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Creating Experiences Enabled by Digital

By Diane Magers, CCXP posted 10-25-2017 09:05 AM

  

Many organizations are facing the challenges and successes as they adopt and drive digital transformation.  In preparation for the upcoming DX Summit in Chicago, www.dxsummit.com/2017, the DX team had some great questions for the CXPA about creating digital experiences, so we shared some of the opportunities we see from the customer experience professional’s view point. 


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 for 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 add interactions. 

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 out 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.

3) How do you ensure seamless customer experience throughout all your digital channels e.g. mobile?

We have seen a focus on creating the digital journey but when all is said and done, we choose to interact with brands not just across digital channels, but physical and face to face channels as well. There are always ties where we need the human interaction and experience and regardless of the channel, we as customers expect to interact in any way at any time across every interaction with the brand based on our needs.  So, it really becomes a need based journey. On the most basic level, it is about the spectrum of human need. From the basic task to be completed to the search for emotional connection – it all transverses every part of our lives.  Whether it is digital, mobile, data, persona, place physical – all those pieces must come together to meet the customer where they want to be and how they want to interact.  You know, it is ironical we talk about experiences as a thing.  We all have experiences, with all of our feelings, our thoughts, our subconscious and our emotions playing a part in how we interact with everything – everyday.

So even the term digital journey or digital channels is misleading.  Separating digital interactions from non-digital ones and then only paying attention to the digital ones clearly doesn’t meet the customer’s needs – but unfortunately, this approach is all too common, and is at the core of the confusion over ‘digital journeys.’

4) How do we differentiate between customer experience and digital customer experience?

All customer interactions, every touchpoint, and phase of interaction with the customer is a part of the overall customer experience. CX is an ongoing process, growing and evolving every time the customer interacts with our organizations. A customer experience is the cumulative impact of many touchpoints and they all must be orchestrated to fulfill how we want our brands to be experienced – how customer will feel, react, what they remember, what they achieve by interacting with our brand.

 To meet and exceed today’s expectations, we need to prepare yourself to fully utilize the data provided by digital environments. You will also need to offer personalized content and provide an all-around great and seamless experience. We will need to focus on the human experience – enabled by digital transformation.

While customer experience has many different aspects, there is seemingly a singularly most important aspect of the whole equation. Regardless of the touch point and interaction, digital customer experience is an emerging concern. The digital ecosystem continues to evolve and at the rate in which technologies are developing and being adopted, more and more touchpoints will happen digitally. But we can’t forget the human element of what motivates us and what can create engaging and valuable experiences for our brands.

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