Effortless Digital Experience Is the New Standard
In the digital age, always-connected customers are demanding instant access, tailored experiences, and effortless interactions. In this new paradigm, brands compete for precious customer attention while discerning customers easily move between offerings. If your organization is unable to meet these demands, customers will pass you over and patron other businesses.
According to the State of the Connected Customer Report, 57% of customers have stopped buying from a company simply because a competitor provided a better experience (Salesforce, 2018). Brands that create effortless and tailored experiences capture customer attention and retain their loyalty—tapping into lower costs to serve, reliable renewals and revenue, and inexpensive marketing.
If you have any doubts, look no further than the digital darlings that have upended established Fortune 500 companies and roiled global markets in just a few years. For instance, Airbnb—as an app—is the largest real estate company on earth without owning any property. Amazon started as a digital bookstore and is now the world’s largest retailer and a web services behemoth. Or Robinhood, another digital app that has changed financial markets and the way people invest forever—forcing major institutions to offer fee-less trading.
“According to the 2019 State of Service Report from Salesforce, 80% of customers now consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products.”
Are You Delivering Stand-Out Digital Experiences Powered by Customer Obsession?
Regardless of your industry, customers, organization structure, or size—your business needs a digital customer experience (CX) strategy. Customer dynamics and tastes are evolving rapidly during the 4th industrial revolution. If you want to attract modern customers or simply hold onto the ones you have, effortless digital experiences are the new brand currency.
As organizations seek to modernize their operations, workforce, and strategies—it is imperative that these efforts are customer-centric. Your organization creates revenue by delivering value to customers and every aspect of your business should serve this purpose.
If your digital strategy isn’t organization-wide and customer-focused, you’re introducing significant risk and added cost to your efforts.
Without a cohesive, customer-driven strategy, you risk:
- Creating disparate data silos that hide valuable customer insights
- Delivering cumbersome experiences that slow customer engagements and damage your brand
- Investing in expensive systems that are trapped in old paradigms
- Alienating other departments and creating broken workflows
- Lowering employee productivity with confusion or change fatigue
These are costly mistakes that cause your organization to waste valuable time and money.
By aligning your team around a common Digital CX strategy and objectives that are focused on your customer experience—you can differentiate your brand while tapping into the efficiencies that digital transformation offers.
Start with Understanding Your Customer
To build truly effortless and engaging customer experiences at every level of your organization, you need to first know your customers.
You need to understand their wants, needs, emotional pulls, and motivators—as well as how these change as they progress through your organization’s customer journey.
Build Your Customer Journey Map
A Customer Journey Map is a visual story, or walkthrough, of every interaction your customer has with your organization—from their perspective.
A well done customer journey map will identify all of your organization’s customer touch-points as well as the impressions, motivations, and needs your customers have at each stage of their journey. This exercise becomes a valuable tool in discerning your actual customer experience, revealing customer pain-points, and identifying missed opportunities—and how to improve them.
How You Benefit From A Comprehensive Customer Journey Map
A thorough customer journey will provide data-points and insights that are valuable to your organization. Your map will:
- Provide a holistic view of the customer journey and how it varies between different customer’s perspectives.
- Segment and personalize customer experiences based on specific needs, objectives, and the stage of the journey.
- Reveal how customers move through and interact with your departments.
- Identify inconsistencies in the customer experience that create churn, lose deals, or upset customers.
- Highlight friction zones in your customer experience where bureaucracy, manual processes, and archaic systems that require unnecessary customer effort.
- Benchmark the ACTUAL experience vs what is desired (or assumed).
- Enable you to anticipate customer’s needs and proactively engage to provide value.
Customer Journey Mapping is both an art and a science. There is “no one size fits all” approach. For an in-depth walkthrough on building your own customer journey map check out: 10 Step Guide to Mapping Your Customer Journey.
Digital Transformation Guided by Customer-Centric Vision
A customer journey map of your current and future desired state provides a vision for your digital customer experience and brand. It defines how customers move through your organization from awareness/marketing, to sales/fulfillment, and adoption/support.
Your digital transformation teams need to be driven by a central vision which enables them to strategize and execute end-to-end effortless and seamless customer experiences.
With a proper vision these teams can identify what systems are needed to:
- Manage multi-channel marketing
- Segment and manage leads
- Streamline, automate, and coach sales operations
- Automate order fulfillment
- Educate and train customers
- Deliver self-help
- Deploy virtual education
- Open channels for instant live support (chat, messaging, phone)
- Automatically suggest and renew products, subscriptions, and services
- Empower customer-facing teams with customer history
- Enable collaboration and access to knowledge
- Measure, track, and report on key metrics and customer feedback
Unleash your Digital CX with Cross Functional-Teams
Digital tools and experiences are built by highly technical teams. In most organizations those teams are isolated and develop solutions based on a set of requirements that have moved through bureaucratic and siloed processes. This is a recipe for creating detached and inconsistent customer experiences.
Instead, we propose that brand-differentiating digital experiences are created when commercial strategy and business process skills are embedded into technical teams. Those teams are then empowered to make decisions that are best for the customer—rather than based on internal efficiencies.
Digital CX teams that are multi-disciplined, cross-functional, and have executive sponsorship are ultimately more autonomous, creative, and effective. When guided by a customer-focused digital strategy—teams are able to deliver more than just digitized workflow efficiency. They create holistic customer experiences that drive value and promote brand loyalty.
If you’re not building solutions that benefit your customers—you risk getting lost in the digital age.
Let SequoiaCX be Your Guide
SequoiaCX can help you build the foundations of your Digital CX strategy, create cross-functional and self-managing teams, run transformative projects, and supply needed skills across the organization to craft inspiring customer experiences.
Our Services about how customer obsession leads to resilient brands and long-term growth.
Ready To Map Your Customer Journey?
A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of every stage and interaction your customers have with your organization. We’ve designed this resource to help you map and visualize that process—so that you can better understand your customers and improve the overall experience! Let’s make your competitors GREEN with envy!
