New research from Aberdeen Group shows that customer experience, driven by optimized content, is a key driver of overall business success. The report, entitled Content-Driven Customer Experiences: Optimize Your Content to Elevate Customer Experience Results, shows how companies that truly understand and address the expectations of new and existing customers achieve far superior results over those that don’t.
Aberdeen surveyed 369 businesses regarding their customer experience strategy and results.
The findings revealed that managing customer experiences is a key strategic business objective for 86% of B2B firms.
The survey respondents were divided into two groups. The first group was made up of companies that have processes and technologies in place to optimize the content they use in customer interactions across all channels. The second group included only companies that don’t use such a platform.
Comparing the year-over-year performance changes across the two groups, Aberdeen found that companies that optimize their content see 48% greater annual improvement in customer lifetime value.
These results show that content optimization not only helps maximize the likelihood of potential buyers to purchase a product, it also helps companies retain customers and grow their spend over time.
The key findings of the research are:
- Companies that optimize content make it easy for buyers to do business with them and earn customer loyalty
- Content optimization helps savvy customer experience leaders maximize sales effectiveness and drive financial success
- The key activities to deliver truly personalized and consistent content are:
- Delivering consistent and personalized customer experiences fueled by targeted content
- Analyzing how content influences customer experience results by various criteria like product or demographics
- Analyzing how unique customer segments interact with content
- Organizations can enrich their content optimization efforts with greater intelligence and empower employees to seamlessly manage content by:
- Enriching internal account data with external data (e.g., customer- generated social media content) for a holistic view of customers
- Using AI-enabled content recommendation capabilities to help employees find and use the right content when managing customer journeys
- Equipping customer-facing staff with templatized content to reduce content management costs, decrease reliance on IT and ensure brand consistency
Optimizing the use of content across the entire customer lifecycle must be a top priority for all customer experience leaders aiming to achieve their objectives. Businesses with leaders who know how to use the right content with the right customer at the right time in the customer journey outpace competitors across a variety of customer experience and financial measures. These businesses retain more clients, grow customer spend, and enjoy a significant increase in annual revenue. In turn, their customers report that they are easier to do business with.
The full report is available here.