If you are a Gen Z-focused business, you already know that customer experience is the heart of your business. But even as you keep up with trends like hyper-personalization and seemingly instant delivery, we’ve got news for you: The Great Customer Resignation can hit your business in the long term.

Convenience is great, but at the top of the Gen Z CX pyramid is trust. Despite great options and affordable prices, Gen Z customers are willing to quit doing business with companies that fall short on CX in this context. On the flip side, a recent Sogolytics study showed that 33% of Gen Z consumers were willing to pay a premium for sustainable products.

Moving ahead, all organizations looking to grow must consider investment in sustainability as a key element of CX strategy.

Why sustainability matters in winning trust

Top CX-focused companies are making customers feel assured about making the right choices. As customers experience climate anxiety and ethical dilemmas around purchases, businesses are leaning in. They are fast committing to transparent and circular supply chains. The democratization of new tech such as NFT is making this happen faster than ever. Even service-led businesses are aligning their ops to positive climate action.

Most of these businesses may take a while to meet their goals all the way. But it is their concretized vision, clear progress, and authentic communication that’s retaining customers — and investors.

To build and retain trust, companies must stick to the goals that they share with their stakeholders, and for many organizations, sustainability is core to the conversation.

How to bring sustainability to the center of customer experience

Making sustainability the North Star for all your business decisions may not be easy. But it is definitely profitable. In the context of CX, it’s important to follow a roadmap. This way, you know both, your destination and the starting point. Do this:

Identify customer must-haves
For instance, use an enterprise survey platform to run a customer survey and learn whether sustainable packaging is what your customers value most. Or would they rather you make your offices solar-powered? This way, you are not trying to do it all at once.

Measure current customer sentiment
Spend a couple of minutes knowing what customers think of your current sustainability commitment. This lets you know how fast you need to turn things around. It may also tell you what’s working in your favor so far.

Know top customers’ perspectives
We only get the answers we ask for! Don’t stop at asking customers about sustainability and your business. Find out their thoughts and concerns around larger, local and global sustainability conversations. You might just stumble upon a cue for your next innovation.

How to collect actionable customer feedback

If you have relied on customer surveys and feedback in the past for critical business insights, we get your skepticism. The traditional approach to customer surveys can often give little. First, there is no telling how many customers may choose to participate. And second, you might not know what to make of the responses.

Here’s where successful CX businesses are doing things differently. They are leveraging an end-to-end CX management ecosystem. It lets them design compelling surveys that translate into rich insights. They also use automation to ask the right questions.

Additionally, ask questions that that center on the experiences of your customers, not your business. This is often the key to getting customers talking and a CX best practice. Here are some quick references:

Ask: Would you place carbon neutrality among your top sustainability concerns?
Avoid: Is our carbon footprint an active concern for you when buying from us?

Ask: Which is your favorite circular economy company (or even non-profit)?
Avoid: How would you rate our waste management practices?

Ask: Which is the most cherished NFT-authenticated product you’ve purchased so far?
Avoid: How do you rate our supply chain transparency on a scale of 1 to 10

Strengthening CX from a sustainability standpoint

Relentless engagement is key to unlocking enhanced customer lifecycle value. Right now, only about 9% of companies use green terms in regular customer conversations. Why does this matter? Because the customer’s memory is short-lived.

But also because the customer doesn’t want you to tick mark a set of sustainability metrics. They want you to keep pushing the benchmarks across multiple aspects – carbon neutrality, clean energy, end-to-end supply chain traceability, bio-fiber packaging, and more. And they want to know about it in great detail.

This demands that you…

• Constantly stay in touch with them.
• Know their ever-evolving expectations
  • New tech they trust for a better world
  • Sustainable, local businesses they love
  • Clean living lifestyle needs
• Interact with them on your:
  • latest sustainability projects
  • challenges (rising costs *wink**wink*)
  • partnerships and breakthroughs

Building an ecosystem that drives the sustainability dialogue regularly

You’ve got that right! It takes an ecosystem to conquer CX at the sustainability frontier. The customer is wakes up each day to continuous updates about the subject on their phone. You need a system that’s as powerful as digital and social media, though a lot more focused.

In this context, aligning talent for the job can be an expensive and low-impact exercise. You need to invest in an end-to-end CX management platform. This lets you:

• Deliver omnichannel customer experiences for high recall across channels
• Identify key moments in the customer journey and reach out with personalized communication
• Leverage automation to respond to customer sentiments without losing time
• Identify trends across customer cohorts as they happen; know your top wins and failures
• Ensure zero data bottlenecks so every team can align their actions to top sustainability needs
• Connect with customers in their preferred language, especially when engaging on local sustainability concerns

If you are just starting to align your CX to sustainability needs, try not to be overwhelmed. Start with a survey calendar and add elements as you go along. Assign a clear owner and an ecosystem will emerge in the months to come. The best part? We can help!

Want a better understanding of your customers’ priorities so you can deliver? Connect with our team today to learn why the top CX companies across industries rely on SogoCX to transform their customer experiences.