Businesses know that satisfying customers is the key to success. They know they need top customer experience tools to achieve this. So why are satisfaction rates going down?
The latest survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index should serve as a wake-up call. “U.S. overall customer satisfaction has dropped for three consecutive quarters,” the group found. It sits at 77%, “which is roughly the same level it was 12 years ago.”
When you look at the big picture, things don’t get much better. “To put it bluntly, at least at a national level, the ACSI hasn’t really budged much in over a quarter century, despite all the investments that companies have been made in quality management, big data, predictive analytics, self-service tools, voice of the customer programs, and, more recently, AI technology,” Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting, told Customer Experience Dive.
Certainly, with increasing competition in many fields and rising consumer expectations, one could interpret relatively static satisfaction rates as something of a win. But with the massive sums of money businesses are putting into CX, a lack of improvement should be seen as unacceptable.
The global customer experience management market was valued at $19 billion last year and is expected to go up by $3 billion this year, according to a new report from Fortune Business Insights. Then, it’s “projected to grow from USD 22.35 billion in 2025 to USD 68.24 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 17.3% during the forecast period.”
To dig into the minds of consumers, marketing researchers at Rice University and the University of Miami surveyed more than 3,000 people. Through qualitative research and quantitative analysis, they explored what customers value most across 18 industries. What they found offers a crucial lesson for every business looking to improve customer satisfaction — in other words, every business.
“Though most enterprises claim to be ‘customer-focused’ or ‘customer-centric,’ few actually are,” professors Vikas Mittal and Michael Tsiros wrote.”A major impediment is their inability to identify and rank order customer value drivers. For example, customers in one sector may derive more value from quality than price, whereas customers in another sector may value access to services more than quality.”
However, research shows that executives are bad at ranking value drivers. In most studies, executives’ and customers’ rankings of the drivers are virtually uncorrelated.”
Fortunately, I know this from experience: “scientifically valid and credible” research is now available like never before.
Why UCXM is a game changer
Decision makers need intelligible, actionable data at all times. With information about customers, their industry at large, and the marketplace all coming together, they should be empowered with key insights to vastly improve the customer experience.
This is why today, the top customer experience tools for improving customer satisfaction are unified customer experience management (UCXM) platforms. Powered by AI, this kind of technology processes real-time information about customer interactions across every channel. All parts of the company, including those doing and analyzing research, add their findings into the same unified system. The large language models (LLMs) in these tools understand industry-specific terminology to provide clarity at all times.
With UCXM platforms, businesses are no longer in the dark. They see how to deliver the best customer experience for each segment and each individual. Better experiences lead to satisfied customers, which lead to more referrals. Without CX improvement, customers are all too happy to walk away. (Customer loyalty isn’t what it used to be.)
As the world becomes more commoditized, more products and services look alike. The most lasting form of differentiation is experience — from the pre-purchase stage all the way through the life cycle of the customer. So it’s time to end guesswork, and focus on trustworthy, complete, robust data. The companies that fail to do this will fall behind — and may even go extinct.