Why Harnessing Customer Experience is Key to Building a Product That Scales

Users uninstall apps for many reasons. But when we asked 2,000 respondents for their top reason to delete an app from their device, their primary reason was typically due to a “poor customer experience.”
An experience is a user’s perception of your brand — an opportunity to wow your customers. And since your brand is built upon customer perception, you better work at giving them the best app experience possible. 
In a recent YourStory roundtable video discussion* with other C-level executives, Abhishek Gupta, CleverTap’s Chief Customer Officer shared his views on customer experience and how harnessing data is the key to building a product that not only scales but more importantly, gives customers the experience they want so that they don’t uninstall.  
Below we present highlights from what he shared during the discussion.  

Customer Experience Means Providing Value at Every Touchpoint

Gupta shares: “Some time back, I came across a study that 89% of the companies in the world are competing on the basis of customer experience.* However I would say 100% of all companies today compete on the basis of customer experience. That’s the reality. It’s extremely important for companies to provide value to the customer at every single touchpoint. 
“When you talk about mobile and data, digital adoption has gone up significantly and there’s a lot of data that is coming in across the board. What has become important is the ability to harness that data and deliver extremely personalized, very relevant end-user experiences. And that really is the biggest problem we’ve seen and are solving for. 
“From an industry standpoint, we’ve seen this happening across industries, whether it be ecommerce, fintech, travel and transportation, foodtech, edtech, healthtech. Brands have an increased desire to provide these experiences to end users. And end users are essentially rewarding the brands by continuing with them longer, by engaging with them, by transacting more with them.”

Using Customer Insight to Build Core Product

When you think about insights from customers, it’s actually a two-part problem, because there are two levels of insight that we at CleverTap obtain:

1. Insights from our customers — these are the brands and organizations who have a mobile app and want to grow their user base 
2. Insights from the end users — essentially the consumers of those brands, those who use the mobile app or service

Gupta shares: “So what we’ve seen is a little bit of shift happening in both dimensions. From our customers’ standpoint — the B2B customer that we serve— we have seen some customers scale rapidly in a short span of time. Which meant we (CleverTap) had to think differently. We had to think about scale, front and center, and not just in terms of feature functionality.”

1.Users Want Personalized Experiences

CleverTap enables brands to provide not just personalized, but individualized experiences. For example: two people might be looking at buying a product from the same ecommerce campaign but one person is looking at a shoe, the other a shirt. If you send the shoe shopper a discount for a shirt, that will NOT be relevant since it’s different from what they are looking for. It won’t resonate with them. The best move would be to give customers the chance to send shoe discounts to their shoe shoppers — essentially, serve end users what is relevant to their needs.

2.Companies Need to Provide Experiences at Scale

Gupta says: “Now increasingly there’s a need to serve at scale. So we started building capabilities into our product to allow brands to do that.” 
Another good example would be cars. Say, you have a large number of car listings for sale. But you need the ability to take those listings and provide every single user looking to buy a car with a personalized experience based on where they’re at in the customer life cycle, their demographics, their psychographics, and more. 
Gupta continues: “So we invested a lot into Artificial Intelligence and machine learning capabilities during the course of the pandemic to build product capabilities that allow brands to provide these individualized experiences at scale.”

3.Users Demand Omnichannel 

Now, end users are also becoming more sophisticated. They’re looking for experiences that are holistic in nature. Omnichannel is now not just in terms of the channels you use — SMS, push, or whatnot— it’s also about the in-app experience.
Gupta says: “If I’m getting a communication from a brand via push or SMS, I want the communication to be the same even in my user interface, for example. So we learned a great deal from end users and we’ve built product capabilities that allow users to have a simplified yet compelling experience across the board no matter what touchpoint they have from the brand.”

Takeaways

Know Them, and Serve Them in the Moment

Gupta says: “What consumers are looking for is to be delighted by brands. Merely meeting expectations is no longer acceptable to consumers. And in that process, understanding customers and their context is super critical. Customers are constantly saying: ‘You need to know me to serve me.’ Now the problem is the brands know their users but the ability to serve them in that moment is limited in a lot of cases. And that is the gap that must be bridged.”

Feedback Is More Than Just Surveys, It’s Digital Footprints

“When we talk about feedback from the customer experience,” says Gupta, “this is usually something that a customer writes on a form and is received by the brand. All of us in customer service know that you only receive feedback in a small percentage of cases.  
“But what is happening today increasingly is customers are leaving their digital footprints all across your properties such as when they come to utilize your app. There is so much data available that brands can harness to provide better experiences to their users.” 
Gupta continues: “Say for example, someone is uninstalling your app. You can go back in time to see what things they did that led to the uninstall of the app. Or if someone is engaging with your brand, you can go back and see what are the things they did right. And you can stitch it all together very neatly to ensure that all future customers are well served.” 
“To summarize I would say there is a lot of data available to brands regarding its users. What is really crucial at this point is the ability to use this data to give a superior experience, and to do so at the moment when your customers want it.” 
Watch the entire roundtable below.

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