How to Help Your Customers by Becoming a Digital Business

Richard McCrossan discusses why you should become a digital business and takes us through how you can do so.

Many businesses are just getting the hang of well-established channels like chat and email, but the speed of digital disruption in consumers’ lives is throwing demand after demand at businesses.

Setting up a Facebook and Twitter team for customer care has been a common occurrence in businesses for a couple of years now. You probably created a dedicated team, using dedicated digital transformation technology to handle customer queries over those channels.

But what about forum moderation? Ah, right ok, we need slightly different skills and technology for that, so let’s set up another team. They sit in the same room, so that’s ok.

Phew, that’s social customer service taken care off. Oh hang on. What about Internet of Things (IoT)? Ah ok, right. We better set up a team to take care of that. We go through a period of exciting innovation, testing, trialling, but now we have to adopt it in our business, to scale it up for our customers. To make it part of what we do.

We’ve done that now; but wait, it’s another team, another technology stack, another face to our customer. But now we can show the market that we are a business for the IoT age!

But what about this virtual reality thing? What about Artificial Intelligence and virtual assistants? Oh, and do you have a strategy for Alexa? You’ve got to be kidding me!

Being a business that is agile, innovative and able to move quickly in the digital age is critical. But once those innovations are tried and proven, establishing them as a part of your standard operating model is where the pain of proliferation starts to take hold:

Bad for customers

Disconnected, inconsistent experience is a turn-off for customers. Connected, seamless experience is what your fickle customers really want. Without it, they’ll look for a brand that’s easier to do business with.

Bad for employees

Digital employees can be as fickle as your customers. If they feel they are missing out on the ability to work on the “cool stuff” that their colleagues in another department are doing, dissatisfaction creeps in.

Bad for business

Maintaining so many technology stacks, training regimes, and even worse, deploying technology that attempts to make connections between those different systems, haemorrhages cash. Even worse, the top-line benefits are not realised due to the underachieved CX.

According to a recent report, one of the top challenges facing marketers today is “collaboration culture”. This means the ability for teams within a business to work together. This is a critical component of an innovative, agile business, but making this a reality for “business as usual” (at scale) is not easy.

The challenge is not limited to marketing, of course; this is a challenge across marketing, sales and service.

The report also highlights another key challenge: the age of customer-centricity. This is really the opposite side of the above internal collaboration challenge: while our businesses have to work across departments and teams, our customers are already doing this.

Customers are going from channel to channel, device to device, place to place; hunting for an answer.

Most customer journeys today start online. Indeed, more than a third are still online while they communicate with you via phone. Customers are not just using multiple channels and devices – they are using them all at the same time!

How can a disconnected, proliferated business possibly hope to engage the digital consumer, while attaining the kind of revenue figures and operating margins that digitally born businesses seem to take for granted?

There is an answer!

Orchestrating customer engagement centrally and holistically is the answer. You need to build your customer engagement from the ground up on a customer experience platform that:

Engages the digital consumer

Providing the ability for your customer to engage with your brand over any channel, device, place; one at a time or all at once (including the phone call!). Recognising moments of need or opportunity wherever and whenever they occur.

Engages the digital employee

Empowering your employees to be the CEO of your customers’ journey, with an omnichannel desktop tool for managing all customer interaction types, managing their presence and driving employee performance, training and collaboration across the entire enterprise.

Optimises your digital business

With all-channel/device analytics for digital journey optimisation and workload management for running your business as a smart business.

Critically, your platform must be real time, reliable and capable of operating at scale. This is the heart of your customer experience; it is business critical. Put your trust in a proven platform.

As new channels, new innovations, new devices come along, you plug them into the common core customer engagement solution, benefiting from the established business rules, skill sets and customer experience look-and-feel.

Indeed, your innovation teams should be starting from that common core. Not taking a view of “what can AI do for us?” But rather taking a view of “how can we enhance our established CX with AI?”

Digitally born businesses like UBER and AirBnB have this in their DNA, and that is their advantage. Don’t let them race ahead – you are creating your digital DNA right now. Put customer experience at the heart of it.

Register and get the on-demand recording as well if you can’t attend live.