AI can do everything, right? Or at least it will be able to do so soon? Like making breakfast for us?
Maybe, maybe not.
What IS certain, is that however sophisticated the technology, achieving any tasks, whether it’s making breakfast or providing customer insights, requires additional factors alongside the tech.
Let’s use our breakfast as an analogy (and yes, perhaps we were a little hungry when we started writing this today!).
You wake up, and you know you need a nutritious, and preferably delicious, breakfast to get through the busy day ahead of you.
Coincidentally, your Instagram feed distracts you with a particularly tempting egg-and-avocado-on-toast…
This is essentially just like your business goals: you want your company to be successful, in-demand, and appealing.
You want it to generate the returns needed for its employees, leaders, owners, shareholders.
So let’s get started.
The Instagram recipe starts with making some toast.
Luckily, you have the best toaster on the market sitting in your kitchen, ready to go!
Similarly, in the business-goal scenario, you’ve understood from reading some great content from McKinsey recently that Experience Lead Growth(XLG) is a cost effective and efficient way to generate growth and success.
Luckily, your company brought in Chattermill, who have the best customer experience intelligence platform on the market…
Why AI alone is not going to solve your CX problems
But here’s the point: just owning the best toaster won’t guarantee the perfect breakfast, and having the best analytics tool won’t guarantee Experience Lead Growth.
Firstly, there’s the old point of garbage-in, garbage-out.
If you put poor quality (mouldy, stale, or simply low-quality) bread into your toaster, the toast will likewise be underwhelming.
Similarly, filling your analytics engine with poor data (inconsistent, badly-asked questions, or surveys which don’t cover the desired use-cases), means you’ll be unlikely to get good, useful, outputs.
But let’s imagine we do have some perfect toast, and some interesting insights.
You’re not done.
You’re not going to just eat the dry toast, thinking ‘a job well done’ while struggling to chew the dry and tasteless dough.
You need to add some butter, some egg, some avocado (or whatever your topping-of-choice may be!).
Likewise, insights by themselves don’t achieve anything.
The business needs to get those insights in front of someone who can take action, then they need to take that action, and measure the results.
Only then can the business start achieving the Experience Lead Growth they wanted.
Extended analogies aside, there is a real customer-experience best practice message here.
The diagram above illustrates the process needed to drive XLG: and note how only a couple of points in the middle are actually covered by the analytical solution - the toaster in our analogy earlier.
Get the whole process right, and XLG will come.
Omit parts, and that success is a lot less likely to happen.
Why customer experience is the future of long-term profitable growth
Gone are the days when companies could achieve all their growth goals by plunging ever-increasing sums in paid customer acquisition.
Today, the real goal is sustained profitable growth, and its main driver is your customers, the people buying from you, and the ones looking to buy.
It’s clear that paid customer acquisition is getting harder.
As search and social media platforms lock down access to new customers, savvy companies are looking at ways to improve customer value and grow their businesses.
If you’re not already doing the same, you should be.
A recent PwC survey shows 45% of CEOs believe their company will not be viable in 10 years if they don’t change.
When it comes to defining which businesses succeed or fail, customers are now in the driving seat.
Unfortunately, this shift has left many companies “behind the curve” as they stop growing or can’t hit their profitability goals.
The shift towards Experience-Led Growth
Today, customer experience is even more important than ever.
Here’s why: as paid acquisition costs continue to increase, interest rates have risen, and customers demand better services, more businesses are finding it harder to achieve profitable growth.
In fact, a June 2022 research showed paid customer acquisition costs for some brands have grown 3.2x over the last ten years.
Businesses have little room to improve these faced with the ever more competitive platforms such as Google, Meta, Tiktok and others.
What’s worse, even when they do figure out how to make their paid strategies work, any advantage is competed away very quickly leaving them without a durable advantage.
Fortunately, there’s a viable solution to the increased risks to business growth, and it’s available to every business – using customer experience to unlock new revenues with XLG.
To do that, brands must refocus their growth strategy from paid acquisition to consistently enticing existing customers to spend more in each transaction, purchase more often, and refer new customers.
CX improvements with the requisite measurement and analytics capabilities are essential for success.
The right approach will be unique for every business, the key is to understand the key drivers of the experience and consistently work to improve them.
For Costco and Ikea, this means keeping the prices low, for Uber, this means improving convenience, for Hermes - driving exclusivity.
Experience Lead Growth (XLG) is an outcome of a whole process, with many stages, inputs, and activities required to achieve success.
The AI and Machine Learning technologies, even the best ones like Chattermill, are simply one part of this.
Chattermill’s experience puts us in a unique, and unbiased, position to help organisations making their decisions around data collection, prompting them to take appropriate action and measure impact.
Contact us to find out more about our XLG acceleration program.
Maybe we’ll even share some toast.
