The rise of digital transformation has forced the hand of many businesses to adapt to the new business model lest they should want to risk going obsolete.
Driven by the customers, this change has made companies shake up their business approach to one oriented by technology and its integration into important business processes. According to a report by IDC, 67% of global CEOs will shift their focus from offline strategies to more digital strategies to enhance the customer experience.
Digital Transformation and the New Normal of Customer Experience
Digital transformation is the deployment and exploitation of digital technologies in the areas of a business to change how organizations deliver value to their customers. Technology integration has become very integral to delivering a stellar CX.
This has gradually caused the transformation of consumer habits and expectations due to advancements in ML and AI, allowing customers to get what they want when they need it. In fact, when quizzed about the factors that prompted them to implement a digital transformation plan the most, nearly 50% of organizations replied with customer satisfaction and experience.
What’s more, the new shift in customer expectations has resulted in a new kind of buyer who represents the new normal and standard of digital customer experience. This new customer is app-native, always connected, and technologically aware. To service them effectively, businesses will have to switch to a digital-first approach while rethinking how they interact with them to provide superior digital customer experience.
The Importance of Customer-Centric Engagement
Client-centric or customer-centric engagement is a strategy that is born out of placing the customer at the heart of your operations and reorienting your offerings accordingly to provide a positive experience. Putting the customers at the heart of your business allows you to gain a great deal of insight into their behavior and expectations (courtesy of data collected by your CRM), which often provides you complete visibility of customer wants and expectations.
This data can be subsequently utilized to understand customer interests and what makes them engaged. Based on this knowledge, you can recognize opportunities to fill a need or demand through your services or products and increase the customer lifetime value consequently. Not only does this allow you to provide better customer service, but it is also highly remunerative, with research by Deloitte and Touche reporting that customer-centric organizations were 60% more profitable than companies who did not orient their offerings around the customer.
Thus, customer-centric engagement means to build products, develop processes, and create policies that are ultimately designed to help customers have a batter and more satisfactory time transacting with you. Here, we will see four measures that businesses can use to provide customer-centric engagement and drive effective digital transformation.
1. A Flexible IT Environment
It’s already evident how essential having the right technology is today to empower digital strategies in today’s business landscape. However, an alarming fact in this regard is that 45% of executives believe their business lacks the necessary technology to employ a digital transformation strategy.
Fortunately enough, these businesses also recognize the need for deploying flexible, agile IT environments, and 86% of organizations are of the opinion that cloud technology is essential to their digital transformation efforts.
Cloud technology facilitates companies to be dynamic and enables them to test projects in a way that is low-risk and extremely cost-effective while allowing organizations to meet customer expectations quicker. Through the integration of SaaS applications, such as customer relationship management systems and big data analytics, organizations can catalog which touchpoints to optimize to boost their understanding of the customer.
2. Personalized Customer Experience
You might have often heard that personalization is the need of the hour. It couldn’t be truer because buyers today want businesses to treat their needs individually and reorient their offerings towards them. According to a study by Accenture, 75% of customers claimed that they would return to shop with a company that recommended products based on their past purchases.
What’s even better is that customers are happy to let businesses use solicited data to customize offerings for them. And with the help of CRM systems, businesses can and are increasingly making this a reality. With a CRM system, organizations can store customer data and browsing history to examine customer data based on their interactions across touchpoints. This helps them acquire a more thorough understanding of their users and come up with targeted offerings to match individual preferences, thus resulting in a personalized experience.
3. A Seamless Omnichannel Experience
Advancements in technology have afforded customers the luxury of getting whatever they want to across channels. This has affected customer experience in such a way that more than 39% of forward-thinking companies have either considered or already implemented an integrated omnichannel strategy.
Apart from mobility, an omnichannel strategy allows customers to constantly be in touch with organizations and monitor their relationship through the channels that they prefer. Customers can choose how to get in touch with organizations.
In that sense, the more channels that an organization activates, the better it is for both the customer experience and the organization’s bottom line as it guarantees a constant connection with the brand through various touchpoints. Thus, integrating all these interactions causes the creation of a unified digital profile that augments brand voice every time someone interacts with your business.
4. A Single, Unified Platform
Over and above all, the thing that most impacts the digital customer experience is the UX. A study about UX insights by Toptal found that 88% of users are less likely to return to shop with a website after they have had a bad user experience. Users rightly expect to be able to, at the very least, navigate across your platform easily, and if they can’t, they are going to jump ship.
This is why it’s important to have a single, unified platform with a well-defined onboarding practice that helps you set the tone for their first interaction and eases the whole experience for them. It also impacts customer expectations and shows to them that you are going to be ready to supplement their platform experience whenever they might need it.
Conclusion
In the on-demand digital economy of today, digital transformation has beckoned organizations by offering them a chance to better engage the modern buyer and meet their expectations of seamless customer experience. The rise of cloud solutions, coupled with the smart use of data systems like CRM software, is enabling organizations to evaluate their previous offerings and correspondences with the customer to help themselves prepare for the new digital landscape and inordinately boost their bottom line as a result.
