Poll Results: Communities High on List of Customer Experience Priorities

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Nov 2, 2011

You think it's always about the latest, greatest, next thing. That organizations are always out on the bleeding edge trying new things. When it comes to customer experience management (CXM), it's a bit more complicated than that. And when we asked you what your top priority was for customer experience, your top response focused on the basics: your customers.

Communities are the Primary Focus for Customer Experience

Here are the results of our poll, conducted last month on customer experience priorities:

From the results you can see that the number one priority is to develop customer and user communities. Your customers are your strongest asset — be they the ones who buy your products or services or the ones who work for you.

Communities provide ways for your customers to get together and share information about your products and services, to provide support or guidance to each other. It's also a place for you to support your customers, encourage them to share ideas, provide feedback and get answers. Whether you are building your own branded user communities or participating in user generated and maintained communities, this is a great place to learn about your customers and how to support their needs.

Here is some great advice on how to nurture your communities:

Communities are just the start of customer experience priorities though:

Improving the Digital Experience

According to our poll results, 19% are focused on improving the quality of the digital experience. For starters, you want to ensure you have some great analytics set up so you know how your website, mobile site and your social networks are performing. You can't fix what you don't know is wrong and even if you think nothing is wrong exactly, there's always room for improvement.

It's not that customers are flaky, but speaking from the customer perspective, there are so many different ways to find information that vendors need to work hard to make it easier for us to do it. Personalization is becoming a key focus for many vendors that helps a lot. Learn about me and what I'm doing here on your site and give me the information I need to make my decisions.

Another great way to work on the customer experience is through testing, testing, testing. And there are lots of great tools out there to help you do that.

Some pointers to get you going:

Multi-Channel, Multi-Device

It's a mobile world, and in more ways than one. Topping the list of main priorities for customer experience is delivering a multi-channel/multi-device experience, and even more specifically, the mobile experience.