Creating and scaling great customer experiences are more crucial than ever to the success of businesses, but what does it mean to scale customer experience (CX)? And how can your company scale successfully?

Scaling means being able to create and control customer experiences for any type of customer, any size group of customers and for any or all portions of a business.

According to Walker research, CX will become the key differentiator between brands by 2020, instead of price or product. Companies will find it to their advantage to better scale their experiences, no matter the size of business or type of customer. When applied correctly, scaling customer experience for your company can save time and money while improving customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Scaling customer experience goes in two directions: personalizing company-wide business processes to individual customers and taking individual interactions employees have with customers and using those insights to reshape business processes. By applying both approaches to a flexible and digitally transformed business, you can be better equipped to adapt to the ever-shifting nature of modern business. The key to any successful scaling of CX is to learn the right lessons from day-to-day business and be willing to rethink how you meet your customers’ needs.

Strategy #1: Applying One-on-One Experiences to Larger Processes

As outlined by Ericsson in their report, “Generating actionable insights from customer experience awareness,” a customer-centric organization is characterized by being attentive to requests, proactive in addressing concerns, consistent with their experiences and adaptive to changing needs.

Imagine a moment when someone contacts your customer service to help find answers to a source of frustration. It’s easy to do so, it happens every day. He or she can’t seem to complete a needed service request on your website or is running into a consistent error with your product. If you’ve enabled your customer service representatives well, they will be able to quickly understand and solve the problem the customer has presented over the phone or via chat. As a result, that customer will leave the conversation satisfied and with a renewed sense of trust in your company. According to an American Express Survey, 78% of consumers have decided to not make an intended purchase because of poor customer service experiences. However, the value of a properly equipped and connected customer service center does not stop there.

If a customer has reached out to your customer service branch due to confusion and complications in their journey, such as trying to complete a purchase online, it’s likely that they are not alone in their frustration. Take the customer’s frustrations into consideration and consider what can be done to simplify this process for all customers, whether or not they ever contact your customer service.

Successfully scaling solutions to customer pain points can result in greater satisfaction and a higher sales completion rate, as unresolved frustrations can lead to abandoned carts and lower rates of return business. The biggest challenge is in scaling correctly in order to apply these takeaways to a potentially massive corporate network while also retaining the individual customer-level detail that made these applicable customer experiences a success in the first place.

Strategy #2: Using Technology to Scale Effectively

The challenge for every business in the age of digital transformation is to run massive everyday operations while making each customer feel like he or she is seen and treated as an individual. It’s no simple task, but a major factor in its success is to correctly scale customer metrics, which analyzes feedback concerning experiences for actionable insights. Research from Ericsson shows that customer metrics can be scaled by evaluating insights based on several metrics, including:

• Scope - If the feedback concerned an individual, a group or the entire organization.
• Outreach - The number of customers who provided the feedback.
• Subjectivity - How objective or subjective the feedback is determined to be.
• Predictive - If the insight is based on measurable facts or predicted for the future.
• Latency - How quickly experiences should be changed to reflect insights.
• Frequency - How often the score should be updated.

By evaluating the feedback you receive based on these scores, you can have a greater awareness of how to scale effectively.

The ever-increasing use of automation in data analytics can play a crucial role in effectively scaling your metrics without putting additional strain on your workforce. Through successful back-end integration, your digital business can receive in-depth data from customer interactions, process it for valuable insights and then modify experiences based on what that data shows. In doing so, takeaways based on real, insightful customer interactions can be applied in scalable ways that make the most of technology to adapt to unique business sizes, structures and approaches to customers.

The End Goal: Stay Focused on the Customer

Companies are constantly striving toward effective innovation in the way they run their businesses through digital transformation that improves customer experience. Using great takeaways from individual customer experiences to improve the brand as a whole can have widespread success, but it’s also crucial to remain focused on personalizing these experiences. Customer expectations concerning personalized experiences with companies are more widespread than ever thanks to their increasingly common occurrence across industries.

If your company has equipped its workforce with the right technology, employees will be able to respond flexibly and quickly to the demands of customers, even if they do not have a set protocol for new situations. For example, if a customer enters a store and has a question about a brand new product that was just announced, a digitally transformed business will have that information ready and waiting at an employee’s fingertips even if he or she has not personally heard about the product yet.

It’s this fast and adaptable approach to CX that will make individual customers feel seen and heard in their everyday interactions with your brand, reinforcing positive impressions and loyalty.