Customer Experience Trends for Enterprise Software Companies

In the digital age, customer experience has greatly expanded in scope. You need to know your customers so well that you can not only increase their loyalty but also encourage them to evangelize to others about you. This depth of knowledge comes from analyzing all touch points and channels across the entire organization.

Digital transformation and customer experience

Digital disruption and shifting customer expectations are creating markets where loyalty is hard to win and easily lost.

• Digital transformation has created frictionless customer experiences, which means buying a product or service without interacting with a representative. The customer journey now begins from the moment a potential customer first learns about a company or its product and extends to the actual point of purchase and beyond.
• Complicated buying processes in B2B and enterprise software markets are becoming a thing of the past. The companies are trying to match the simplicity and speed of purchasing a consumer product.
• Your product is an experience too. To make a product successful in the long run, one needs to understand and influence user behavior and experience inside their product. “You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around,” famously said Steve Jobs.

Key customer experience trends

1. Customer experience leaders deliver predictive experiences that turn customers into brand advocates. This can be done by processing large amounts of data and using the right tools to get valuable insights from that data with speed and precision.
2. Personalization of customer experience continues to be a strong trend. Excelling in it requires a lot of skill, a whole lot of data, and the right tools.
3. The growing use of AI helps companies turn their products into online services that are based on interactions with software rather than with people. This changes how people purchase and use enterprise software.
4. Today’s buyers can access much more product reviews and thought-leadership content than before, through a variety of channels, which allows them to make decisions independently. Self-directed customer journeys are becoming common in the B2B sector. According to a Forrester research, two-thirds to 90 percent of a buyer’s journey is completed prior to engaging a salesperson.
5. Enterprise software companies now compete with customer experience, not with features and pricing, as CX is harder to duplicate.

Why does it matter?

• Customer experience is a differentiator that’s very hard to copy. It is the result of your overall strategy and collaboration between functions.
• In highly competitive markets, providing an unparalleled customer experience is a chance to stand out against rivals and build strong relationships with customers.
• Today’s empowered customers can unpredictably switch to a competitor if at any point they provide a better alternative.
• Great customer experience helps to keep customers longer, which can significantly increase the revenue growth rate.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos summed up the importance of customer experience in the age of the empowered customer perfectly, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” Leading enterprise marketers agree – CX is their companies’ most important battleground.

by Catherine Matantseva