In “Why Your Business Needs to Know About — and Prioritise — ‘Operational Customer Experience’”, Alok Kulkarni asserts that “there is a crucial element of CX that has been overlooked within the customer engagement management landscape. It’s called Operational Customer Experience (OCX) — applied effectively, it could transform the way your company communicates.” Since OCX specifically focuses on customers’ experience of an organization’s technology systems, Kulkarni advocates for prioritizing OCX and analyzing customer interactions to identify failures.
The Cost of Poor OCX
Kulkarni emphasizes the cost of poor OCX to companies that fail to measure and improve customers’ digital experiences, pointing out how easy it is for modern customers to switch products or brands and how unforgiving of negative experiences they have become: “[E]ffectively managing the customer experience is no longer a choice, and an organisation’s OCX needs to be precise, flawless and at a lower cost, otherwise they risk losing market share.”
Writing as an Australian technology entrepreneur, the author notes that Australian consumers ranked not a single brand in the “excellent” category of Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index). This demonstrates that companies are failing to explore their customers’ journeys thoroughly enough to find operational failures before they affect public opinion of the brand. In summary, poor OCX is costing Australian brands (and brands around the world) in multiple ways, including causing customer attrition, lowering revenue, raising customer acquisition costs and causing longer and unnecessary interaction handling time, which further increases costs.
Prioritize Analyzing and Improving OCX
This leads to why businesses should prioritize OCX. You have to thoroughly understand customers’ digital journeys from the outside-in perspective. This is something only OCX can provide. The more typical inside-out analysis of CX is often unable to provide actionable insights, fails to alert you of CX failures before they occur, and leads to only reactive measures being taken. By the time a customer’s perception of the brand is damaged, it’s probably too late.
Therefore, OCX needs to be a priority for organizations wanting to understand customers’ actual experiences and proactively detect and eliminate failures in real time. Effectively improving customers’ digital journeys — for example, through a well integrated customer communications management (CCM) system like INTOUCH® — streamlines customer-facing content creation and touchpoint distribution costs and increases customer loyalty and advocacy.
Are you responsible for improving CX and/or operational efficiency in your organization? Join us in discussing the future of CX architectures at the CX Architects LinkedIn group.
