Customer experience is essential to growth

‘Empowering’ clients is extremely critical and personalisation is key

CUSTOMERS expect more from businesses, Aditya Rath, a lead partner at KPMG in Cape Town, said. Rath was one of the keynote speakers on the opening day of the 6th Customer Experience Management 2017 Summit Africa at the Century City Convention Centre.

In his presentation, Rath said customers expected more from businesses, because they demanded excellence, and personalisation was key. Empowering the customer was extremely critical, he said.

“In my experience, it is very difficult to get it right. The more we try to understand it and what customers mean when they mean personalised experience, what we believe in the art of getting it right in the personalised experience. It is important to understand that is the customer ready to accept the market we operate in, in Africa or South Africa.

“Customers keep us true to our agenda, they keep us honest to our services, and that is going to happen more and more.”

He said everyone believed they had an opinion and that it counted.

Rath said, that according to the KPMG CEO Outlook 2017 report, 70% of chief executives felt a growing responsibility to represent the best interests of their customers, and 67% agreed that building greater trust with their customers was among their top three priorities. He said that 56% of chief executives were concerned about the data on which they were basing their decisions, and 45% said the depth of their insights into their customers was hindered by the lack of quality data.

Rath said KPMG research into the revenue growth of customer experience (CX) leaders compared with Fortune 500 companies showed that the top 25 CX companies achieved almost double the revenue growth of the top 25 Fortune 500 companies, and the top 25 CX leaders last year achieved five times the growth in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation of those in the bottom 25 of the rankings over one year.

Graham Stephen, the chief commercial officer at Wonga, said in his keynote speech that technology had brought massive speed into people’s lives, but this had come at the expense of relationships with family members and friends.