Digital Experience Management: Why is it important for your brand?

In today’s world, with fast-changing technology and experience paradigms, even if a brand’s sales and revenue numbers are stable or growing, it cannot just get complacent with customer experience offered across the lifecycle.

There may be some unfulfilled expectations or pain points in the customer experience especially in the digital experience that the customer is getting in process of availing or consuming the product or service.

The Sales and revenue numbers and other operational analytics may not give the complete picture of how the business is performing and how sustainable the business is or its growth is.

The customers may have had a good experience with a brand in the past and may have higher expectations going forward. If that expectation is not met, he may start looking for alternatives or maybe due to time constraints, he may not be looking as yet. . Having said that, if the experience on the digital side, be it at the purchase of the product or service, Customer relationship management or after-sales customer support is not as good as the product or service that he is consuming, probability of him shifting at the first available opportunity would be really high.

To build customer loyalty, the perceived value of the product or service should not be considered to be limited to the product or service itself but to the product and whole Experience linked to the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase of that product or service.

In this regard, it is critical for the business to create a complete experience management system, especially the Digital Experience Management, since in the world we live today; there is no meaningful business that does not have any digital asset or digital footprint. To bring customer delight and subsequently build loyalty, any business needs to track or measure, analyse and optimise the digital experience that its customers are having.

What is?Digital experience management?

Digital Experience Management System is an integrated framework of creating multiple digital touchpoints, Tracking, Analysing and optimizing every aspect of the customer’s interaction and involvement?through those touchpoints with a business. It is not a one-time activity but a cycle that runs itself repeatedly for every unique customer. Once the system is developed, tested and implemented, it eventually leads a brand to become a data-driven experience company.

The Digital customer experience management system helps you to understand how your customers or potential customers are behaving digitally and get feedback about their preferences, the amount of interactions that the customers are having with your company and offer personalization to the customers in the real sense.

In short, it lets you know the pulse of your customers and what are they expecting out of your business. It helps you make relevant changes to the product and operations strategy and its successful implementation.

?The Building blocks of Digital Experience Management System:

Most businesses rely solely on hard quantitative numbers such as Sales, Revenue per transaction or overall revenue, cost of customer acquisition and so on to make business decisions. These metrics give you some understanding of how the business is doing but not the complete understanding.?

These metrics do not convey the intangible aspects such as customer behavior, how they or potential customers think or feel about your business, what is the probability of them staying with you or getting into the next transaction with you and so on so forth. Basically, predictive analysis can never be done for a business without measuring and analyzing the data related to the customer experience at all touchpoints in the digital space.

There are three building blocks to a comprehensive Digital experience management system:

?1.?????Creating well designed Digital experience platforms

?Gartner defines?a digital experience platform (DXP) as “an integrated and cohesive piece of technology designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys.”?

The above seems to be a comprehensive definition, however, to completely make sense of its significance, we need to understand how a brand communicates with the customer or visa versa.

The brand basically communicates with its customers by speaking and listening to them. Digitally, the ‘speaking’ part is taken care through content displayed on the multiple touchpoints and the ‘listening’ part happens through Data.

Well designed and architectured digital experience platforms offer organizations an integrated suite of tools to foster meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships by speaking and listening to customers and prospects.

2.?Data collection

The success or failure of a digital experience management system lies in the accuracy and the exhaustiveness of the experiential data collected at all possible touchpoints by the company.

The experiential data can help you understand better the where what and how of your customer activity and create better predictive models that would be key to estimating your hard quantitative numbers more accurately.

There are different kinds of data sets that should be collected. The major ones that the business should aim at collecting are:

The Medium: How did the customer reach out to you? Whether through an Ad on Google or through Social Media or through content created and posted on a third party site? The device which the customer used to visit your site or make a transaction through a link received on E-Mail: A mobile or a desktop or a tab? Whether he visited by downloading an app or through the website? Data regarding all these touchpoints when collected comprehensively and analysed deeply can reveal a goldmine of information about the customer preferences and his personality traits.

