The effects of the Pandemic have had the lion’s share of the narrative in the past year and rightly so. The enormity with which the Pandemic has impacted the world is unparalleled.
A quieter narrative is also about the innovations that have emerged from the vulnerability that the pandemic caused – in people and in organisations.
One such vulnerability led development has been the catapulting of the digital customer experience. Pre pandemic movement into digital customer experiences had been industry driven, digital infrastructure dependent and still a choice for organisations and industries.
The Pandemic has removed all choices and made digital customer experiences non-negotiable for most industries and in crashed timelines.
Today, it is no longer about digital vs traditional ways of engaging with the customer, it is about how the digital customer experience can ne distinctive.
Digital is no longer one element of the customer experience it is about having a digital customer experience strategy to underscore the company’s unique value to potential and existing customers, earn their trust, make engagement easy, and nurture loyalty. Research suggests that brands that combine the three essential elements of great products, powerful digital experiences, and memorable human connections have engaged, satisfied and loyal customers.
Our experience of partnering with leaders and organisations on their digital customer experience journeys indicates 8 proven strategies that can enable a distinctive and superior digital experience for your customers.
8 strategies that can be used to create the best customer experience:-
1. Know your customer:
How the accelerated change is changing the customers’, what the customers need unchanged despite the environment, consequently what they want from you, and, most importantly, how they want to acquire your product/service. This level of applied empathy will power the digital experience strategy.
2. Refining the digital customer experience at each stage of the customer journey:
The customer journey has consistent fundamentals and unique aspects according to the customer, with different expectations associated with each stage. It is critical to build insights on the unique needs and then build a strategy that enables those uniquely personalized experiences.
3. Innovate to better fit into the digital lives of the customers:
Digital is all about new technologies and finding the right way to incorporate them into your strategy. Yet the concept uncovers a much deeper reality: innovation should not necessarily be complex. Remember “ease of access and use” is the constant success mantra. Take Uber, for example. The appeal is the frictionless experience, eliminating the potentially frustrating touchpoints.
4. Use customer data to fuel your digital transformation efforts:
According to Accenture, 75% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that recognizes them by their name, knows their purchase history, and recommends products based on their past purchases.
The continued and growing success of Amazon: is a testament to this. Their algorithm promotes upselling by recommending products their users are highly likely to be interested in, based on a solid knowledge of their buying patterns. Therefore, digital can be leveraged to know the customer better and provide exceptional services to them.
5. Leverage design thinking for better digital customer experience:
Design thinking is a human centred, iterative design process consisting of 5 steps- Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype & Test. A process like this is important because it helps to create personalised experiences at every interaction with the customer. In other words, it enables businesses to travel the last mile and really engage & connect with its customers.
6. Ensure all digital initiatives complement existing customer journeys
Many companies add digital components to customer journeys that do not directly benefit the customer. At best, these additions fail to gain traction; at worst, they can make the experience more complicated and drive people away. A better approach is to include features that simplify some aspect of the journey on which customers are already engaging. The Starbucks mobile app is a great example of this. It manages a customer’s loyalty points and lets customers place orders ahead of time, so they can skip the in-store lines. Customers love that the app saves them time.
7. Make the experience never-ending:
An excellent digital customer experience strategy takes into consideration what happens after users become customers. It ensures that even after the sale, customers continue to enjoy a memorable experience with the brand. By implementing a never-ending digital customer experience strategy, not only would brands build their reputation, but they are also more likely to retain existing customers and ultimately impact their bottom line.
8. Train your leaders on designing exceptional digital experiences:
Any investment in the above is wasted if the leaders do not develop a digital mindset to re-imagine customer experience. Hence, improving digital acumen in leadership and increasing their ability to design innovative customer journey is also an important aspect. And this has to be owned by the leaders themselves.
Conclusion: Based on the above strategies, it can therefore be stated that that digital customer experience management is neither about simply managing specific digital channels nor is it an effort that only marketing or sales should focus on. Instead, it focuses on all touchpoints that the company shares with its customers across platforms and continually improving the experience its customers have within and in-between those touchpoints.
InspireOne has developed a program on Digital CX that helps leaders to adopt a digital mind to reimagine customer experiences. To know more about this program, feel free to visit our website.
References:
https://www.bright.global/en/blog/what-makes-a-great-digital-customer-experiencehttps://
www.exoplatform.com/blog/2017/08/24/why-digital-customer-experience-is-important-for-your-business/
