Digitizing CX is no longer merely an option in 2023; it’s a must-have for companies across the globe. Consumers have turned to online channels in the last two years to research brands, check reviews, and get customer support.
What Does Digitizing Your Customer Experience Exactly Mean?
Digitizing customer experiences requires migrating existing processes, tools, and offerings to an online channel and envisioning new processes, tools, and offerings that will benefit from cutting-edge technology when engaging with consumers.
Customer Experience digitization is no longer limited to large organizations with sizable budgets. Channels like social media have very few barriers to entry, and it is straightforward for small businesses to get started without any coding knowledge or initial investment. Furthermore, this digital transformation process does not only cater to consumer needs. It allows companies to unlock data and insights that can prove impeccable when shaping the future CX but would be inaccessible through traditional mediums.
Here are the top ways to master digitizing your customer experience.
- Customer is the King
It’s way too easy and common to take your eye off the customer when focused on digital transformation. It’s crucial to ensure that your decision-making is in sync with relevant data about your consumer, including operational, perceptual, behavioural and business value insights.
- Personalization is the Key
Not only do personalized experiences boost revenue and brand loyalty, but customers also increasingly expect them. Intelligent personalization increases relevance and engagement, delivering better experiences in the process. Through an in-depth understanding of each customer, rather than just all customers, personalization offers unique benefits most competitors won’t match.
- Gain and Maintain Internal Alignment
Key stakeholders across the company must align around where you’re going and why, or digital CX transformation won’t happen. So do the legwork. Get buy-in, Be transparent about objectives, Communicate progress, Ensure expectations are set and met, and minimize negative surprises.
- Eliminate Silos Across Your Business
Consumers expect to interact seamlessly across channels, departments and groups. But most organizations aren’t built this way. Now’s the time to strategically boost performance, simplify internal processes, integrate critical insights and data sources, and change how you deploy initiatives across your entire company.
- Prioritize and Digitize Relevant Customer Journey
When a consumer interacts with you on their phone or laptop, they (and you) are experiencing a digital customer journey. Using customer thinking and agile methodologies, you can quickly prioritize the most important journeys to digitize processes, bridging gaps between systems, silos, and people to smooth the journey and maximize the value of their time and business.
- Enable Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience
Taking the delivery of fluent interactions one step further, consumers expect to start a transaction in one channel and continue in others. These omnichannel experiences allow your customers to transact on a site, move to a call centre or chat function, switch from a laptop to a smartphone, and even walk into a store without having to start over.
- Integrate and Digitize Processes
Businesses have been digitizing manual processes for decades. In order to deliver interconnected experiences and hindrance-free interactions across platforms, devices and channels, standardize, simplify and enable integrated process flows aligned to consumer wants and needs.
- Align KPIs to Desired Business Outcomes
It makes no sense to initiate a digital customer transformation effort unless you’re able to measure business impact from it, hence the criticality of linking KPIs to the outcomes of your efforts. This means tracking and analyzing the impact on your process, financial, customer and employee-related measures and leveraging a defensible and extensible metrics framework to manage everything.
- Assess Your Customer Experience Operating Model
Digital customer experience transformation is a business model improvement activity. Put the consumer at the focal point of your transformation by optimizing people, processes, technology and data across all your customer journeys. You’ll facilitate and ensure a future-proof, innovation-driven, customer-centric customer experience operating model.
- Keep it, Human
Customers prefer digital channels as a first point of interaction until they don’t. When customers need to talk to someone, they must do it immediately. And when they do, that someone had better know who they are, what they’re trying to accomplish and what their prior experiences were.
Transformation is a multi-step journey, and digital customer experience transformation is no different. While strategically delivering great customer experiences is a never-ending process, the rewards are significant and measurable.
