Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Businesses aren't delivering frictionless customer experiences

And 29% aren't taking action even for known problems

The global study, which surveyed 1,700+ executives and 12,000+ consumers, discovered that despite the majority of companies (66 percent) investing upwards of US$250,000 each year evaluating the customer experience through Net Promoter Scores, reviews, and customer satisfaction surveys, 82 percent were unable to recall a single positive example of a recent frictionless customer experience-showing current customer experience processes do little more than wallpaper over the cracks.

While much attention is paid to customer service, the inflection points that occur throughout the lifecycle of an operation and encompass processes, technology solutions, and human coordination are even more important to business outcomes, yet even more frequently overlooked. Only by careful orchestration of these components can companies deliver a quality `Moment of Service', in which everything comes together to create a positive result for a customer.

However, while 79 percent of businesses have invested time and resources in identifying where these inflection points are, when problems are identified nearly a third of managers (29 percent) admitted to reporting them but not taking action. Furthermore, some 18 percent revealed they were too busy to report issues unless urgent, while just 15 percent said they proactively look to pre-empt problems. This begs the question of how companies can expect customer experience and loyalty to improve without taking necessary action, leaving revenue and market share on the table.

With 90 percent of businesses stating they have reengineered or are reengineering their business to ensure customer touchpoints and stages come together for better moments of service, it is vital that companies ensure processes are optimized across each of these inflection points to mitigate issues and fuel growth.

For enterprises that fail at the moment of service, the financial ramifications are significant. A quarter of consumer respondents stated they would never engage with a brand again after just one bad experience, while over half (52 percent) would abandon a company after two to three. IFS also sought to examine the impact of negative experiences on wider brand perception and uncovered that 58 percent of consumers are very likely or somewhat likely to share their negative perceptions with their network, highlighting how easily a bad interaction can be amplified.

However, it's not all doom and gloom. Over half (52 percent) of consumers are inclined to leave a positive review, underscoring just how much can be gained by keeping an open dialog with customers and focusing on delivering an exceptional brand experience.

"When it comes to delivering a positive customer experience, businesses have a limited opportunity to get it right. And if they neglect a single inflection point, they are gambling with their outcomes, including profits and margins," IFS Chief Customer Officer Michael Ouissi said. "There are many points where you can either delight or disappoint a customer across the value chain and it is clear from these findings that consumers are willing to voice their opinions either way. As more and more businesses look to service provision as a key competitive differentiator, running the right enterprise software-engineered for the moment of service and capable of orchestrating a multitude of people, assets and customers-will separate the winners from the losers. To achieve this, enterprises must rethink how they architect their operations, and become a 'composable enterprise' that harnesses a combination of packaged functions and technologies to deliver outcomes and adapts to the pace of business."

The report, 'Fixing the fundamentals: Understanding new business models and opportunities in the wake of Covid-19' has been made available for download from IFS's web site, at https://www.ifs.com/fixing-the-fundamentals/

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)