How Adopting Customer Experience Driven Business helps Manufacturers add Value

Traditionally manufacturers have relied on their products and product-based development technologies as a differentiator among their competitors. But in the present business landscape, the product alone is not enough to drive business values. Customer experience also makes a powerful impact on the overall business performance.

Rise in Customer Demands

The customer expectations have skyrocketed due to several up to the minute standards set by organizations that are not even part of the direct competition. Customers no longer compare their experience with companies in the same spaces. It’s more about brand experiences for them, e.g., comparing an RO water purification service with the best-in-class airline customer services.

Customer expectations have increased alongside the expectation of the distributors, retailers, and other businesses that are part of the ecosystem. This makes customer-driven approach and necessary improvisations crucial for the survival of the organization.

To deliver the desired experience, manufacturers require a well-defined strategy in place for improving customer satisfaction. Here are some of the ways you can improve and enhance the customer experience.

1. Know Your Customers

Manufacturers must commit to understanding their customers and personalize products and services tailored to the needs of their customers. Businesses need to invest in studying customer data and evaluating the behavioral pattern. With the data points derived, you can make data-driven decisions and provide better experiences.

Your business landscape should evolve based on the expectations of your customers. An effective customer feedback process with performance measurement in line with customers can also help in the continuous improvement of the experience.

2. Importance of Personalized Experience

To stand out in the sea of competitors, manufacturers must invest in a robust personalized experience as personalization is crucial to building a rapport with customers. In case of digitally divided manufacturing, distribution, and services, the growth gets limited and restricted. It’s about time to rethink the strategy and adopt digital platforms to move towards an experience-driven business. The digital platform provides enterprises with the ability to personalize experiences for customers at every touchpoint.

3. B2B and B2B2C eCommerce

The traditional sales team’s orientation for business-to-business is replaced with online websites. Many manufacturers are moving towards B2B websites to create an online experience by delivering values directly to the customers.

In recent days, manufacturers are also adopting B2B2C approach, which is a popular business model of Industry 4.0. Here, the manufacturers create a new business as a transitional, direct to customers under their brand, thus getting closer to the customers.

With the above modes of operations, the manufacturers must use the collected data to build on the experience to deliver higher-value, personalized value to their customers. Manufacturers also need to invest in platforms that not only help them sell their products/services to customers but enables them to analyze customer behaviors as well.

4. Be Omnipresent

It is equally important to connect with the customers across all touchpoints and on every channel. Manufacturers should engage with their customers with an omnichannel experience, providing a consistent experience across all channels - both online and offline.

To provide such an experience, organizations need to collect data points from various touchpoints for having a complete picture of the customer journey of their different customer personas.

5. Embrace the New Technologies

Manufacturers can use the latest technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to increase customer retention. With the combined power of both, the collected data points can help in serving the customer even better, helping you make the necessary conversion for your business.

With the rise of Industry 4.0, Extended Reality (XR) technologies help you provide an immersive, rich, and better-curated experience to boost sales. Using these technologies can help you serve the customers in better, faster, and reliable ways. These can improve your logistics as well as the shopping experience.

One of the most exciting technologies for the manufacturing industry is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). It can help manufacturers optimize inventory management, improve safety, increase operation efficiency, fast-track manufacturing, and enable a better supply chain process. These benefits can cascade down to customers in terms of lower-cost supplies, tailored reach to customers, and precise forecasting of demands.

6. Create a Team Goal and Improve Product Development

Providing a better experience to customers is a shared goal. Organizational culture must evolve from the top management and reach the workforce. Everyone should be encouraged to collaborate with the help of digitalized tools and processes to serve better.

Implementing these digital tools and platforms will help you understand your customers better and help you serve them better. A better customer experience allows you to sell directly to the customers. This helps to establish a direct relationship with your customers through their data and the product feedback helps in improving the product.

Conclusion

In every industry, customer experience has helped businesses increase customers, sales, and brand loyalty. Teams that evolve themselves to understand their customer sentiments are the ones that outperform their competitors.

Traditionally, manufacturers have an operational mindset, but in this digital landscape, things are different. Manufacturing businesses need to be focused on customer-centric approach and always ready to simplify customers’ lives. To learn how ACL Digital can help you with hyper-personalized Customer Experience and Experience Design, get in touch with our experts today.

References

• https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2018/10/08/experience-driven-manufacturers-realize-real-returns.html#gs.9tk0bf
• https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/experience-cloud/research/roi/pdfs/business-impact-of-cx.pdf
• https://www.verndale.com/insights/industry-trends/manufacturing-distribution-cx-insights-2018-04