Digital customer experience is a term that covers all customer online interactions with a brand. It usually starts with a website but can also include social media, mobile applications, chatbots, and other channels with virtual touchpoints.
Flawless customer experience goes beyond giving customers what they want. It is truly seamless and meets the exact customer needs without any fuss or bother. It is characterized by simplicity, elegance, and joy. Since 73% of businesses started competing primarily on their customer experience, it plays a crucial role in digital transformation.
In this article, we'll cover:
What Is Digital Transformation
Digital transformation was considered to be a buzzword in the past, although it has a long history. It started when computer-aided design and manufacturing were first used by businesses. Later, enterprise resource planning, as well as customer relationship management, were the next steps on the way to digital transformation.
By digitizing manual processes, the above-mentioned technologies played a big role in the improvement of productivity. Later, as online banking and eCommerce have risen, the speed increased, and these activities have been moved from offline to online. Then, as social media was introduced in the mid-2000s, it revolutionized the communication models. Later, companies started using digital channels to connect with their customers. As a result, digital processes emerged and started playing a crucial role in supporting customer interactions. Then, companies’ digital ambitions grew and dedicated digital teams started managing new social and mobile channels.
The main idea of digital transformation is to adopt digital technology for products, services, or operations in order to increase their value through efficiency, innovation, and customer experience.
A highly efficient digital transformation structure can:
- Provide efficiency and consistency
- Enhance performance
- Skyrocket teams’ productivity
- Simplify and improves business operations
- Meet customers’ need
- Create consistent business strategies
As a means of redesigning businesses in the digital age, digital customer experience transformation uses technology to adapt existing business processes and customer experiences to meet changing industry and customer requirements.
What Is the Connection Between Digital Transformation and Customer Experience
Profound analysis can help realize the connection between digital transformation and customer experience, set business priorities, and flexibly adapt organizational models to a new high performance standard.
New Post Pandemic World and New Aspirations
Modern world is restlessly moving forward. New models of remote work and consumption have fundamentally changed the aspirations of people around the world and increased the speed of customer experience digital transformation:
- 80% of professionals say they like working from home
- 41% skyrocketed their productivity
- 50% of respondents admit COVID-19 made them reevaluate the importance of live communication
All these behavioral changes were possible due to a high level of global customers’ digitalization, and it automatically changed the feeling of time.
Speed as a Key Metric in Customer Experience
Speed of service remains a high quality standard. A slow response leads to mistrust and can destroy a product’s or service’s reputation:
- 60% of users feel frustrated waiting on hold even for a minute
- 63% of users generally prefer a call back option
- 50% of customers are demotivated by long waiting on hold
- 90% of respondents say the quality of customer experience plays a pivotal role in their loyalty
A recent study shows that realizing speed as one of key factors in customer experience, business leaders can take digital steps to save, not waste customers’ time and get huge business advantages.
High speed of service is connected with another trendy characteristic of customer experience digital transformation.
Omnichannel Support Gradually Replaces Multichannel Support
As each user has their own preferences where and how to communicate with a brand, multichannel support provides companies with great opportunities and flexibility. The only drawback is that part of important information about users may get lost among communication channels (45%). 71% of customers confirm they want a consistent experience across channels, but only 29% say they get it. Customer experience advantages of omnichannel support allow integrating the channels to ensure a seamless customer experience. Customers can easily switch between channels, which helps increase efficiency. Being omnichannel today means to understand customers’ needs, create a consistent experience, add more opportunities and flexibility in customers’ lives, and empower customers with all the necessary purchasing tools as a sign of care.
For companies that already invested in omnichannel support, the sales rose tremendously from 20% to 80%.
Bigger Focus on Corporate Culture
The recent global crisis forced businesses to pay even more attention to corporate culture. Today, brand values are directly linked to customer experience needs. A deep and powerful culture of openness and loyalty, flexibility and mutual support motivates both teams and customers. Recent studies show 31% of users want to interact with socially responsible brands.
From the perspective of digital customer experience transformation, brands checked and revised their corporate values and improved their digital profile. Being proactive, eco- friendly and ready to help became a new trend and found its place in visual presentation and digital content.
Artificial Intelligence and Live Interaction
Artificial intelligence brought its wind of change and caused a significant customer experience digital transformation. First, it appeared as a marketing tool for lead generation. Later, it found its place in customer support. AI has shown to be useful for the processes that require automation and saving human resources. AI can significantly facilitate the work of a human and perform certain operations with greater accuracy. As everything new is bound to go through a phase of rejection, currently only 20% of users prefer a chatbot to solve customer support issues. Therefore, the best approach is to combine AI and human efforts. Tasks related to creativity, emotional intelligence, and cognitive skills should be left to a customer support agent.
High Demand for Self-Service
80% of US consumers choose an automated self-service option, such as a mobile app or a website, for getting support service. It made digital self-service options a must and became a new step in customer experience digital transformation.
When customers face problems with products or services, the first thought is not to pick up the phone. Instead of speaking with a support representative, customers expect to find answers in FAQ articles, video tutorials, or a knowledge base.
It’s a new kind of online behavior that has made companies implement self-service solutions. The challenge here is to make web self-service portals easy to use. But the tasks of this kind are just another fuel and motivation for the next steps of digital customer experience transformation.
Personalization Becomes a Key Point in CX
60% of customers are ready to become repeat customers after a personalized shopping experience. They are ready to tell about their personal preferences and be treated as unique individuals. The customers expect to be able to improve customer service quality. The good old “Know Your Customer” rule took a leading position in digital transformation and is closely connected with providing the best customer support.
Walking in customers’ shoes is a smart step to launching omnichannel support. Personalization motivated businesses to invest in omnichannel support and to collect all information in one place. Among the main ways to personalize customer experience are:
1. Developing customer profiles
By creating a perfect user archetype, companies offer experiences that were only recently dreamed of.
2. Creating a customer-focused vision statement
Focusing on customers’ key expectations and creating a completely customer-focused vision statement can act as guiding values for the entire service department.
3. Training employees to be customer-facing
Instead of giving canned answers, it’s worth using emotional intelligence and trying to understand the needs of a customer.
4. Gathering feedback
Seeking regular employee feedback and finding ways to provide even more choice to customers by using a broad range of modern digital tools.
In order to provide a truly personalized experience it’s crucial for the brands to collect feedback and insights from every available resource and use them to develop and ensure offering personalized interactions with customers.
Conclusion
In today’s fast-moving “one click” world of the Internet, artificial intelligence, like ChatGPT, co-browsing possibilities, and omnichannel support benefits, businesses have to consider implementing a digital transformation strategy seriously. Knowing customer experience trends, learning thoroughly about buyer persona, using all the opportunities of digital revolution in customer support, and choosing a high performance speed can make any business or organization become a customers’ dream.
❤︎ Like it? — Share: Share on LinkedIn or Share on Facebook
Svitlana had a passion for deep and extensive research, which helped her gain valuable expertise in customer support trends. Thanks to her ability to analyze and understand the evolving landscape of customer support, she created insightful research materials in a simple and clear language.
Posted on
LinkedIn
