The 10 companies with the best and most personalised experience
The latest customer experience survey from professional services firm KPMG has found that personalisation continues to be the most desired trait among Australian consumers.
An alcohol retailer has once again featured near the top of Australia’s favourite brands for customer experience, according to KPMG’s latest Customer Experience Excellence report. Among almost 90,000 participants globally, the firm surveyed 3,000 Australians on what they hold to be important when dealing with goods and services providers, with personalisation continuing to be the number one driver for customer experience.
Despite the ongoing challenges of Covid-19, such as supply chain disruptions and shopfront shutdowns, the retail segment leads the way on customer experience (CX), with seven of the top ten organisations lauded by Australian respondents for their CX operating in the retail space.
This year’s number one was make-up and beauty retailer Mecca, which bumped last year’s top performer First Choice Liquor down into second. Bendigo Bank ranks third, with Bunnings and Afterpay rounding off the top five. Specsavers, Priceline, Chemist Warehouse, the Iconic and Paypal completed the top 10 positions.
What defines CX?
KPMG highlights the six key pillars which have consistently been raised as the essential characteristics of excellent CX, with personalisation followed by ‘integrity’ – being trustworthy and engendering trust – and ‘time and effort’; minimising effort and creating frictionless processes. The three remaining pillars are in managing expectations, the resolution of disappointing experiences, and empathy.
As to consumer desires, there hasn’t been a great deal of movement across the six key pillars of CX over the past three surveys, with the second-most important driver, ‘integrity’, falling slightly in contrast to a rise in the three lowest pillars, empathy, resolution, and expectations – suggesting consumer expectations have become slightly more nuanced during the pandemic. Personalisation however still reigns supreme.
“Personalisation continues to be recognised by Australian customers as the number one driver for CX, having the most impact on both advocacy and loyalty,” said Carmen Bekker, who leads KPMG’s Customer, Brand and Marketing Advisory. “The brands that bring together purpose with personalisation and can demonstrate that they go beyond ‘know me’ to ‘understand me’ will continue to win hearts and minds.”
In terms of trends within the six key pillars, KPMG notes that customers want to deal with companies which can tangibly demonstrate that their customers are important, such that organisations are beginning to operationalise empathy. Here, as a growing core competence, customer experience designers are being informed by anthropology and ethnography techniques in UX design and improvement.
As to personalisation, the firm says that customers seek not just the physical ease of simple transactions, but the psychological satisfaction of human connection as well, with advances in technology, data and analytics enabling companies to create much more personal ‘human’ experiences across touchpoints. According to KPMG, this requires a deep and profound understanding of the customer.
