Welcome to the new year and the new decade. This is a milestone to make sure your experience is on track and resolve to fix the areas where it might not be up to snuff. In fact, Gartner found that while only 36% of companies competed on customer experience in 2010, that number went up to two-thirds by 2018. And it’s only increasing as we enter the 2020s.

The Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report found that the #1 benefit of good customer experience is increased customer loyalty; the 2 benefit is increased profits and revenue. So perhaps, more than ever, the success of your business depends on giving your customers the experiences they want.

At the most basic level, your customers want easy experiences that get them to the answer or resolution they need — quickly. But even that can be trickier than it seems.

A recent Genesys survey found that the ways customers want to interact with your business vary: 63% by phone, 17% through the website and 7% through social media. On the surface, it seems that companies with great phone support are doing things right.

Except when they aren’t.

The survey also polled customers to understand which ways they most disliked to contact a company. And 12% listed the telephone as their most disliked method of contact.

I’m one of those people. For whatever reason, I’ve never liked talking on the phone. If you make me call you, I already think it’s a bad customer experience. No matter how fabulous your phone staff is once I get to them, the fact of having to call someone at all means you have one strike against you before we’re even connected.

Which brings us to the next thing that your customers want. They want you to recognise them, really know them and deliver the experience they want.

Too often, companies see the value of personalisation from their point of view — not from the customers’ point of view. We’re bombarded with messages, as many as 10,000 a day, from companies that want us to buy from them. Things we take a casual look at follow us around the web for days afterward. Shopping carts remind us that we’ve left things in them and might pop up on our phone as we pass stores that we don’t have time to go into in that moment.

Even what often passes for customer-centric personalisation isn’t. You could have a very fine-grained persona that reflects my lifestyle, vital stat ranges, role in the company and title, and you’d never know the customer service method that annoys me most. In fact, elements in that persona could lead you to believe that I’d prefer to contact you and be contacted by you through phone calls.

A recent Accenture Strategy study found that only 22% of global customers acknowledge that the companies with which they do business tailor their experiences based on a deep understanding of customers’ needs, preferences and past interactions. This is the decade where survival for every business means having that deep understanding of your customers preferences, needs and every contact they’ve had with your company. And this time calls for Experience as a Service.

Powered by Genesys Cloud, Experience as a Service lets you provide distinctive experiences tailored for each customer to achieve the level of personalisation they want. It also enables you to provide better experiences for your employees.

McKinsey found that improving customer experience can enhance employee engagement by as much as 20%. And #3 on that Dimension Data list of customer experience benefits — engaged employees. Having engaged employees who deliver a truly personalised experience offer the customers the third thing they want: empathy.

Empathy is the true human touch in customer service and great customer experience. Imagine if every customer service encounter left us feeling “well taken care of.”

When customers feel taken care of, it builds customer loyalty now — and for years to come. You create an emotional connection and trust with each customer. And that’s critical; it’s a major deciding factor when customers choose which company to trust with their business in the future. Multiple surveys prove this: Anywhere from 56% to 81% of respondents that trust and connection as critical to their relationship with a company.

Experience as a Service, powered by Genesys Cloud, is your secret for business and customer experience success in the 2020s. Your best decade starts now.