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Team Eela
What is Digital Customer Experience? 2023 Trends & Strategies
What Is Customer Experience Transformation?
Customer Experience is a multifaced concept that may be understood as the cumulative cognitive, affective, sensorial, and behavioral effect of multiple touchpoints interactions between an organization and a particular customer. Generally, we can say that customer experience transformation is the practice of streamlining sales and service procedures within your business to enhance customers’ interactions with your brand. If you struggle to offer an excellent customer support experience, this will damper your ability to retain your present customers and attract new customers as word gets out. So, to continue to deliver extraordinary service, you need to incorporate customer experience transformation.
In other words, digital customer experience unfolds whenever a consumer interacts with a company at any touchpoint, time, through any channel, for any purpose. From a company’s point of view, it’s far clear that each interaction is a possibility to weaken or strengthen the relationship with that very customer. However, this could be a narrow way to understand customer experience – in the end; customer experience executives need to ask themselves the question -
This implies a genuine interest in something apart from the actual company/business for a person who, in most instances, would like to be recognized as a human being, independently of the channel and touchpoint. This person, this very person, will ultimately, however not always, convert (i.e., enter into an exchange relationship) with the business. What should I do to facilitate the creation of a long-lasting relationship between my team and this customer to build stable mutual value?
Therefore, customer experience is about a human coming across someone apart from you to establish and build a deep and possibly significant relationship. The possibility of this encounter isn’t confined to brick and mortar businesses – technologies can facilitate unique and meaningful customer experience digital transformation supporting what’s called ‘high tech for high touch,’ this is to say, a technological layer (high tech) always built with the final customer in mind to help differential value creation in a (technology-mediated) experience (high touch).
Customer Experience Transformation Framework
Within this concept, there’s an in-depth Customer Experience Transformation Framework to help you overhaul four critical areas within your organization –
1. Company’s vision & strategy – Should be customer-focused.
2. Employees or Talent – Create a collaborative environment across all teams and departments.
3. Operations – Implement procedures and strategies to foster agile engagement.
4. Technology - Create a standard technical infrastructure that permits collaboration and a customer-targeted strategy.
We’ll talk about how to enable a transformation experience in a moment. But, first, let’s discuss the benefits of incorporating CX transformation.
Why is CX so difficult to deliver?
According to Forrester’s Australia CX index 2019, no clear CX leaders exist. Australian businesses have yet to rise to the excellent category. Most Australian companies (68%) have been in the OK category, with only 13% in the Good category. Most companies struggle not with the design of the CX but with the ability to deliver it from an end-to-end perspective.
Over-investment in customer-facing systems without the support and integration of back-office systems has seen many businesses being able to make promises to customers, however, not being able to keep those promises.
Who owns CX?
There is a standard lack of accountability for the entire CX framework. Specific departments will own certain aspects but will not be answerable for the whole experience. Businesses on the transformation journey have also quickly learned that it isn’t only the customer-facing aspects they need to take care of but the inner, back office people and procedures as well. A retailer which has invested in remodeling its online experience can quickly erode all goodwill if the fulfillment and shipping experience don’t live up to the customer’s expectation, leaving the customer with a final disappointing experience.
Delivering on CX requires the whole business to play one role; from a customer’s point of view, they deal with one brand/business. This is a complicated task; the more significant the business, the more excellent the dots need to be connected.
Impact of digital transformation on customer experience
We all sometimes wonder how digital transformation is driving customer experience strategies and the various positive impact of digital transformation on customer experience. Let’s dive deep into it.
Find out the revolutionary product or service concepts.
Detailed research and customer internal groups are often used to see the reactions to launching a brand-new product or service. Buyer feedback from a CX project can help deliver the information, as consumers often express what they perceive are shortcomings in something you already provided. The outcomes of your research can then be used to check or implement in development. Whatsoever the case might be, CX insights have given you an extensive advantage in the procedure!
Get to know the distinct kind of prospects.
You can use customer experience analytics to research and compare your buyer categories. Identifying various methods in how consumers use your goods and offerings, their interests, how they perceive what you’re selling, and what issues they’re trying to solve allows you to know more about them.
