We are witnessing a profound breakthrough in the digital landscape today. Almost every company is adapting to digital transformation, irrespective of its industry domain. Digitalisation has enabled digital innovation and digital customer experience (DCX) to make delivery of services easy, quick and convenient.
Consider your day-to-day monetary transactions that have become fast and much more simple after banks moved to digitalisation. Facilitation of ATMs, mobile banking and digital money have taken conventional banking to convenience banking.
In the past few years, companies have used innovation as an integral tool that intended to offer something unique to the customers. Unfortunately, the most overlooked part of this process has been the customers themselves. An effective digital customer experience always keeps customers at the core of the digital transformation strategy.
By an effective digital customer experience we mean, delivering personalisation, speed and accuracy in the customers’ hands.
What is digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience refers to the experience customers have with an organisation on digital platforms. DCX encompasses all sorts of communication, information related to products, services and all the processes that customers would experience through various digital channels.
Digital customer experience is a journey. Encountering the communication of a brand across multiple platforms and device types is like going on a voyage that affects the buying decision. Therefore, consistency here plays an important role as the customers own the entire purchase process.
The degree of digital customer experience can vary based on the extent and quality of communication across various digital platforms. Different organisations embrace digital transformation at different levels. The scenarios could be as follows:
Harnessing digital medium for marketing and communication
Certain organisations cannot make their services go completely digital considering the nature of service, constraints related to customer reach and several other influential factors. Most of the time they end up using digital platform only for the promotion of the brand.
Use of digital medium for e-commerce
Digital medium works as the backbone for any e-commerce led business. Amazon, Flipkart and Alibaba are obvious examples where digital medium is being utilised as a marketplace. Such brands have completely embraced digital medium as a major part of their product is built digitally. Leaving aside the physical delivery of products, everything else from marketing led communication to making a purchase and leaving feedback is done digitally.
Digital medium to build an end to end product
With the rise of digital product innovation, online apps, softwares and websites have started taking over offline businesses by removing geography and time based constraints. Online service platforms like Netflix, Facebook and PayPal serve both as a digital product and service that can be accessed anytime, anywhere.
Apparently, there organisations that have completely outgrown the stage of digital transformation and are now using digital for all the above mentioned purposes. No matter what the purpose of digitalisation is for an organisation, it is essential to ensure that a good digital customer experience is delivered when a brand makes use of this medium.
What will make a good digital customer experience as we look at the trends?
Personalisation
The fast-moving world keeps generating an urgency where time becomes the most valuable commodity. Customers appreciate acts that saves their time, takes care of their expectations and brings in a sense of immediacy.
Customer experience cloud allows organisations to treat customers as individuals by analysing their search history, preferences and behaviour. The digital customer experience has become personalised by using data to recommend content that aligns a specific taste leading to a frictionless and hassle-free experience.
An excellent example of modern DCX is Netflix, that pays attention to minute details to build a great digital customer experience. Based on what customers play and what they abandon, it improvises the search experience. Emerging as a leader in online streaming service, it is said to achieve a user base of 128 million by 2022 with 44% increase in the current user base.
Delivering Mobile Experience
Mobiles are the smartest portable devices that permit accessibility and add momentum to the utilisation of content and services facilitated through digital media. It has become an essential device to get access to such information, products and services that one needs on day-to-day basis.
Considering today’s trends, digital customer experience on mobiles should focus more on seamless transitions and smooth navigation.
Imagine apps like Facebook and Pinterest for that matter. Mobiles allow instant accessibility to social media platforms to the user. Understanding that Facebooking mostly happens through mobiles, Facebook analyses data to deliver great digital customer experience, specifically on its mobile platform.
Other examples could be Alexa’s smart home devices that can be easily controlled through the Alexa application on your mobile and the Uber app that makes accurate use of data to calculate Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) and compute optimal pickup points for the booked rides.
Self-dependency
Customers today are tech savvy and capable of carrying out tasks independently which once required a lot of human intervention. Through self service analytics and customer experience cloud, organisations can now leverage data to provide features that can boost the customer experience.
Talking about machine learning, potential use of data has enabled machines to serve the customer with the next most relevant action. It is reducing the dependency on customer care services as machines are now becoming self-equipped and can take steps that can resolve several such issues caused while its functioning.
Early in 2017, LG announced addition of ‘Deep ThinQ’ learning technology in its smart appliances. For example LG’s smart refrigerator can do things like refill the ice tray and adapt accurate temperate to prevent food spoilage.
Artificial Intelligence
After machine learning and Internet of Things, technology has empowered more real time responses and interactions through a much evolved version of technology that is AI. Invention of bots on websites answer most of the customer queries instantly by cutting down time that was earlier consumed by customer care service.
Sophia, the social humanoid robot is the latest and the most intelligent invention in AI. Technology possessing a mind very similar to the human, is a supreme example of what data can do.
Similarly, Google maps use anonymous location data from smartphones to analyse speed and movement of traffic, With the acquisition of Waze in 2013, it also detects traffic incidents due to construction and accidents to navigate the fastest routes while travelling.
How can digital customer experience help a business to grow its ROI?
Engagement
Whether it is promotional marketing, e-commerce or a digital product, a good digital customer experience will help you in engaging the target audience.
Tailor-made services
Making use of data analytics to study the behaviour and preference of a customer will help you in serving your customers with accurate content that is relevant to him/her.
Personalising data saves time and enhances the experience making the customers avail your services even more frequently without much struggle.
Acting upon feedback
Collecting customer feedback through online digital platforms is much more quick and easy as compared to offline platforms.
Customer cloud allows accurate analysis of areas that are functioning well and areas that constantly need improvement. Hence, actions required to level up the performance will be fast for you to execute.
Elevating Brand Perception
Great digital customer experience is respected and relished forever. This will help you in building a better brand perception in the competitive market.
What customers value most is effectiveness in service and great experience which makes their purchase journey worthy. This will generate repeat sales for the business.
Takeaway – Embrace digital customer experience as a key strategy to leverage your business growth
Digital world is replacing offline business at a fast pace. Disruptive technology is refining business models and data is being used to impact businesses positively.
Successful organisations are leading the economy because they are among the first ones to innovate or adapt themselves to new trends. Technological innovations are an opportunity for businesses to grow by adding more value to the customers’ life and capture higher market shares.
The sooner you align your business growth strategy to deliver an impeccable digital customer experience, the more likely you are to outbeat the competition.
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