Digital technology drives excellent customer experience

The challenge racing across businesses today is how to improve, scale and sustain an excellent customer experience (CX). CX is the sum of all the customer’s interactions, good, bad or indifferent, with a company’s products, services and other support services that the customer encounters in their pre-, during and post-purchase activities. Activities as benign as the placement of the company’s search engine, how well search results mirror Google search results, and how easy it is to process a billing dispute seem insignificant to a great product. These little “pin pricks” can damage a brand and damage a product’s standing when easy tasks become hard, frustrating and take a long time to successfully complete.  

Company’s management of their CX is vital because how well and how quickly a customer can find product information, pay their bills, get questions answered and resolve complaints is as valuable (or more) as the actual product or service the company creates to satisfy customer requirements. Company’s want to have not only great products and services, but also great customer experience to make it easier and faster to find, discover, research, purchase and then great post purchase follow up that leads to a re-purchase. CX is vital because it allows companies to create further competitive advantage that not only forestalls competitors but maintains loyal customers while growing new customers. Company’s need a goal of great CX to make new customers a returning customer and then make them loyal, brand advocates of the company.

Digital innovation at the customer level is how companies improve and grow a great CX. An easy first question is for management is: why digital? Digital can be seen to be cold, impartial and elusive to a great customer experience.  Improving and growing digital interactions is how companies create, improve and sustain great CX. The challenge with company’s focused on a great CX is how to improve “pain points” in customer interactions while maintaining

1. How Digital Builds Great CX – It’s Led by The Voice of The Customer. The voice of the customer (VOC) leads and prioritizes the digital improvements to the customer journey. The customer journey is the typical path a customer takes all the way from the discovery and research of the product through the purchase process to the repurchase of the product. It’s easy to adopt a “we think” attitude to improve things “for” the customer. Instead, analyze, categorize and visualize the customer journey using the actual words, observations and data from the actual customer behavior. Where does the customer stop? What takes a long time? When does the customer request help? Do customers return to a new process or try it once and then never return? These points of customer frustration are where digital improvement need to be directed. Prioritization goes to the places of greatest customer frustration and where it is likely to discourage customer loyalty and re-purchase. Finally, monitor the existing customer surveys to ensure that digital improvements are heard in the VOC. If the customer complaints are still there, it’s back to the drawing board.

2. How Digital Builds Great CX – Always On, Consistent and with High Levels of Self Service. For customers, inconsistent levels of service are one of the major pain points in any step of a customer journey. Consistency, even if a process is not perfect, is far better than one that is inconsistent. Customers, increasingly customers of any age and demographic, want the ability to have powerful tools to research and solve their own problems. In the 1990s and early 2000s, calling a customer service center was a naturally accepted way that customers new they had to endure to solve a problem or ask for an additional service. Today, no more. Give customers the power, insight and consistent delivery to find, research and solve their own problems through web, mobile and voice-enabled digital applications.

3. How Digital Builds Great CX – Personalized to Individual Customer Needs. Great CX really becomes “my customer experience.” Even for seemingly similar products and services, customers have different needs and requirements in their customer journey. Personalization gives customers the ability to use a common set of digital tools to create and use to their own preferences and needs. There are lots of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and supporting technology to help guide the personalization of the CX. Conducting deep analytics of how customers set their personalization preferences can help build both a product recommendation engine and a self-help recommendation engine to help customers solve problems before they even realized they were experiencing difficulties.  

4. How Digital Builds Great CX – In Works in Any Industry. Creating a great CX environment, is not limited to B2C, B2B and the thousands of different industries. Great CX is needed and works in any industry. A great technique when building a great CX in digital is to look beyond your own customers, your own industry and your own competitors to discover what are great digital CX practices. When company’s look beyond their own industry, they discover new, exciting and effective ways to deliver great CX that customers want and may not expect. Delivering a CX that is effective, fast and personalized in a way that is new to an industry leaves the customer satisfied and a company in a great position. Compete against leaders outside your industry to deliver world-class, not best-in-industry CX.

5. How Digital Builds Great CX – Company Solves & Improves Customer Issues in The Background. The hardest lesson for a company to discern is that a great CX is never done. Great CX is a constant, consistent and never-ending path and mindset to always be better, more efficient, more personalized and more predicative to solve customer problems and pre-identify products customers need before they know it. Customer surveys are a part of this but drive to deliver ongoing great CX is a passion for customer success. The passion for customer success dedicates itself to constantly looking for ways to improve CX no matter how small.

Digital is a powerful tool for improving CX, but it is far from the only one. Small sessions of 10 to 15 customers grouped into the same segmentation categories discussing their “journey” of how they use (and don’t use) a company’s services to solve their problems allows digital improvements to sustain company bright spots and improve company pain points that customers may have. In addition, advanced analytics can help identify and target customers that need a new product or service. CX not only helps maintain the bottom line, it allows helps grow the top line revenue. Create loyal customers by using self-service, easy-to-use, fast, personalized and powerful digital technology to enable a great customer experience.