Re-imagine Your Customer Experience

Digital Transformation Series - 2

While human touch has its place in customer interactions, successful digital companies have combined digital innovation with no-touch or limited-touch experience for customers. Not all interactions with humans are actually valuable to customers. At points where people simply serve as a customer interface or a vehicle for customizing services, customers may find it more convenient to interact with digital devices.

It’s not just the retail or healthcare or hospitality or high tech, digitally savvy companies across the spectrum from multiple industries are creating value for their companies by creating unique and exceptional experiences to their customers. I have quoted few examples below and for any company that is intending to make this transition, it’s critical to understand three aspects of customer that enabled these experiences.

1. Customer Understanding: Typically addressed as part of use case referred as Customer 360° to gain an in-depth understanding of specific geographies, history and market segments by exploring social media and other channels to get insights into what makes customers happy, what leads to dissatisfaction and why do they purchase your products or services. In the digital world, opinions matter:

2. Customer Touch Points: Typically addressed as part of use case referred as Omni channel to gain an in-depth understanding of customer journey, consistent messaging and branding to bring seamless connection between online and physical interactions. An integrated experience is critical to succeed in the digital world. As an example, customer service division is enhanced significantly by creating a twitter account and addressing customer complaints. There are companies in the banking industry, airlines banks that are doing this already successfully.

3. Top-Line Growth: Digitally savvy companies are using technologies to grow their top-line. As an example a retailer and a hospitality company use location-based marketing uses analytics to send personalized mobile coupons to customers as they near a facility; the company can then track uptake in real time. Top-line growth is all about predicting and meeting the additional needs of customer and offering them at the right time in a seamless manner that can only be done once you have Customer 360°and Omni Channel use cases addressed successfully as the outputs of those two use cases are critical to the success of top-line growth program.

While there is no silver bullet in terms of different ways to create satisfying and profitable customer experiences there is one common thread among these three elements and that is the fact that your company needs to have data platform to store and process data from all sources and in many cases in real-time to be able to gather the customer data and use analytics on the top of this data platform to gain insights that can be acted upon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/fashion/rebecca-minkoff-store-soho.html?_r=0

As an example shoppers at luxury fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff in New York city, can now experience the best of online shopping and brick-and-mortar. Shoppers check in on arrival, via the "Connected Glass" shopping wall, a large mirrored interactive display. Once a shopper has made their selections, they tap a button to have their products sent to a dressing room, each of which is also outfitted with the mirrored touchscreens. Once in the fitting room, a shopper can still browse the online catalog, and request that additional items be brought to them. The shopper also has a high level of control over the ambient lighting inside the fitting room.    

In fact, some customers today favor self-service over personal interaction. For example, many young adults in their 20s and early 30s prefer to buy insurance online or use mobile banking rather than visiting an insurance agent or a physical bank branch. For them, interacting with a human service representative represents an inconvenience or an extra cost that is eliminated in self-service interactions.

Yet transitioning to a direct-to-consumer model can be difficult in industries such as insurance and automobiles, where agents or dealers can rebel against what they perceive as a threat to their commissions. That’s why, when Volvo Car Corp. introduced direct services to consumers through apps and in-car electronics, the company opted to keep dealers involved by sharing customer data with the dealers and assisting customers in scheduling service appointments with local dealers. GM and Tesla did the same with successful results by selling direct-to-consumers involving dealers.

Also in Healthcare, Patient engagement has come to mean much more than access to health records, and today patients and physicians are utilizing mobile digital platforms as a key part of the healthcare journey to educate, engage and speed patient recovery while keeping population healthy. Walgreen’s has mobile app that offers automated medication alerts, immunization scheduling capabilities, and the ability to chat directly with pharmacists through a mobile device. BJ’s restaurant chain on the other hand launched mobile application platform to decrease waiting time, improve service, customize meals in order to achieve their mission of becoming ‘Restaurant Of Choice’ for customers by creating exceptional dining experience.

None of these transformations happen overnight – there are many different paths to Digital Transformation and few universals. The CEO doesn’t have to own the implementation but need to lead the way.

In effect, the pathway to digital transformation often follows these steps:

• Top leaders within the companies must lead the way;
• Radical transformation happens in incremental steps;
• Leaders must stay flexible.

Do you have the Data Platform to help you transform your customer experience and engagement? Would love to hear the experiences you are planning to create for your customers.