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Giving Your Customers a Great Digital Experience – The Essentials
- January 9, 2020
- Posted by: Admin
- Category: Blogs, Business Intelligence
Digital technologies have revolutionized the ways in which customers shop for, and purchase, products and services. Just a few years ago providing customers with a decent customer experience was enough to remain competitive. Those days are gone. Today, the ability to achieve, and maintain, a competitive advantage can be dependent upon your ability to provide your customers with a digital customer experience that keeps them coming back. The provision of a digitally-empowered customer experience that is dynamic, efficient, intuitive, and engaging can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Digital Customer Experience – What is it, Really?
Regardless of what you read or hear, defining Digital Customer Experience does not have to be overly complicated. It is actually fairly straightforward. Simply put, it is taking the time to fully understand how people currently interact with your online presence and then implementing tools, processes, and technology to enrich the customer experience across your entire customer engagement ecosystem.
Defining it is simple. Implementing it, however, requires an understanding of the essentials and how to get there. You also need to understand how an outdated customer experience can cripple your business.
Digital Customer Experience – Why it’s Important
It’s fairly simple. If you fail to provide your customers with a digital experience that is both engaging and memorable someone else will. Using outdated modes of customer communication and interaction can result in loss of new business opportunities, degraded customer loyalty, and a diminishment of your brand. Specific problems can include:
- Static web portals that fail to deliver content and brand messaging that customers can actively engage with. Portals that do not provide user-centric experiences.
- Lack of dynamic content management that fails to deliver the right messaging, at the right time, to the right audience.
- Failure to collect and synthesize customer data across all input channels (social media, email, call centers, surveys, etc). Results in sluggish response to issues and opportunities.
- Failure to make lasting connections to customers via mobile devices and applications.
- Inability to utilize analytics to draw predictive conclusions regarding future customer trends and behaviors.
- Outdated tools, processes, strategies, and tactics that focus on meeting internal demands rather that delivering the levels of service and convenience demanded by today’s customers.
Delivering a Customer Experience that Wins – The Essentials
A commitment to a few core essentials can completely transform the experiences you are providing to your customers. Depending on specific business circumstances, each of these elements will require different levels of focus, effort, and investment but they are all critical aspects of providing a great digital customer experience.
Optimize Your Mobile Strategy
Use mobile technology to create additional value for your customers. Integrate mobile technology across your entire sales and marketing ecosystem to provide real time access to—and connections with—your customers. Incorporate mobile applications that provide your customers with value that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time. Collect valuable information from your customers in ways that cause them the least amount of effort or inconvenience.
A Web Portal that Provides Engagement and Value
Few things contribute less to customer experience than a dull, static, template-based website. Your website should be an Enterprise Web Portal; a two-way conduit between you and your customers. Key features of the most effective enterprise web portals would include:
- Dynamic ecommerce integration that supports all shopping and purchase transactions
- UI and UX designs that provide visitors with an environment that is attractive and user-friendly
- Fully responsive design (for mobile devices)
- Integrated with other internal business workflows to provide a seamless customer experience
Learn from Your Customers
Listening to your customers is crucial. Equally important is the ability to learn from what you hear. You likely already gather a large volume of customer information. The intrinsic value of that information lies in your ability to quickly synthesize that data in ways that create actionable insights; insights that will contribute to your delivery of a winning customer experience.
The use of analytics should be a key component of any digital customer experience program. A data analytics solution will provide the means for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing your customer data, thereby fully optimizing the value of that data. This will enable your enterprise to not only learn from current customer behavior but to also predict future behaviors.
Consistency in Messaging and Branding
Inconsistent messaging and branding creates confusion for the customer and can lead to loss of confidence in your brand. An effective customer experience will include the development of brand messaging, content, and imagery that is consistently reinforced throughout every interaction between you and your customers. This will include an ability to consistently develop, deliver, and manage digital content across all of your sales, marketing, and customer services channels. Brand messaging that is consistent, and consistently reinforced, is brand messaging that sticks.
Convenience, Convenience, Convenience!
Customer’s attention spans are shrinking. Their tolerance for inconvenience is at an all-time low. A customer experience that is clunky, inefficient, and unrewarding will not build the level of brand loyalty that is necessary for a business to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive environment. A digital customer experience should, above all, provide your customers with value that is seamless, uninterrupted, and convenient.
The End Game
Focusing on the above essentials will allow you to provide a digital customer experience that will….
- Improve customer satisfaction and stickiness
- Increase your brand awareness
- Build your reputation as a provider of a great digital experience
- Improve your market share and drive revenue growth
Client Says
We are implementing Plasma Ag Solutions across our network of locations. Plasma Ag provides several capabilities that stand out for our users such as Programs, Rebate management, and Inventory tracking. It is quite difficult to track margin information on crop protection products in our industry so our Owner Operators love the transparency the system provides. We utilize the system to professionalize our support to the network and it has become a bit success with all of them.
Several hundreds of our retail locations and joint ventures use Plasma Ag solutions as a part of their core operations. Plasma solutions provide very useful tools and deep insights to users – including tracking customer transactions and financial information. Their applications are tightly integrated with CRM, ERP, Accounting, and our other mission critical IT infrastructure and third-party systems. The dashboards provide rich analysis and insights that helps us adjust to the changing markets.
Plasma Ag solutions have been a tremendous asset to our operations. They offer powerful capabilities such as managing Retail programs, Products, Programs, local discounts, and wraps. Ability to track inventory at physical locations, calculating true and average costs, rebates and accruals on user-friendly and simple interfaces has helped us and our retail customers adopt Plasma Ag solutions quickly.
Our software, system and processes used to be an old struggling engine. Plasma team solved all that. With exceptional training and planning, their consultative executive team down to their support team executed the deployment with first-class speed and professionalism. Their platform not only removed all the pain points in my division, but also created a ripple effect benefiting my entire company.
It has been my experience that Plasma has the technical expertise, commitment, and work-ethic to deliver best-in-class solutions that allow business owners to fully realize business strategies and objectives. They work in a highly professional manner to ensure that the clients’ requirements and recommendations are fully realized. I would highly recommend Plasma for any web enablement initiative that you may be considering.
Plasma has been a smart choice for us as our online business partner. I don’t even consider our work with them outsourcing because Plasma management takes the time to truly understand our business and is able to direct its technology resources for the most efficient and quality output possible. I don’t think you can say that about many companies in their space.
Plasma has been a smart choice for us with our online requirements. I would recommend them to any company looking to better manage their online presence.
It has been my pleasure to work with the Plasma Team since August 2008. We have completed three major builds and multiple smaller projects in this time. I heartily recommend Plasma Comp to anyone needing a workable, practical and effective system solution. Plasma’s Q&A process was extremely thorough. They quickly understood what was needed and then worked the process with pointed and penetrating questions to ensure they had the entire picture of the finished product.
I think Plasma has come a long way in embracing our philosophy of becoming more agile, both leading and following in this area when necessary. The teams have been very open to change and have a great attitude. I have no complaints!
Plasma is a great vendor to work with. They took us from an email-based process to a fully designed, web-based workflow. They have dramatically changed how our devices are certified to be used on our network and they will save you time as well! One of the many processes in our current environment has saved us so much time; from four months down to a few days!
