Understanding customer experience requires constant innovation, driven by a culture that is always asking questions and listening to feedback. Innovation lags at businesses that won’t or can’t listen to their customers – the people they exist to serve. Trust among customers, employees and leadership is a crucial component of the innovative mindset that delivers a consistently great customer experience.
Takeaways:
- The organizational drive to innovate customer experience solutions is a product of culture, tradition, and mindset.
- A great customer experience requires constant innovating, informed by up-to-the-moment CX intel.
- Innovative organizations build loyalty by leveraging the trust that develops from listening to customer needs.
I’m still amazed by the reaction I sometimes get when I tell new clients that we are located in south-western Ohio. They either try to place us in relation to Cincinnati, or assume we are out in the cornfields somewhere. Actually, our HQ is in Centerville, a suburb of Dayton, about 40 miles north of Cincinnati. Dayton’s legacy – and its future – are based on innovation. The Wright Brothers developed their airplane here…and now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is the foremost acquisition and development center in the U.S. Air Force. Dayton is also where Charles F. Kettering revolutionized the auto industry with the electric self-starter (no more hand cranking!). And if you’ve ever bought something at a brick-and-mortar business – they still exist – you might be familiar with what NCR Corporation’s early cash registers, developed here, have evolved into.
So you could say innovation is in our blood. Or in the water. Or in the thin-crust, square-cut pizza that’s one of our yummier local innovations.
That’s why we think we’re in the right place. For over 20 years, our team has been here asking questions, testing assumptions, and challenging the status quo, innovating the solutions and analytics that get to the heart, mind, and will of the customer experience. We’ve never stopped listening to our clients about what they need to understand their customers better. At the core, we’re researchers of financial consumer behavior – what it is, what’s driving it, and most of all, how you can anticipate it and act to change the outcome.
Change is inevitable. Innovation is intentional.
If you’re not innovating, you’re standing still…and falling behind! Successful organizations never stop innovating, implementing continuous improvement at both the incremental and transformative level, and learning from mistakes to build something better. Anyone with a “we’ve always done it this way” mentality is setting themselves up for failure. Reluctance to move on from relying on one successful product or approach has doomed many companies to irrelevance as the competition passes them by.
In an organization, innovation is driven by culture, which starts with top-level leadership. Leaders identify goals, then draw up the strategy to get there. But the soundness of that strategy turns on whether it responds to an actual customer need. Many organizations fail to innovate because they don’t know what’s important to their customers. Defining the problem and your objectives starts with gathering the right customer intel.
PwC’s 2022 Customer Loyalty Survey reveals why it’s getting tougher to deliver on customer retention these days: “… it doesn’t just have to be ‘bad’ experiences for some [customers] to leave: 32% said they’d drop a company if it provided inconsistent experiences.” With so much hinging on the customer experience in an environment of fluctuating customer intolerance, you need to keep pace with your customers’ expectations. And that means continuous innovation.
Trust – Innovation – Loyalty. Repeat.
One essential component of a strategy of innovation is trust. Without the trust of all parties involved – your customers, frontline employees, back-office management and executive leadership – it can be difficult to develop new ideas that respond effectively to customer needs.
According to an HBR study, 82% of executives say high levels of customer trust make it easier to innovate. In fact, innovation leaders are more closely attuned to what consumers want than are followers/laggards. A Filene study found that credit unions regarded as the most innovative generate greater customer loyalty and have a higher NPS than their less innovative peers (48 compared to 22).
Did I mention that our clients’ average NPS for 2022 is 72.11? Compare that to an average NPS of 30 for the banking industry as a whole (CustomerGauge). Proof that Innovation + Trust = BIG wins!
With the challenges of change coming ever faster in a digital-driven age, intentional transformation requires “always-on” listening to your customers – so you can prioritize the innovations that will benefit them the most.
What it comes down to is a virtuous cycle: To have a great customer experience, you have to always be innovating. And to create impactful innovations, you have to know what the customer experience is right now, in every moment.
If you’re ready to take your CX to greater heights, check out our innovative Insight Builder customer survey platform today!
