The most sustainable and effective competitive advantage for the near future? Customer experience, linked to always available and highly personalized sales and onboarding processes.
There is no doubt about it: the utility market is facing an increasingly competitive environment, and this will not change shortly. In fact, competition is likely to escalate as companies are always looking for new ways to attract customers. In this context, a great truth stands out: it will not be the new products and services or their functionalities that will make the difference, because in this sense we can foresee a levelling of the market. The real pivot of business success will be finding a key competitive advantage that is sustainable over the long term to put distance between the companies and their competitors. And this key, in an increasingly automated and customer-centric world, can only be the customer experience.
It’s all about CX
Let’s start from the basics: even the most innovative, powerful, and revolutionary product has little value if the customer experience is poor. If the end-user has difficulty accessing services or is forced to waste precious time to do so, if the communication and operations are complex, if every change to the contract must become hidden work to be added to their days, the service is disadvantaged. A bad customer experience is an awful enemy: it can reduce the number of services that the customer activates with a company, discourage the transition to the latest version of a service, slow down business progress and ultimately drive away customers altogether. While the competitor companies that have invested in CX are waiting, welcoming them. Therefore, before devising new shiny products and services, it is necessary to stop and thoroughly analyse the customer experience at the contact points, be they physical or virtual (but especially on the latter). This is even more fundamental today because new tech-savvy customers do not forgive the shortcomings of an easily malleable customer experience like the virtual one.
A crucial competitive advantage
So, customer experience must be at the centre of every business enhancement, optimization, and improvement process, and it must come before the creation and release of new products. This must be a rule if you want your company to be able to make use of the competitive advantage over other companies and be successful, especially since acting on the satisfaction of customers who have already chosen you is a more economically sustainable and less risky solution than to keep looking for new contacts. Furthermore, the market is a virtuous circle: your loyal and satisfied customers will be the most powerful advertisement at your service to acquire new customers who are already enthusiastic.
A good CX:
– Increases customer loyalty
– Creates a virtuous circle to find new leads thanks to word of mouth from loyal customers
– Optimizes internal resources while improving processes for customers
– Allows companies to better control the customer journey, without incurring risky surprises
– Has a positive impact on the entire corporate ecosystem
It is good to remember these points because they are still too often forgotten or underrated: too many companies think that the services or products will drive customer satisfaction alone, without understanding that a good supply of services also includes great attention to the human experience of the matter.
How to take the customer experience to the next level with OnBoarding Funnel
We have created OnBoarding Funnel as a tool to help companies tackle the challenges of today’s market, making the process of analysing, enhancing, and optimising CX more comfortable and straightforward. This is how it can help you:
By quickly and easily creating new onboarding and sales processes
To maintain two key points of every customer journey in the utility sector, namely onboarding and sales, at high levels, it is necessary to be able to modify them quickly and easily. Thanks to low-code customization, OnBoarding Funnel makes this process possible by adding agility to the company.
By moving processes to the cloud
Today the compartmentalization of processes and data, especially when it comes to big data as in the case of utilities, is no longer acceptable. Instead, it is necessary to create information flows that are always available and that make every process, from the first contact to the addition of services, to the signing of the contract, easy and fast. That’s why moving everything to the cloud is a great idea. In addition, the cloud offers more security and less risk of data loss.
By customizing processes to the nth degree
Customer experience means also receiving the perfect answer to every customer query or action from the system so that there are no gaps in the processes. In OnBoarding Funnel each process can be customized at any stage of the customer journey and for any event and each user cluster.
Measuring and monitoring satisfaction at every contact point
An important factor when the aim is to improve the customer experience is to monitor satisfaction at every contact point with the company. This means being able to measure and record the moments of interaction between the customer and company channels, and then analyse the satisfaction index. Within OnBoarding Funnel this is a basic feature.
A tool like OnBoarding Funnel is crucial for the development and success of your company and to give you the competitive advantage of a skyrocketing customer experience. Would you like to try it for your company? Book your free demo now!