How Brands Use Knowledge Management to Uplevel Their Customer Experience

It’s official: customer experience (CX) has surpassed both price and product as a key brand differentiator for businesses. In fact, a 2021 survey of business professionals found that almost 46% rank customer experience as their top priority for the next five years, compared to 34% and 20% for product and price respectively.

Investing in the customer experience—that is, the sum of experiences at every touchpoint of the customer journey—has a tangible impact on the bottom line. According to McKinsey, optimizing the customer journey leads to average revenue gains of 5-10% while reducing costs by 15 -25%.

Business leaders are focusing on CX strategies to:

• Maintain and gain revenue
• Grow loyalty and advocacy with their customer base
• Keep up with market dynamics (and gain a competitive advantage)

We recently partnered with 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, on a survey of 300 business leaders across CX functions—customer service, marketing, sales, and customer insights— to better understand how organizations have adapted their CX strategies and what they’re focusing on going forward. One thing that became apparent from the resulting report, Five Best Practices to Future-Proof the Customer Experience, was that the most advanced CX organizations aren’t just thinking about customer experience as something external: they’re focusing on internal processes and operational improvements that empower teams to better understand their customers and enable them to elevate how customers experience their brand.  

The report uncovered five best practices that business leaders are using to increase their CX maturity:

• Establishing clear ownership of the CX vision and strategy across the organization
• Centralizing CX knowledge and insights to provide a holistic view of the customer
• Taking a proactive approach to internally sharing market research and customer insights
• Improving cross-functional collaboration around the CX strategy
• Improving the remote and hybrid employee experience

In considering these best practices, we discovered a commonality: knowledge management is critical. Customer experience (vs. customer service) is the responsibility of the entire organization, but to keep every department aligned and collaborating around the CX vision, businesses must have a strategy to centralize knowledge, make it actionable, and keep employees engaged.

We were interested in exploring the connection between customer experience and knowledge management further, so we recently spoke with several Bloomfire customers about how they are using knowledge management and engagement to elevate their CX. Customers from leading brands, including Capital One, Ameritas, Regeneron, and Dexcom, weighed in, as did several CX industry thought leaders. We have compiled their commentary and expanded on the five best practices from 451 Research’s report in a new white paper, The Essential Guide to Upleveling Your CX Maturity.

The full white paper is available today—you can download it here.