*This blog post is part of a partnership agreement with the upcoming 4th Annual Digital Customer Experience Strategies Summit, September 19-20, 2017 in Chicago, IL.
Digital Customer Experience experts share how they are creating a great digital customer experience within their organizations. Find out what they are working on currently and how they are ensuring a great customer experience at their company with the help of digital.
1) What are the main challenges your company is facing using digital right now?
“We see confusion with organizations defining digital. Some define it as the technology transformation, some believe it is customer-facing technology and some refer to it as integrating technology across the business. There’s no doubt that technology continues to transform business and that it has become a bigger part of the mindset, is seen as an enabler, and has inspired innovation. Digital continues to be brought to life as an enabler that makes our lives easier, saves us time, and grows our engagement with brands (whether we are a customer, an employee, or a partner of the brand). We still have to design the digital experience just as we design every other interaction. We still have to focus on the core of who we are as a brand and how to meet the customer’s need and create more value from the relationship. Digital allows us to create those deeper, more value added interactions.” ---- Diane Magers, CEO, CXPA
“Firstly, I think it’s a mistake to think of digital CX separate from any other CX channel. When deciding to use a channel, any channel, you must first understand how your client wants to interact with it and how you’re using it to satisfy the right customer “job to do”. Just like a poorly designed IVR can illicit negative emotion, so too can a digital channel if it’s not used correctly. Design your total lifecycle, and then design a channel strategy, including digital if it applies.” ---- Gordon Littley, Managing Director, Customer Experience Practice, Verizon
2) How do you ensure personalization for your customer throughout their journey?
“It's been a very dramatic shift to watch organizations who were once just collecting data and have now transformed to dynamically integrate and use that data from multiple sources to enable better experiences. Organizations that have embraced personalization know it is really about the relevancy of your brand to the customer's life. We all want to feel unique and special and using information to better understand us and offer us things that are important to us. It's about feeling that a brand can understand us as an individual. Personalization can also remove aggravating points of friction (have you ever gotten a product recommendation that was way off your needs?). It can also be used to create those truly unique moments of delight. In the end, personalization is about building ongoing relationships. Just like our personal relationships, it's about the back-and-forth, those conversations, those exchanges of value. Whether it’s value related to saving time, effort, money, stress or creating positive emotional feelings, over time we can create deep engaging interactions that grow those long-term relationship by being personal.” ---- Diane Magers, CEO, CXPA
“For us, it is a combination of scalable technology and also human interaction. We have done a good job automating ‘common’ interactions to support low-effort customer needs. However, it is important that we maintain certain levels of human interaction to keep ourselves honest about really knowing who our customers are and building that trust between us. The goal of technology is to streamline the experience at a scalable cost. The goal of a CX department, however, is to delight the customer. We should always balance efficiency and cost with sincere human interaction.” ---- Andrew Watson, Director, Customer Experience & Partner Marketing, Vivint
3) How do you ensure seamless customer experience throughout all your digital channels e.g. mobile?
“For us it’s about making improvements to how our systems speak to one another to create an experience for the customer where they do not notice the hand off between channels or when they can pick up where they left off when moving from one channel to another. A seamless customer experience is the holy grail a lot of companies are looking for.” ---- Trays O’Reilly, Vice President, Customer Experience, Comcast
“Number 1 rule; know your customer, throughout their journey, irrespective of channels used. But knowing your customer is easier said than done. I can think of several retail experiences where one might hop between multiple channels before making a purchase decision. That channel hopping is most commonly done separately and without knowledge of previous interactions. In other words, the company treats it as multiple independent transactions, whereas the customer thinks of it as one. So designing a lifecycle CX is much more important than just designing a digital CX. Do the first right; the digital strategy will become more obvious.” ---- Gordon Littley, Managing Director, Customer Experience Practice, Verizon
4) Do you think there is a difference between customer experience and digital customer experience anymore?
“To me, the line is blurred since so many transactions transcend physical and digital touchpoints. Experiences like Uber, Foursquare, and Waze have been bridging the physical and digital divide for years. Right now, the definition of a digital experience is evolving. For example, consider a dialogue with Alexa, which isn’t a traditional digital experience. I think we’ll see many more digital touch points that are invisible, background, or layered onto reality in a more elegant fashion. We should see most, if not all, experiences beginning to have a digital component in the not-so-distant future.” ---- Michael Solheim, Senior Insight Strategist, Insights & Innovation, Cars.com
“No, I see a digital customer experience as a subset of the customer experience. The customer experience is the sum of all interactions not just the digital touchpoints that occur in the lifecycle. Digital transactions are becoming more frequent touchpoints for customers interacting with companies but quite often the memorable interactions that really improve a customer’s perception of a brand are delivered during human touchpoints such as technician visits to the home.” ---- Trays O’Reilly, Vice President, Customer Experience, Comcast
Read the full version of the speaker eBook here.
Hear more from these digital customer experience experts and others including Google, McDonald’s, Twitter and Salesforce at the 4th Annual Digital Customer Experience Strategies Summit, September 19-20, 2017 in Chicago, IL
Special offer to readers! CXPA Members receive a 20% discount to attend the event. Use VIP Code CXPA20 when registering.
Visit www.digitalcustomerexp.com for more information