The Location: Which part of the globe are people reaching out to you or trying to search the category of services you are offering? How many searches from a particular Geography are happening? Whether people from a particular location are using a particular medium to reach or a particular mode to make a payment? Location-based Experiential data can help along with Sales and revenue numbers, etc decipher the roadmap or strategy that the company should adopt for that geography in future.

?The Timing: How people’s behavior and habits change with time? Are more people searching or interacting with you at night or during the day? Are people subscribing more during the economic slowdown or vice versa? How are people talking over the call or chat at different times of the day or year? These questions may look obscure, however, they along with other parameters reveal a whole lot of information that can help determine business decisions like when to display Digital Marketing ads, when to offer discounts on subscription and so on.

?2. Data Analysis

The information and data left in the form of digital footprints by the customers or prospective customers can provide a wealth of insights into their behavior and is crucial to identify new opportunities and improve experiences across the journey.

But this requires Digital customer experience analytics.

Digital customer experience analytics can bring together disparate customer data and transform it into actionable insights.

A recent report by McKinsey ?found that “intensive” users of customer analytics are 23 times more likely to outperform competitors in customer acquisition, and nine times as likely to?stay loyal customers.?

But what exactly are digital experience analytics, and how do you measure the data collected?

Using Artificial Intelligence based software and Big Data tools, all data points can be collectively, swiftly and comprehensively arranged in a meaningful manner to create quantitative models that provide answers to the key questions.

The important thing here is to first prepare a list of those relevant questions or metrices. Some of the relevant questions that may be explored are:

Customer satisfaction levels – How satisfied or dissatisfied are customers from the experience they had with a brand

Loyalty Score – How loyal are the customer to a brand and how likely are they to becoming brand ambassadors?

Customer churn rate – How many customers went away in a particular period and how many new customers were added in the same period?

Time to resolution – How much time is being taken to resolve customer queries or escalations?

?This is followed by the model that would provide answers to that or at least reveal a pattern, which then along with subjective analysis or AB testing can allow companies to successfully test the results of the analysis.

The Experiential analysis would definitely throw out some startling facts and gaps that existed in the current experience versus the one that customers expect or you as a company would like your customers to have. It would also give you an insight into the touchpoints that have had a positive impact on the customer experience and how could those be leveraged to your advantage.

?3. Implementation or Transformation

All the data collected and analytics applied to it should lead to the creation of a digital transformation plan. This is imperative for a meaningful customer experience and amplifying the revenues associated with it.

Since the analytics throw meaningful insights into unfulfilled expectations and issues if any, it is the responsibility of the leadership to inspire all the respective teams to cohesively work towards digital transformation to resolve customer issues,?close the gaps, and preemptively take steps to meet future customer needs. For eg., if the analysis throws out information that there are a whole lot of customers dropping in when required to provide personal information to create an account or subscribe to a service and the analysis shows it might be due to the trust deficit, then how does the company incentivize the customer to go through the process or make them feel more comfortable in providing personal information are the things that need to be decided and acted upon to enable a positive customer experience or improve it from the past.

The 4 Main Areas of Digital Transformation

Process Transformation: Process transformation entails modifying the elements of a business's processes in order to achieve new goals.

Business Model Transformation: Pursuing digital technologies in order to transform their traditional business models. A great example would be digital KYC replacing the In branch physical KYC process.

Domain Transformation: Exploring a new opportunity with the existing resources or some investment in them to produce a unique but interconnected experience resulting in enhanced revenues. For instance, Jio investing in content creation to bring in stickiness for the ever-growing Mobile network customer base.

Cultural/Organisational Transformation: Alignment of the digital transformational values with the internal values of the company is the key to a sustainable transformation.

?Sometimes one, two or all of the above need to be changed to get the customer experience right and derive the huge commercial benefits associated with it.