Stronger customer experience is a business imperative
Editor’s note: Jim Longo is co-founder and chief strategy officer at Seattle-based market research firm Discuss.io.
Over the past year, organizations have faced a new foe in attracting and retaining customers: an entirely new business environment, shaken under the weight of inflation, labor shortages, supply chain and pandemic-related disruptions.
Under these new market conditions, one thing remains certain: strong customer experience (CX) is a business imperative. Today, consumers stay loyal to organizations due to the experience they receive rather than simply the price or quality of a product. For businesses to continue winning over customers and earning their loyalty, CX has grown in importance and become a key differentiator.
A change in consumer priorities began in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, when the surge in e-commerce began. According to a global McKinsey survey, 40% of consumers said they had tried new brands or retailers through the spring of 2020; in the U.S., it was 46%.
If 2021 marks a change in the power dynamic between businesses and consumers, how are CX and insights teams providing strong customer experiences into 2022?
1. They’re finding alignment.
The silos of CX and insights teams are being broken down as organizations realize that customer feedback needs to be shared broadly to impact strategic planning. To that end, they’re converging under shared objectives such as getting closer to customers or inserting the voice of the consumer (VOC) into organizational strategy, often reporting to a chief customer or chief customer success officer. In order to fuel evidence-based decisions, they’re adding qualitative research into their workflow, rather than relying on quantitative data sets from various teams and departments.
2. They’re becoming more agile.
Experimentation and innovating early and often are now viewed as distinguishing characteristics of a successful business under the digital transformation of COVID-19.
Traditional, linear market research is not keeping pace with these new expectations. Taking a cue from the tech industry’s “test, learn and iterate” UX approach, CX and insights teams are employing agile research frameworks that allow the VOC to provide direction and guidance in the development process. 
3. They’re conducting more qualitative research.
Qualitative research has emerged as a complement and even an enhancement to quantitative data, adding color to explain the why behind consumer behavior, not just the what. Now, 50% of all research projects run in the past year have had a qualitative component, because organizations realize that gaining context requires intelligence beyond just numbers.
3 business strategy recommendations for 2022
As CX and insights teams conduct more qualitative research, they need to further align on the sharing of customer insights. Intelligence from consumer conversations benefits every single function of an organization that touches customers or prospects: product, marketing, sales, strategy, customer experience, research, etc. A customer-centric organization is one that expands the VOC beyond insights or CX teams and creates an environment to speak directly to consumers regularly and deeply.
For a future-proof business strategy into 2022, organizations must:
- Move fast. Key decision makers require qualitative insights and data on hand during meetings. Giving a window into consumers’ lives via sharing quick clips of customer conversations is a powerful way to influence the decision-making process. While tomorrow’s insights might be more thoroughly detailed, today’s on-demand insights will always hold more value and influence.
- Make insights shareable beyond CX and insights teams. With the right technology to automate insights sharing, more stakeholders can look at dashboards and consume the same information, see consumer conversations on demand or in real time, and more.
- Employ a one-platform solution to automate insights. With the democratization of insights comes more interest in customer feedback from key decision makers and other non-researchers. To disseminate insights quickly, CX and insights teams would be wise to invest in one platform that does everything from online recruiting to integrating discussion guides into their workflow for more robust search capabilities, to moderation and video editing to maximize efficiency.
Insights into action
Why does democratizing insights matter for organizational future-proofing? Non-researchers are better positioned to put insights into action. CX and insight teams that have shared qualitative insights across the organization are able to increase productivity, reduce risks and make decisions faster. In 2022, organizations that have teams rowing in the same direction will move with speed and agility, ahead of the pack.