Improving Customer Experience with Personalization and Speed

Customer experience has become increasingly important and complex over the years. When looking to improve customer experience, it’s important to keep in mind the buyer’s journey:

    1. Awareness
    2. Consideration
    3. Decision


Personalization with a CRM and CPQ Solution

All three stages are important aspects of the experience. From the initial learning process to comparison and research to the final decision, businesses not only must make their buyers journey easy, but also quick and personalized to leave a good, lasting impression. This is why many companies are turning to solutions like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) to help their sales people deliver personalized experiences in a timely manner.


CRM’s Impact During the Buyer’s Journey

The CRM keeps a record of all contact and interactions a customer has had with the company/brand, whether it be via phone, email, chat, etc. The more customers interact, the more data that is collected — providing you with more understanding on what the buyer is looking for and expecting. All this information can be easily pulled up by a sales person for more personal interactions during the three stages of the buyer’s journey.


Improving Customer Experience with CPQ

While a CRM can be used during all stages in the buyer’s journey, CPQ is focused more on the consideration and decision stages. A CPQ solution, like Oracle’s CPQ Cloud, allows for buyers and/or sales people to quickly and easily produce quotes for products. CPQ can also handle automated pricing based on rules/validations, and using AI it can recommend other products or solutions that would be relevant to the customer. CPQ also improves mobility by giving sales people the ability to configure, price and quote on the go using mobile devices — another big aspect in customer experience.


Why It Matters

During all phases of the buyer’s journey, customers are researching their options and comparing them. The longer it takes for a company to respond with a pricing quote, the higher the chance that a potential customer will move on to another company who can provide that information faster.

If the customer had a bad experience during the first two stages, they will be less likely to choose that business in the decision stage. It is important to maintain a seamless and personalized experience across all three stages for a truly good customer experience that boosts sales and brings back customers.

According to a 2019 Forbes article on customer experience, “A business’ ability to retain customers is as important, if not more important, than its ability to acquire new customers, particularly when establishing a foundation for sustainable growth and long term success. If the people and functions within business do not work closely and well together then they are unlikely to be able to deliver a great and consistent customer experience.”

For some great examples of CPQ’s value in improving the customer experience, join us at Modern CX 2019 from March 19th through 21st at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, or take a look at one of our CPQ case studies.

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