How Digital Transformation Is Driving Customer Experience in the Wake to the Pandemic Crisis

How Digital Transformation Is Driving Customer Experience in the Wake to the Pandemic Crisis

Digital transformation is a vital accelerator and an absolutely indispensable ingredient to the optimized customer experience, especially in the post-pandemic era. Marketers who understand how to embrace digital transformation and leverage it to their competitive advantages are indeed having an edge over their counterparts in attracting, engaging, and winning over their prospects as the paying customers. 

With the accelerated adoption of digital transformation, there has been a boom in the adoption of automated MarTech tools and marketers across the globe have understood the importance of delivering personalized solutions to the pain points of their customers in real-time or proactively as soon as possible. While automation has helped a lot in resolving the customers' grievances and queries faster; keeping the human touch intact is something that will never go out of fashion.

The post-pandemic dawn to the next normal requires marketers to communicate with their existing & potential customers with empathy and compassion and at the same time requires them to be quick, precise, and personalized in the resolutions they provide. This is where the convergence of the modern AI-driven tools and humanized touch becomes vital in designing and providing a holistic, and seamless customer experience across omnichannel.

Marketers need to leverage modern technology working on the principles of artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML) to envision, design, and deliver customer-centric, human-led experiences that advance their digital transformation and drive business outcomes. 

To reinvent their businesses in the post-pandemic competitive battleground inside out, marketers need to blend in their digital strategies, data, analytics, experience design, and platform implementation expertise with their customer experience strategy.

Combining end-to-end business strategy with the customer insights fetched from the modern digital tools helps marketers to establish a digital experience, employee experience, and user experience that leads to the total transformation of customer experience.

A successful customer experience strategy takes into account the entire customer journey, from customer engagement through the issue resolution, engages across the full lifecycle of the customer relationship, and accelerates your transformation with business strategy & consulting. For uncovering customer insights and creating intelligent workflows, marketers need to utilize data science and analytics methodologies to strengthen their customer experience management architecture.

In a Harvard Business Review survey, 40% of the respondents said that customer experience is their top priority for digital transformation.

Every experience with a customer impacts their overall perception of a brand, brands therefore should focus on strengthening relationships with customers. So, if a brand is looking to improve their customers’ overall experience, they need to invest time and resources into technology that enhances business relationships.

Brands Need to Focus on Turning Digital Conversations into CX Insights

Brands need to turn digital conversations into CX insights by featuring the Brand Experience Score and business KPIs need to be derived from the day-to-day digital interactions that brands have with their customers.

Based on the brand experience conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses that are evoked by brand-related stimuli and are a part of brands' design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments a 'Brand Experience Score' is assigned that includes four dimensions namely sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral. This score is reliable, valid, and distinct from other brand measures, including brand evaluations, brand involvement, brand attachment, customer delight, and brand personality.

The Brand Experience Score affects customer satisfaction and loyalty directly and indirectly through brand personality associations.

The Evolving Customers’ Expectations and Digital Transformation Shape the Pursuit of Customer Experience

Customers’ expectations are evolving & shifting towards a holistic omnichannel experience. Brands need to match up with this “always connected, via any device” relationship with their customers and need to provide their customers with seamless experiences across omnichannel.

The expansion is almost exclusively into digital channels and has added complexities of more point solutions, more disparate data sets, and more departmental silos that make the task of execution of a unified strategy for customer experience increasingly difficult.

Brands must accurately analyze the voice of their customers by aggregating the organic conversions occurring across every digital communication channel to optimize customer retention & bolster revenue.

This can be done by following the steps below:

  • Customer interactions need to be aggregated from every digital channel
  • Consistent classification must follow across a normalized data set
  • Every department should have an access to at least one analytics platform

When unstructured data from diverse digital customer interactions are normalized and analyzed, an omnichannel data set is automatically analyzed and fetches interesting CX insights that are rich in scale, scope, and content & delivers pure, candid customer feedback without one ever having to ask for it.

By measuring the Brand Experience Score marketers can evaluate the areas of their businesses that integrate the Voice of Customer (VoC) with CX and evaluates the customer-impacting areas of the businesses:

  • Brands can start with identifying the sources of customer friction across their business
  • Once the business areas configure for your organization, one can use the dashboards and charts for monthly, and quarterly analysis of data
  • Marketers can drill into details from various channels for more refined insights

CX continues to Evolve Beyond the Survey Based Assessments in the Light of Digital Transformation

Survey-based CX assessments like NPS are gradually eroding and the market is acknowledging that. Customers are experiencing survey fatigue. Brand Experience Score or BXS fetches in-depth CX insights by processing natural language text and performing sentiment analysis to curate, classify and score contextually rich unsolicited feedback. The data is classified into key business areas and rendered as a numerical score on the BXS dashboards. This data can then be used by the senior management for the executive oversight and by operators as a starting point for deeper analysis.

The BXS dashboard allows users to understand the root causes behind the score of each business area and is guided by topic classification, sentiment analysis, and anomaly detection features. Once the unstructured data from conversations is joined with structured data from CRM, CDP, and other legacy systems, it gives users the ability to understand the impact of friction on specific customer cohorts:

  • Users get a powerful omnichannel view of all customer interactions
  • Every interaction is analyzed for topic, classification & sentiment
  • Anomaly detection displays changes in your environment
  • By leveraging the intuitive UI, marketers can get on to simple querying for a vast dataset
  • Marketers can review query-specific snippets or entire interactions

 

Artificial intelligence helps in designing a precise model for strengthening the omnichannel sentiment analysis model and adds an emotional dimension to help users quickly and accurately identify the source of customer friction.

Listen: The Customers are Already Telling You What They Feel About Your Brand

Companies needn't ask for feedback about products and brand perceptions – the feedbacks are already provided every single day via digital channels like chat, SMS, product reviews, social media, online communities, and more.

The brands just need to harness the CX insights by delving into the organic conversations and must track where the customers are experiencing friction & why. Once the sources of friction are fixed, it paves the way for improved retention & new customer acquisition.

Wrap Up

For the B2B sales teams, digital-first means more of social selling than cold calling. Your customers already reside on diverse social channels and that's where you need to be. Don't wait for the customers to contact you, instead reach out to them, build a relationship with them and educate them. Share relevant content with them along with your expertise as a part of a solution to the customers' problems.