, and video communication capabilities, this information can take the form of a simple voice call, data from a heart monitor, an image from a MRI, or a real-time video conference with a medical specialist located in the next room or hundreds of miles away.

In the hospitality industry, there’s always been an eagerness to provide a positive customer experience. And you can see that goal realized in places like the Intercontinental Citystars Cairo Hotel in Heliopolis, where Internet Protocol communications allow you to tailor your interactions with the hotel, view restaurant menus, and shop—all from your room’s telephone handset.

Even governments are getting into act. The City of Cleveland is involved in a venture called OneCommunity— a nonprofit, high-speed wired and wireless network that serves the city, Case Western Reserve University, and many other educational, governmental, research, arts and cultural, healthcare and civic organizations across ten counties in Northeast Ohio. OneCommunity enables a new kind of citizen experience and improves government responsiveness to the needs of citizens.

The Network as a Platform

Just as the network provides the platform for more efficient customer transactions—so, too, is the network the platform for orchestrating and delivering the total customer experience.

Today, the network can deliver converged data, voice, and video communications with ease. And it can do so wirelessly. This combination of data, voice, video, and wireless, or “quad play,” provides a wealth of possibilities for rich customer interactions and collaboration.

Meanwhile, the network allows organizations to capture knowledge and information drawn from each customer encounter to continually improve and personalize the customer experience. In fact, successful business leaders are making customer preferences the fundamental unit of analysis, rather than the account, the purchase, the product, or the location.

The bottom line is this. The customer experience is the next frontier for growing revenues and enhancing customer loyalty. And the network is clearly the platform for delivering enhanced customer communications, collaboration, and experiences. We have entered an era of customization, personalization, and interaction, and those companies that understand the power of these business components will be first to reap the benefits.

Next Steps

Learn more about creating the “total customer experience” at cisco.com/go/tce . Go to cisco.com/go/tce-execnet to view a video presentation by Robert Lloyd on “Creating the Total Customer Experience.”