Digitalization of Customer-Experience: Four Key Steps to follow

Last few years have seen a surge in competition among brands to deliver end-to-end customer experience (CX). The exponential increase in online users, along with the ever improving connectivity between businesses and consumers, are the prime factors that have forced enterprises to focus on digital customer experience. Apparently, it has evolved as one of the ideal methods to keep pace with the target audience. Moreover, digitalization has also opened up many opportunities for businesses to surge ahead of their competitors.

However, brands looking to excel at digital customer experience(CX) have to deliver an aggregate of all experiences throughout the customer’s lifecycle. The process has to focus on maximizing customer loyalty, retention and brand propagation, which ultimately would increase the bottom line. Through gradual digitalization of business processes and initiatives, brands can turn data into insights and subsequently into actionable results. When performed regularly and with diligence, they can achieve digital operational excellence, which is the key to the superior digital customer experience.

Moreover, brands also have to focus on the evolving trends and keep improving steadily. It can be accomplished by adopting some of the key tips such as Flawless Scheduling, Contextual Relevance, Psychometric Perceptions, and Existential Authenticity.

Impeccable Scheduling

When customers are not prepared for promotional activities, pushing it on them could prove to be a detrimental experience on a whole. Brands must realize those individual customers have their perceptions about the things they wish to buy and engage with. In addition, they also wish to spend time on researching those products as per their own convenience. Marketers can utilize promotional campaigns to drive brand awareness, but trying to contact customers when they are busy with something else, would not help them get the appropriate response. Hence, it is important to determine the exact timing to engage with the customers and deliver the offering they need. The data can be derived using real-time analytics each time a customer interacts with your brand. Subsequently, you have to apply the information you’ve collected, analyze your options and shift the message/content in time to maintain their interest and customers can be approached at the most appropriate time, which would not just improve the overall experience but also maximize the conversion ratio.

For instance, in inbound channels, this means personalizing web and mobile-driven content during an interaction. With channels like email, it’s about customizing content when it’s opened by the customer, or as close to that moment as possible.

Contextual Relevance

Relevance to context is a critical component of CX. Hence, it’s important to talk to customers about the things they care about, and not just what you want to sell. If you can’t get this aspect right, then you would risk losing their attention. On a smaller scale, segmentation can be helpful to an extent. But, when you’ve got millions of customers, categorizing them into segments and mapping their unique interests can be a massive task. Instead, predictive analytics with propensity models can be deployed to identify the right offer or message to each customer. Mapping the model for digital use is the first part of the puzzle, and it’s important to keep the data fresh with routine updates.

Psychometric Perception

Companies are always are under the impression that consumers who engage with them are interested in buying their products. However, it’s important to understand that most of them are either looking out for a solution to a specific problem or seeking out information to solve it. When brands want to use this opportunity to sell their products to these consumers, most of them may not like it they’re not looking to be sold to. However, you could still pitch in but the focus needs to be on providing a solution, which probably can change the consumers’ perception.

To get a better idea of the consumers’ thought process enterprises can use digital channels to obtain questions from the prospect customers. By digitalizing the consumers’ context in real-time, businesses can shift to prioritize the problem, and earn long-term loyalty by providing a great experience. It’s important to note that selling opportunities can be created when the customer get the due respect before getting their problem resolved.

Existential Authenticity

Enlightened organizations let their customers interact across channels, without losing context. Whether the channel is outbound or inbound, paid or owned, there must be consistency in building a progressive series of experiences to create a sense of authenticity, and this is where digital can come into play. Be it an email, or a chat, companies must be able to align all the messages from a particular customer to offer an exceptional experience.

There are various constraints such as multiple accounts, data, and channel silos or disparate technologies make it difficult to create a centralized channel. However, intelligence and machine learning can be used to integrate the disconnected channels and customer interaction can be aligned to deliver a personalized experience.

While overhauling the traditional processes can never be a simple task, integrating consumable pieces to re-engineer your relationship with customers with one interaction at a time has turned into a necessity. Transcending these challenges by deploying these key tips could lead to huge gains in customer satisfaction, retention, conversions and ultimately boost the ROI.