Why Startups Need To Build & Boost Customer Experience To Accelerate Business Growth

Customer experience has emerged as a new competitive battleground for startups looking to ensure their success

Despite much talk about customer experience (CX), many businesses are still failing to meet customer expectations when it comes to delivering on the experience

Let’s look at how to better understand this and see how businesses can take a more holistic approach to consumer sentiment

Customer experience has emerged as a new competitive battleground for startups looking to ensure their success. It is more important than ever to consider it. 

Businesses in some industries perform better than others. Consider the Indian consumer electronics brand boAt, whose CX innovation propelled the company from the production of electrical accessories to the production of fashion goods. Over time, boAt has emerged as a lifestyle brand, creating a completely new CX standard.

Keeping client sentiment as a top priority drives good CX. It is not only necessary to create a product; it is also necessary to manage the emotions that come with it.  Understanding customer needs and using that knowledge to improve the brand and product offering allows the customer to connect with the brand on a deeper level, resulting in happier, more loyal consumers.

Despite much talk about CX, many businesses are still failing to meet customer expectations when it comes to delivering on the experience. If a company wants to perform better, it must make smarter, more customer-informed decisions. Let’s look at a recent trend to better understand this concept and see how businesses can take a more holistic approach to consumer sentiment.

Customer Sentiment (& Data To Back It Up) Is King

It is an undeniable fact that today’s consumer has a plethora of options. So, what distinguishes your company from the competition is its level of empathy and understanding for its customers, which translates to its ability to create a superior CX.  This has emerged as the primary differentiator. Understanding not only a customer’s emotional response to a product or service, but also their emotional response to the larger scenario in which the interaction takes place, is critical to ensuring a positive experience.

Businesses can significantly improve their CX and make more informed business decisions by focusing on customer feedback. So, how are businesses dealing with it? The first step is to collect data. Web analytics, surveys, focus groups, usability testing, one-on-one meetings, and other channels all provide data on customer sentiment. 

All of this data must then be aggregated and analysed to provide clear insights into client sentiment, which is often easier said than done.

Where Startups Are Falling Short

Obtaining the complexities and insights of consumer sentiment can be challenging at times because it necessitates a thorough examination of data from multiple sources. Even though the data is linked to the same set of experiences, a more in-depth examination is required.

Consider a retailer attempting to gauge customer sentiment toward a new mobile app. They have information on how users interact with the app, as well as consumer feedback from Twitter, surveys, and one-on-one usability testing interviews. By definition, this data does not lend itself to blending.

To add to the complication, it was gathered by different people on separate teams within the organisation, completely isolated from one another. The person analysing the data may not be the same as the person who gathered it. Context can be lost, and critical information can be missed or misinterpreted.

The true challenge of customer sentiment is gathering all of this information and extracting accurate insights. The next step is to ensure that these insights can be integrated into existing processes to improve customer experience, guide product development, and help businesses make better decisions. 

A Holistic Approach To Customer Sentiment

To address this issue, businesses must de-silo customer sentiment and shine a light on it–transparency is essential. Businesses must reconsider their entire process and ask themselves, “How can we incorporate consumer sentiment into every stage of product and experience development?”

Customer empathy is developed over time by taking a more comprehensive approach to customer sentiment and incorporating it into every business decision. Naturally, user experience design teams perform significantly better when they have a strong sense of empathy for the user. It is a snowball effect.

It doesn’t take much to incorporate customer emotion into modern decision-making processes: only small, incremental steps are required. Some organisations accomplish this by designating an employee to champion customer sentiment within the organisation, whereas others take it to the board level and establish measurable goals for customer happiness.

Finally, it is up to the organisation to decide how to incorporate customer sentiment into its decision-making process. Whatever approach startups take, there is no denying that customer sentiment must be at the forefront of every decisionmaker’s mind within every organisation. It determines the quality of a company’s CX, its brand reputation, and its overall success.