Feature
The Gist
- Customer empowerment. Crucial for building brand loyalty and ensuring long-term retention.
- Technology and data. Fundamental for enabling informed and data-driven decision-making.
- Holistic Approach. Imperative for the successful implementation of customer empowerment strategies.
Employee empowerment, especially frontline customer service staff, has been a key element of customer experience (CX) for years. But brands in touch with consumer realities are also waking up to the power of “customer empowerment” as a lever for their CX strategy.
Seeking Control Over the Buying Journey
Today's consumers don’t just seek personalized journeys and convenient experiences, but also active participation in and control over their buying journey. This is where empowering customers is a natural progression of CX design and can foster retention and loyalty, says Melissa Hill, VP of product at search tech company Lucidworks.
It works because customers are more likely to stick with brands that recognize their autonomy and actively support their decision-making process at each stage of the buying journey, agrees Monica Ho, CMO of co-marketing cloud platform SOCi.
Start With Data
Because almost everything we do, touch, or see today is enabled by tech or transformed by or into data, the obvious place to start with customer empowerment would seem to be data and technology. Empowering customers with relevant and timely data gives them the right tools to accomplish their goals, says Jessica Wooding, global CX lead, at workflow management company Wrike. This helps them have more confidence in the choices they are making and gives them freedom to spend time doing impactful work that drives business outcomes.
Yet, despite its rising significance as a CX differentiator, many companies are not yet positioned to be successful with it, opines David Grabert, VP of brand and marketing communications at CX platform DISQO. That is because customer empowerment needs more than just investments in data or enabling tech and tools.
Cultivate a Deep Understanding of Self-Service Preferences
It first needs a deep understanding of customers’ self-service preferences, individual capabilities to engage in offerings and at what stages of their brand experience they seek a more high-touch approach. The goal is to optimize the path-to-purchase, the actual purchase and the post-purchase experience for customer empowerment. Brands that get it right, Grabert says, tend to employ a three-pronged approach:
- Start with a solid understanding of their customers’ needs, attitudes, capabilities and behaviors
- Monitor how their customers engage with and adapt to new empowerment capabilities
- Strategize where customer empowerment should grow, be supported, or in some cases, be retracted
A recent global study of 2,100 consumers and 800 brands across industries supports that basics-first approach to empowerment. What customers most value in their relationships with preferred brands are cost-effectiveness, convenience and consistency.
The Foundation of Customer Empowerment
This tells us that the foundation of customer empowerment lies in delivering value, making it easy to shop and providing ongoing assistance post-purchase. It’s why brands that view empowerment as a simple hack can fail to drive conversation and engagement, says Pete Stein, global president at Merkle. They fail because of disconnects in technology, strategy or organizational design.
To be truly empowering, the entire organization must be oriented around customers, and this means putting tools and capabilities in the consumer’s hands that make them feel invested. The overall service design too must be reconsidered to understand how the people in the business will need to change their ways of working and enable this new dimension of customer experience.
Related Article: Improve CX: Enable Customers to Control Their Own Narratives
What Does Customer Empowerment Look Like in Practice?
There can be many paths to customer empowerment — from payment options to customer-managed communities. However, it all boils down to two basics: providing customers optimal access to information and enabling them to self-serve.
Access to information
The spectrum of what consumers consider “access to relevant information” is wide, and depends on the context of where they are in their buying journey and how mature their relationship with the brand is. It’s not just what information is available, but when, in which format and on what channel.
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Your Online Profile
For example, when on the move, nearly 80% of consumers search for local businesses online. Nearly half (47%) of them would look for another business if the online profile of one business was inadequate or inaccurate. So up-to-date local search listings could be key at that moment.
Real-Time information
Similarly, real-time information on product availability and accurate pricing information can make all the difference during a checkout moment, says Hill, adding that the privacy experience is another great opportunity to empower shoppers. Customers equate the use of their data with trust in a company. Allowing customers to choose how and when their data is collected and used, and providing full transparency over the data management process can also offer customers a great sense of empowerment.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content on social media channels and private social communities or forums also empowers customers with access to unfiltered product reviews, a space to share their personal experiences, and even seek help from peers within the brand environment, thus co-creating their experience.
Related Article: Allow Customers to Control Their Narratives for Improved CX
Self-serve tools
From product discovery and research, to order customization, loyalty programs and customer service — every stage of the buyer journey holds scope to empower customers with automation and self-serve options.
Deep Customer Journey Research
Stein shares that the digital leaders he works with across B2C and B2B industries are investing heavily in deep customer journey research. The goal is to break down roadblocks and evolve the operating models at key decision points in ways that better empower customers. Not only can this approach save companies time, reduce the chance of errors, and speed up the sales cycle, but it also helps customers get exactly what they need at the moment they need it.
Product Information
In the B2B context, Hill adds, brands are working to let customers access detailed product information, engage with user communities and even configure custom products to meet their unique needs.
Driver's Seat
Trends such as embedded payments, buy-online-pay-in-store (BOPIS) /BORIS, and even viral trends such as “no-spend months” and “loud budgeting” are changing how brands are putting customers in the driver's seat of their retail experience.
High-Touch and High-Tech
Starbucks, which goes to great lengths to educate customers about the source of their coffee and enable product customization, and Zara’s self-checkout kiosks in Europe are two ends of the tech spectrum — one high-touch and the other high-tech. Shiseido and Warby Parker’s guided try-on features and Neutrogena’s Skin360 app, which helps customers co-create their skincare regime, are great examples of immersive and interactive experiences powered by AR/VR and AI technology to improve customer empowerment outcomes both online and in-store, be it for education, try-outs, planning, purchase or customer service. These brands leverage the idea of customer empowerment to provide a differentiated experience while also realizing the business benefit of modern CX, suggests Stein.
Tech Watch-Outs
The watch-outs with using automation, immersive tech or AI-enabled self-serve tools, cautions Ho, are that they should support customers without making things too complex, should “feel” like the brand — staying true to its voice and message, should be balanced at the right moments with the human element, and finally, must be privacy compliant at all times.
Non-Tech Empowerment
Mike Welsh, chief creative officer at immersive tech company Hexaware Mobiquity, also suggests that sometimes, the most impactful customer empowerment tactics provide instant value with little to no technology or investment. For example, some retailers offer different color shopping bags for customers to use in-store. One represents the customer’s preference to shop in peace, while the other signals to the associate that they may need some assistance.
Avoid This Pitfall
A key pitfall to avoid when executing a customer empowerment plan, as per Wooding, is the creation of excessive self-service content without adequate human support at the right moments. Self-service options that are not appropriate to the particular stage of the buying journey can be equally damaging. Both can lead to customers feeling overwhelmed, causing frustration, or worse, total disengagement.
Final Thoughts on Customer Empowerment
Before embarking on a customer empowerment initiative, Wooding suggests taking the time to understand the customer’s objectives. What impact are customers (and not the brand) seeking to make with better access to information and self-serve facilities? Then ask, are we really considering customer needs? Are we able to remove the effort from their decision-making, buying and post-purchase experience?
This is not a fit-and-forget process either. The CX team should continually leverage voice of the customer programs (surveys, interviews, engagement data) to measure the impact of the empowerment initiatives.
