How to make it easy for customers to choose your brand every time
Experience: the main differentiator
Every customer interaction, digital or in-person, is part of the total customer experience and has the capacity to make or break your brand. Like business excellence, CX is the main differentiator between you and your competitors.
How do you make this happen? Where do you start? How do you tackle the various challenges? And perhaps most importantly, how do you know you are focusing on the right things?
Your takeaway for 2025
Shift your perspective: when improving CX, the focus often moves quickly to touchpoints. But better experiences start with the customer, and your response to how their desires fit into the broader context of their life and needs.
The numbers speak volumes:
32% of customers abandon brands after just one bad experience. After two or three negative experiences, 92% of customers have moved on.
86% of consumers leave previously trusted brands after only two poor experiences.
88% of customers are more likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive customer service experience.
For 4 out of 5 customers (80%), the experiences a company offers are as important as the products or services they provide.
72% of people share positive experiences with 6 or more people.
Know your customer
Customer-centricity and exceptional customer experiences are key to business success. Every interaction, whether with customer service or through automated systems, must leave the customer with a positive memorable impact.
To do this, organisations need to get to know their customers. According to Steven van Belleghem, renowned expert in Customer-Centricity and Strategic Advisor at iO, organisations that are collecting and structuring their customer data in a smart, structured way have a significant advantage over their competition. They can continuously enhance their Customer Experience by extracting valuable insights from the data they’ve collected.
iO’s Experience Model: create memorable CX
We developed the iO Experience Model to make it easier to understand customer experience. It helps us look beyond interactions to the underlying factors that shape experiences.
By breaking down customer experiences into five layers, you can effectively identify where and how to create more value.
By connecting measurements and insights from the five different layers, you can better understand your customer and adjust your digital, customer, and brand experiences to fit their needs.
Next steps for 2025
Empathising with customers. Review your business processes and identify the moments that directly or indirectly impact customer interactions – for example with the Service Blueprint approach. Put yourself in their shoes and implement changes – no matter how small – to increase customer satisfaction. Use iO’s Experience Model as a guide to fill in the blanks in your understanding of what your customer needs and wants.
Leveraging technology. Use AI and your historical customer or marketing data to anticipate customer needs and offer hyper-personalised experiences. Train your chatbots with historical customer data for more accurate and empathetic responses.
Blending expertise: Improving the experience requires a seamless collaboration between design, marketing and technology. The best solutions for your customers and consistent user experiences are created when your designers, (data) marketers and tech experts are involved from the start.
Collaboration. Partner with organisations that can support your customer-centric goals and technological implementations.
Dive deeper into CX
Discover how to improve your customer experiences with our Experience Model. This model places customer experience at the heart of your strategy, is optimised for sustainable growth, and adds real value.
Need help with customer experience optimisation? Or are you looking for a partner for the creation of memorable experiences that keep your customers coming back?