Want to be the customer - Digital transformation is not an option

Offering a pleasant and memorable customer experience with digitally enhanced methods, is becoming vital for every brand to adopt. This phenomenon of digital transformation is prompting the organizations to alter their business strategies and models. However, in a majority of the cases, it isn't the organizations that are controlling this phenomenon. Rather this change is being orchestrated by the customers themselves.

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Customers are smart today. They expect a certain relevance in connection with whatever they’re doing regardless of the time and place, and in the medium and device of their choice. This is why organizations of today need to divert their attention from offline, and traditional methods of operations to more modern digitally forward approach to nurture their customer experience.

In order to keep this new kind of customer interested in your particular product and services, your company must adopt technology like CRM to provide an unparalleled experience to the customers.

Now for integrating digital transformation into the operations, a business owner has to know what it does and also has to identify who the new-age digital consumer is. You will also have to decipher how you can use data and technology like CRM to offer your consumers a best-in-class experience, all the while keeping in mind that this new-breed of customers are always connected, app-native and are incredibly efficient at using technology to their advantage.

Statistics on enhancing the digital experience of the customers:

A study conducted in 2016 on the executives regarding the impact of digital transformation, has identified the major insights and trends that are influencing the market that is undergoing this revolution.

This study indicated that while 55% of the executives mentioned “changing customer choices and behaviours” as the major catalyst for the impact; it also revealed the most prominent hurdle (71%) is knowing the impact of it on today’s customers.

However, only half (54%) of the participants of this survey have been able to thoroughly outlined the customer journey, which indicates that there is a clear imbalance between deciphering the journey of the customer and its influence on digital transformation.

The blunder that many organisations have made is to base their business transformation efforts on business processes and IT when the real change needs to happen with people.

Enhancing the digital customer experience:

While Digital experience(CX) can be quite a gruelling process for businesses, especially since many of them have little idea about where their customers stand in the vast digital space and what are the efficient ways to stay in touch with them.

Then there are some businesses which are learning the best methods to reach out and engage their multi-channel consumers, and still developing plans and systems to offer the best experience at every step of the digital process, Now, the question remains, what are the most proficient ways to maintain a fulfilling customer experience?

Brands have to be experts in customer service across every platform, from social media to email to mobile and even beyond. They shouldn’t let go of any opportunity to grab the customer’s attention. To deal with the ongoing transformation, the following are some practices for enhancing your digital customer experiences.

1. Understand that digital customer experience is essentially a customer experience.

In their attempt to boost the digital customer experience, marketers must understand that digital is after all a part of the overall customer experience. Some companies try to come up with a plan or strategy for offering stellar customer experience specifically for the digital platform without preparing an overall CX strategy, thus making it difficult to maintain consistency across various channels.

2. Identify the objectives of the customers with the help of the digital platform

One of the most crucial steps for boosting the digital customer experience is to have a clear idea about what the expectations of the customers are from your brand and the manner in which they'll utilize a specific digital platform. Many organizations develop website, mobile gateways, because everyone else is doing it, without understanding the context of the customers’ utilization of that platform. In this case, you not only have to understand your business objectives, you also have to clearly identify what your consumers expect out of it and how to meet their expectations.

3. Decode what the customer expects

Organizations must maintain their customers’ expectations. This begins with a clear knowledge of what their consumers are expecting out of the experience. Any experience, digital or offline, is guided by the theory that all of us as consumers, often get involved in a situation with a certain expectation of what’s about to happen. If you have particular expectation while going for a discussion, and that expectation is not fulfilled, then naturally the experience is not going to be nice. Eliminating this disappointment requires a proper knowledge what your consumers expect in the context of your business objectives.

4. Step into your customer’s environment with the help of adequate research

According to experts, one aspect that most companies are ignorant about when they are determining the customer experience, is research. Hence, many organization don’t have a thorough knowledge of what their consumers truly want or need. The standard procedures for conducting research in the business community is to do things like surveys. The companies tend to observe some operational details, or some online statistics but those kinds of details are good determinants of what a particular need is. They’re not an efficient determinant of how an experience should be offered. These generic surveys, more often than not, will describe some things that customers need, but there may also be some undiscovered needs that you can’t get discover by conducting one survey.

This is why evaluating the customer behaviour in a natural setting, is a good idea. One of the things that experts in this domain often suggests people that they must carry out ethnographic research on their consumers. Visit their homes or businesses or reach out to them in a public place, or wherever it is they're engaged in business with you to detect what their behaviours and attitudes are conveying. Carefully notice them, interact with them on a one-on-one basis to derive an indelible insight, which would be more detailed than a standard survey or even a particular group that is gathered within an artificial setup.

Many companies want to ignore this step because it demands considerable investments of time and money, but the outcome is a service or product that genuinely maintains consumer needs and is equipped with real feedback, which will offer more money in return.

5. Make sure to get help from outside when you need it

When marketers are too engrossed in the specifics, it’s often hard for them to determine the big picture. It may sound surprising, but only a handful of companies would actually keep the consumers at the core of their decision-making process.

One survey of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1,000 companies has discovered that, on average, only 11% of marketers rely on data for all the decisions connected with customer service. This suggests that the customers don’t have a say in what the organizations are doing to meet their expectations. This is why it’s always recommended to appoint a CX expert in digital experience design.

Organizations that employ outside help to create effective digital experiences tend to have a substantially higher return on the investment since the fact is it’s quite tough for organizations to look at the experience from an outsider’s perspective.

6. Maintain transparency with your consumers

Transparency has a crucial part to play in enhancing the digital customer experience. While marketers are dealing with plenty of data, it’s vital for organizations to be transparent about what they’re gathering, why they’re doing it and how they’re going to use it. Now the most significant thing about data is consumer privacy and rights. So while it's alright to utilize the relevant data to enhance the services for your consumers, but you must maintain an optimum level of transparency about how you're using the pieces of information, what's its purpose, how it works and what advantages are.

7. Deal with every customer feedback as it matters

Feedback not only allows your customers to have a say, but it can assist your organization to decipher how to develop and enhance your consumer experiences. For instance, if you run an online assignment help company, you would want to know what services can be added further.

Customers are reaching out through the call center, or they're dropping an e-mail to customer support, or they're using social media network to get in touch, or they're writing reviews on a third-party site, organizations need to know how appropriately sum up all of those specific parts of the full customer feedback. That is a critical aspect that organizations must never bypass.

So enhancing the customer experience in a digitally-driven era becomes all the more convenient when you abide by these practices.