As digital further dominates business sales and revenue, organisations are facing major hurdles in decreasing the time between identifying digital opportunities and acting on them.
Added to this are teams’ limited ability to capture every customer friction, including small customer touchpoints that can have a significant effect on the customer experience (CX). These challenges have an immediate impact on digital return on investment (ROI) and focus on ongoing initiatives.
Organisations must recognise that digital-first strategies allow teams to align and prioritise the digital needs that have the greatest impact on their business and how to take action. Yes, this will help you to retain customers and drive sales, but more than anything it shows your customers you really care!
So, how can organisations set new standards for a great digital CX?
Visibility of the customer journey
Without a holistic understanding of when, where, and why their customers are struggling, organisations struggle. There may be several barriers preventing your customers from having an optimised experience but identifying them all is not only extremely difficult but acting on them can be even harder.
Something highly visible but relatively minor may take up all the headspace of your team, while a deeper, less visible issue leads to hordes of customers abandoning their carts and a loss of profit. Being able to see all the issues easily and prioritise them based on the friction points means you can work on the issues that affect your business’s bottom line first.
Multi-channel engagement
It can be extremely challenging to accurately align and quantify digital priorities. Digital experiences have evolved rapidly over the last few years due to more people spending more time online and consuming online experiences constantly. Not only are people spending longer online, but they are also engaging across multiple channels and expect a consistent experience across them all – from the web to mobile and native app to kiosk.
This creates more data volume and richer data sets which is great for painting a full picture of consumer behaviour. For example, user analytics enables organisations to go beyond individual sessions to understand how users behave over time to build long-term customer retention and loyalty. With data visualisations, like retention and churn analysis, digital teams can dig deeper into what is attracting and detracting repeat visits across the web and mobile apps. You need to see your customers to really know them.
Digital expertise
Filling the gaps in digital expertise and fostering the right digital expertise is arguably one of the hardest challenges for those working in digital customer experience. A wealth of data is useless if the gatekeepers of that data do not know the right questions to ask to interrogate it to maximum effect or navigate the insights produced into actionable next steps for the business.
Pockets of expertise are often held within the organisation and if the person who holds knowledge is unavailable, the lack of understanding amongst the rest of the team is soon exposed. This holds a lot of risk in case of employee churn, vacations or long-term sick leave. Operational efficiencies can grind to a halt and digital needs go unanswered or resolved. With an increasing need to be digital first to engage customers, it’s essential to establish the tools for every team member to be able to access, interpret, and understand the customer data available to them. This means they funnel time more efficiently into immediate actions, doing more with less.
By understanding where customer pain points are, what to prioritise and act on, and understanding how to efficiently interpret and action data sets, organisations can set new standards for a great digital CX. Digital transformation will continue to transform and impact every industry, and organisations will feel even more pressure to provide a great customer experience. If executed correctly, organisations will have happier customers, cheaper costs and higher revenues. Most importantly, you become an advocate for your customers. By taking away the pain and irritation and turning it into an unexpected and delightful digital customer experience, organisations have a greater chance of retaining customers and returning business in the future.