Want Your Company to Survive Beyond 2030? Do These Three Things

The average lifespan of S&P; companies is shrinking, and business leaders are looking for new ways to compete. Michel Feaster, Co-Founder and CEO, Usermind, presents three ways to reinvent your business around customer experience 

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Successful enterprise companies used to spend an average of 30 years on the S&P; 500 list. Now, the average S&P; tenure is closer to 15 years. In the next ten years, 50 percent of the companies on the list will be replaced.

So why are once-successful enterprises dying? Companies today compete on their ability to deliver a positive customer experience — and every single enterprise is being disrupted by both startups and digital platform providers. It’s never been cheaper or easier to build a startup company, and large platform companies like Amazon and Google use their wealth of customer data to drive more relevant profitable long-term customer relationships. Enterprise incumbents have an imperative: to strategically evolve to face technological disruption and vertical competition — or die.

The companies that are winning right now are doing three key things: using rich amounts of customer data to drive better experiences, making logistics and supply chain core pieces of the customer experience, and rebuilding their org structure to align on delivering world-class customer experience (CX). The only way to compete with startups and platform disruptors is to join them — by completely reinventing your businesses around customer experience.

Own and Operationalize Customer Data

If customer experience is the battleground, then customer data is the ammunition in that battle. The companies that are harnessing data to drive better, longer-lasting relationships through customer journeys are the ones that will survive. Customer journeys connect data across channels and siloed systems, and help companies understand a customer’s historical and current context.

Businesses across industries are catching on to the benefits of owning and operationalizing customer data — by evolving from traditional retail to direct-to-consumer business models, from one-off transactions to subscriptions, and from one-size-fits-all customer service to personalized, omnichannel customer engagement. In making these strategic switches, companies should focus on building the right technology stack to gather the right data, understand the end-to-end customer journey, and connect those insights to real-time actions.

Make Logistics & Supply Chain Core to the Customer Experience

It used to be enough for a company to compete on the virtue of its goods or services. Now, a company’s supply chain is a key competitive differentiator. Amazon has mastered the order fulfillment customer experience, and Amazon Prime’s free, unlimited two-day shipping has set a new benchmark for instant gratification in retail. From monthly subscription boxes to try-on-and-return clothing companies to meal kit delivery services, companies that prioritize ease of use and convenience are winning customers’ hearts and wallet share. To make logistics and delivery a key piece of your customer experience strategy, it’s crucial to have transparency into customer order status, and rapidly optimize and improve internal business processes to better serve customers. 

Rebuild Org Structures for Better CX

Outdated org structures are the enemy of good customer experience. Historically, customer experience was a side function that managed Voice of the Customer or customer support. Today, leading companies understand that managing the customer journey — all of the interactions across touchpoints, teams, and channels — is impossible if teams and technology remain in functional silos.

If your business functions are all optimizing for their individual KPIs (e.g., converting MQLs to SQLs, closing support tickets), it’s unlikely that your teams are operating with the full context of that customer’s journey in action. So how can businesses get away from siloed teams who only care about their individual function’s business metrics and siloed technology that doesn’t share customer data between crucial interactions?

Leading companies today are taking one of three approaches to build innovative, customer-centric teams. The first way is to elevate a functional head such as a Chief Marketing Officer to the role of a Chief Customer Officer who has complete ownership of the end-to-end customer experience, with customer lifecycle owners across teams reporting to that person. The second is to create a cross-functional CX team that owns Customer Experience Operations, including both customer-facing interactions and the technology that delivers these integrated experiences. The third approach is to centralize all of your customer operations under a Chief Information Officer or Chief Operations Officer to prevent a siloed org structure from standing in the way of using data to deliver better experiences.

Whichever path your business chooses, it’s vital to take an end-to-end approach to customer journeys, and strategically adopt the technology that will allow your team to use data to drive personalized, omnichannel customer experiences.

From Service to Subscription to Platform

Customer journey orchestration is the only way to stay competitive in a world of shrinking corporate lifespans and escalating customer expectations. To deliver, enterprises must behave more like the startups and platform companies they’re competing with. The only way to thrive in this landscape is to completely reinvent how you go to market: to build customer relationships with data, insight, and immediate action; to build a transparent, elastic supply chain to deliver your goods and services; and to structure your team to deliver the best, most relevant customer experiences.