Bring awareness of the whole variety of services and products.
CX data may reveal how your consumers learned to regard your business, their strategies of using your product or service, or show shortfalls in your whole product line. Gather and use all of the information while setting up marketing campaigns and promotional messages.
Improve your company’s positioning.
Your market may view your brand in a unique way than you do. Keeping an outside perspective can be helpful in the long run. Leverage the power of Customer Experience to fine-tune your one-of-a-kind USP. Nothing changes in a glimpse, but imposing the new strategies after focusing on the CX insights can be a great start. Here, the key is to be open to further information from your consumers.
Increased Client Acquisitions.
The emergence of virtual media has made word-of-mouth advertising extremely effective. Today, businesses rely upon their customers to share positive reviews regarding their services and products as a good CX creates connected customers that reflect your brand image. A Nielsen study observed that nearly 92% of customers depend on recommendations from relatives and friends. Client acquisition is based heavily on virtual communications.
Improved Customer Interaction.
Customers trust companies they’re familiar with, and their engagement builds a healthy relationship, ultimately ending in better results. Value-added offers are being offered to current customers by businesses. They engage with customers through email and social media to get feedback. This method creates a pleasant environment in which customers are ready to express their needs with businesses. As a result, companies can deliver better solutions.
Customer Conversions Have Increased.
A returning, pleased consumer is likelier to purchase a new person. Creating an error-free CX that can generate better service or product offers isn’t a bad deal, as it can help boost conversion rates. But, the primary goal of a company needs to be to build a valuable relationship, not simply to earn more income or increase sales. We may apply the same concept to potential buyers.
Companies need to continue to offer value to prospects through advertising and interactions rather than considering them as small consumers. This will help develop such a relationship that will aid in converting that consumer into a loyal customer.
Minimized Service and Marketing Costs.
A customer-centric strategy assists companies in better understanding their consumers. It results in a better understanding of your customer’s desire, which may add to significant marketing expense savings. Companies in traditional advertising often continuously contact customers to introduce new offerings or items without understanding their specific needs.
A CX-centric strategy might consist of integrated checkpoints that help businesses take a unique customer-orientated approach. Businesses accumulate information, develop business analytics, and understand market dynamics. It reduces costs while enhancing sales and customer happiness.
Improved Complaint Management.
One of the main factors of customer experience is trust. Customers who trust a business are more willing to express their concerns, directly saving the overall brand reputation. A poor evaluation could have far-reaching outcomes beyond losing business. It can cause businesses to lose potential investments and have trouble hiring efficient staff.
Technology makes CX possible.
To gain an edge in customer support, you can focus on developing technology that enables the front-line workforce to provide extraordinary experiences. For instance, Automation may save time by automating the procedures and workflows, permitting service agents to deliver individualized help. This transformation needs new modes of working, an emphasis on staff experience, and a complete understanding of human-machine interactions.
How to transform Customer Experience?
Most likely, implementing any changes in an organization can be a daunting undertaking. However, a change that should span every branch of your business sounds terrifying. But, of course, in case you approach this without a solid plan in place, you’re probably to fail. Fortunately, there’s a formula you can follow to help you effortlessly incorporate seamless customer experience transformation into your business, which might cause a little distress to yourself and your employees. Ideally, your customers will only notice that doing business with you is much easier.
To reconsider the way your organization approaches customer experience management trends, you’ll need to consider these critical building blocks for customer experience digital transformation -
Continually keep the customer in mind.
While targeting the digital transformation customer experience, it’s far too easy and familiar to take your eye off the customer. So consider this a reminder – It’s essential to ensure that your decision-making is informed by relevant information about your customer, consisting of operational, perceptual, behavioral, and business value insights.
Personalize your customers’ experiences.
Not only do personalized experiences improve revenue and loyalty, but customers additionally increasingly expect them. Intelligent personalization will increase relevance and engagement, therefore delivering better experiences in the process. Through a deep understanding of each customer, instead of simply all customers, personalization gives unique benefits most competitors won’t match.
Embrace and manage change.
