Shiny object syndrome is a common way to describe the belief that newer is always better. For enterprise companies, shiny object syndrome usually appears in the form of new customer acquisition. While new customers can be a key tactic to generate more revenue, another approach can prove even more beneficial — unlocking new revenues from existing customers.
This blog will explain why being data-driven is required to meet customer expectations. We’ll also explore how curating a distinct and unparalleled customer experience (CX) through data-driven decisions can help businesses consistently and proactively optimize their customer experience, increase engagement, and drive conversions for existing customers. We call this “experience-led growth.”
What is Experience-Led Growth?
Experience-led growth is a business strategy that focuses on improving the customer experience for existing customers. By focusing on existing customers, brands can unlock new revenue streams while avoiding customer churn and without having to spend more money to acquire new customers.
By adopting an experience-led growth strategy, businesses can identify the financial goals they want to achieve and optimize the customer experience to help achieve that goal. When done right, it leads to better customer engagement and increased loyalty. But executing an experience-led growth strategy requires businesses to assess customer journeys with a fine-tooth comb.
Worth Reading: Adobe Summit: The Dawn of Experience-Led Growth
Why Being Data-Driven is Table Stakes
For years, companies positioned themselves as data-driven have benefitted from increased productivity, better customer acquisition and retention, and, most importantly, increased profitability.
As a result, not being data-driven can see your business lose a competitive advantage before you’ve even begun implementing an experience-led growth strategy. Here’s why:
Avoid the Guessing Game
Making decisions based solely on gut feelings and intuition, or the ingrained belief that something has always been done a particular way without issues, so it doesn’t need to be improved, often leads to disappointment. Data helps to inform decisions based on tangible insight into customer behavior and previous interactions.
Changing Marketing Conditions
Enterprises typically rely on long-term thinking to determine their next moves. However, in a dynamic environment with frequently changing conditions, data is the only ally businesses have in swiftly making adjustments. Data helps you stay up-to-date with the latest developments, allowing you to adapt your strategy accordingly and remain relevant in the eyes of your customers.
Newer Technologies
With the flood of new technologies continuing to enter the market, from emerging content distribution channels such as AR and VR to AI-backed tools that help companies move faster and increase productivity, leveraging the data provided by these technologies is necessary to improve the customer experience.
Efficiency and Innovation
Data enables organizations to operate more efficiently, helping to increase productivity, eliminate tasks that aren’t generating revenue and maximize the use of existing resources. With better resource allocation, companies can focus their time on innovative initiatives that create value for customers and improve their experience.
Internal Assessments
Data can help assess the current state of the customer journey, how satisfied existing customers are, and the pain points they are experiencing. Customer behaviors change, so using data to examine and re-think the customer experience is a major competitive differentiator.
The Role of Data in Improving Customer Experiences
For an experience-led growth strategy to work, access to large volumes of data and the ability to democratize it to be used throughout the organization is a bare minimum requirement. However, companies that can leverage that data to its fullest potential can achieve even more success.
CX Measurement and Analytics Capabilities
Facilitating an experience-led growth strategy requires companies to measure and analyze all aspects of the customer journey. Adopting a data-driven approach requires companies to invest in the right tools to track performance, allowing them to track the appropriate metrics that impact customer satisfaction.
Big-Picture View of Customer Experience (CX)
Data provides a holistic and comprehensive view of the customer journey, enabling you to zoom out to understand how customer interactions, purchasing behavior, and preferences change. As such, spotting patterns or outside trends that impact the customer experience and ensuring that your brand maintains consistent performance throughout becomes much easier.
Granular View of Key Touchpoints
Along with seeing the bigger picture, being data-driven allows you to zoom in on the specific touchpoints within the customer journey. Having a granular view enables you to hone in on the customer preferences, such as the channels where they prefer to interact, and allows you to build personalized experiences to better appeal to your longest-serving customers.
Optimized Customer Experience (CX)
Data enables companies implementing experience-led growth to analyze customer feedback and other performance metrics and quickly identify areas for improvement. By fine-tuning strategies in this way, organizations can make tweaks that reduce churn and facilitate better satisfaction.
Increased Engagement and Conversions
Leaning on the data available to your business helps to increase engagement and conversions. Companies can identify areas in the customer journey causing drop-offs so that content and marketing initiatives can be adjusted accordingly.
3 Key Pillars of Experience-Led Growth Strategy
Rather than employ short-term acquisition measures, leading enterprises can encourage growth from existing customers by increasing customer satisfaction and convincing them to use more of the company’s products and services. To accomplish that, it’s necessary to create an experience-led growth strategy. The pillars of such a strategy are:
- Craft a visionary framework centered around the customer. This entails a comprehensive strategy to consistently and proactively sculpt an unmatched customer experience (CX) that is a compelling magnet for the brand’s incumbent customer base.
- Begin the customer journey transformation. This involves redefining and re-imagining customer journeys, evolving services, and overarching business models guided by data-driven insights.
- Enable broader business transformation. This is accomplished by establishing cross-functional CX and governance operating models by deploying a CX measurement and performance management framework.
Best Practices for Making Data-Driven Decisions
Experience-led growth, or other strategies an organization might want to employ to acquire new customers, won’t be possible without a solid data-driven foundation. Here is how to ensure that the foundation is in place.
- Define objectives
Define the targets that the business needs to meet by implementing the strategy. Following the classic SMART goal-setting process, where targets are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, enables you to determine what success looks like and what changes need to be made to the customer experience.
- Assess data collection and cleaning methods
Take a look at the current methods the organization uses to collect and clean data. For any data-driven approach to succeed, the data must be of high quality, without errors and biases.
- Choose and monitor the right KPIs
In the case of experience-led growth strategy, customer experience-focused KPIs such as churn rate, net promoter score, customer satisfaction rate, and loyalty program participation are useful to measure.
- Build a data-driven culture within the organization
Taking a data-driven approach requires that companies embed it within their culture. As such, organizations must implement training and processes that ensure the customer remains top of mind so that the right data points are collected, assessed, and used for all decisions.
- Invest in data security and privacy
Another important aspect of being data-driven is ensuring the proper security and privacy protocols are in place to protect critical customer information. As such, it’s necessary to invest in the right tools, processes, and compliance measures to ensure data security.
- Continuously measure to understand the impact of data and make adjustments
Just as data helps organizations gain deeper insights into their performance, an experience-led growth strategy and the data-driven culture that supports it need to be continuously assessed for their effectiveness.
Building a Data-Driven Culture
Experience-led growth may require some organizations to radically change how they view their customer base. Still, it can yield numerous benefits in increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. But assembling an experience-led growth strategy must be coupled with a data-driven approach and culture.
Content Bloom understands the importance of leveraging data to inform your strategy and drive desired results. Our business intelligence consulting services, in particular, can help you build a data-driven culture in your organization and unlock the true value of internal and third-party data.
Contact us today to learn more about using data to support experience-led growth.