The reality is that few businesses can comfortably keep pace with technological change. The work culture drives the main component of success. Work cultures built to embrace change and enable adaptation and adoption will most efficiently manage their digital transformation of customer experience. So, weave a love of extruding into your culture to assist your organization keep pace with technology.
Gain and maintain inner alignment.
Key organizational stakeholders need to align around where you’re going and why, or digital customer experience transformation won’t happen. So do the legwork. Get buy-in. Be clear about objectives. Communicate progress. Ensure expectations are set and met, and limit surprises.
Eliminate silos throughout your business.
Customers expect to engage seamlessly throughout channels, departments, and groups. But most businesses are not built this way. Now’s the time to improve overall performance, simplify internal processes, combine insights and information sources, and change how you deploy initiatives throughout your entire business.
Accelerate your speed to insights.
Customer-centric businesses thrive on customer-centric insights. To help drive decision-making, they require fast, informative insights in near-real time across multiple areas. In contrast, conventional advertising research remains crucial to understanding customers, including sources that include voice analytics and behavioral data into the mix lets businesses get towards their customers faster.
Prioritize and digitize relevant customer journeys.
Whenever a consumer interacts with you on their phone or any other device, they (and you) are experiencing a digital customer journey. By leveraging customer thinking and agile methodologies, you can prioritize the most crucial journeys to digitize, bridging gaps between systems, silos, procedures, and people, to smooth the journey and maximize the value of their business and time.
Enable endless, omnichannel customer experiences.
When taking the delivery of seamless interactions one step further, customers increasingly expect to begin a transaction in one channel and seamlessly keep in others. These omnichannel experiences deliver customers the ability to transact on a website, move to a call center or chat function, switch from a computer to a mobile device, or even walk into a store without having to start over.
Integrate and digitize processes.
Organizations have been digitizing manual strategies for decades. To deliver interconnected experiences and seamless interactions throughout platforms, devices and channels, standardize, simplify and allow integrated process flows aligned to customer-specific needs and wishes.
Let customers engage on their desired devices.
Customers have the choice of using more than one device to engage with your organization today. Recognizing that any given customer may select computer, voice, mobile, or others at any given time, digital transformation customer experience needs to plan for customers changing choices and expectations.
Align key performance indicators to preferred business results.
It makes no sense to start a digital customer transformation effort unless you can measure business impact from it, therefore the criticality of linking KPIs to the results of your actions. This means monitoring and analyzing the impact on your process, financial, customer, and workforce-associated measures and utilizing a defensible and extensible metrics framework to manage everything.
Assess your customer experience operating model.
Digital customer experience transformation, at its core, is a business model for improvement activities where you put the customer at the forefront of your transformation by optimizing people, approaches, technology, and information across your customer experience journeys. You’ll help ensure a future-proof, innovation-driven, consumer-centric (and constantly improving) customer experience operating model.
Think by design.
In simple words, design thinking is customer thinking, an outside-in approach to understanding what customers need and want and the way these align with the methods you design and deliver products, offerings, and experiences. As a result, the problems you pick and how you solve them will be driven by their desirability to customers.
Keep it human.
Customers tend to prefer digital channels as the first point of interaction — until, of course, they don’t. When customers need to talk to someone, they need to speak to someone now. And once they do, that person had better know who they’re, what they’re trying to accomplish, and what their prior experiences have been.
Transformation of any type is a multi-step journey, and digital customer experience transformation is no exception. But as daunting as it can seem, getting started isn’t as challenging as you think. Take another lesson from organizations efficiently engaged in digital transformation – Start small, stay targeted, and move quickly. Try learning from your successes and failures and take the following step. While systematically delivering excellent customer experiences is an endless journey, the rewards are substantial and measurable.
Closing thoughts
Digital transformation is often seen to update human workers with technology. However, this isn’t always the case. Digital transformation can enhance the human experience by making it less complicated for people to interact with technology and providing them with more information. Let’s take an example – the digital transformation can help increase the accessibility of information and communication for people with disabilities(PwDs). One instance is how people with disabilities can easily access information and communication via text-to-speech software programs and other available tools. This can help them learn more about subjects they’re interested in, connect with others, and participate in society.
