The Key to Successful Digital Customer Experience

Businesses now need to take multiple steps ahead to exceed customers’ demands by accurately giving them what they are going to need in the future. In this scenario, digitalization in customer experience becomes an ultimate tool to assist both customers and companies in preventing frustration and discouraging repeat custom. And to set up a seamless customer experience that satisfies you, you would need a framework to cover organizational mindset and workflow. Here are six foundational steps to set up such a process:

1. Begin with Customers First

As presented, customer experience solutions need to satisfy customers first. They are the most crucial subject in this whole process. Therefore, it is vital to put yourself in their shoes to understand their experience journey with your business and then come to identify the ultimate procedure from their point of view.

A good fresh start to really play the customers’ roles is to ask and answer the right questions such as “If I were a customer, how would I want my problems to be solved?”, “How could a service exceed my expectations?”, “What is the easiest way to access customer service?” etc. By setting up suitable questionnaires, businesses can eliminate unnecessary steps, focus on optimizing the process, and motivate their team to think outside the box. 

2. Back-to-Basics

After accumulating all customers’ demands and behaviors in sync with your existing customer service process, it is time to turn back analyzing its performance before pushing the button on digitalization. Businesses can either carry this audit process out internally if experienced enough; otherwise, it is better to hire an independent audit agency for the best outcomes. Moreover, it is also vital to interview the chosen technology agencies on the details of the digitalization process. So organizational synchronization can be continued without any delay or misalignments.

3. Choose A Scalable Process

Though digital transformation is highly prioritized, it is not recommended to risk your organization by going all-in at once. The best practice is that businesses should build an economical process and serve the highest volume of customer requests. Under such requirements, agile project management is the most suitable solution.

Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment. Agile project management focuses on delivering maximum value against business priorities in the time and budget allowed, especially when the drive to deliver is greater than the risk. Principles include:

• The project breaks a requirement into smaller pieces, which are then prioritized by the team in terms of importance.
• The agile project promotes collaborative working, especially with the customer. 
• The agile project reflects, learns, and adjusts at regular intervals to ensure that the customer is always satisfied and is provided with outcomes that result in benefits.
• Agile methods integrate planning with execution, allowing an organization to create a working mindset that helps a team respond effectively to changing requirements.

At the same time, organizations need to get a hold of the whole landscape to ensure that the sub-project is heading to its ultimate goal. Maintaining this objective shall accelerate the scalability of all customer service processes.

4. Make Sure Digitalization & Change Management Come Altogether

Digitizing your customer experience department will not change the team’s workflow only but shall transform others surrounding people throughout the organization. These drastic changes, if not well planned and organized, shall cause misalignments among departments. Moreover, there will be potentiality that employees feel insecure about losing their jobs to machines.

Therefore, companies should have their communication plan well prepared, so organizational understanding is reached before the transformation starts. There are four steps companies can take to close the digital skills gap and prepare their workforce for digital transformation:

• Evaluate employee skills. What digital skills do your employees benefits currently have that are a value-add for the business? These can include software knowledge, CRM experience, Microsoft Suite expertise, or internal, proprietary systems.
• Reveal talent gaps. Do you have the workforce to handle digital transformation, or do you need to seek outside talent?
• Offer on-the-job training to your existing workforce. Continuing education–whether in the workplace, through a professional association, or at a higher education institution–can supplement an individual’s skill set and significant impact. According to a report on adult training and education from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, 66% of adults surveyed thought a work experience program was beneficial for improving work skills. Read more here.
• Promote from within. Promoting internally is significantly less expensive than recruiting for the same role externally. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM’s) Human Capital Benchmarking Report, the average cost per hire is $4,129. And, external hires often get paid more.

5. Establish Organizational Mindset

While infrastructure and technology are clearly important considerations, digital transformation is about the people and changing the way they approach business problems and where they look to find solutions. Many organizations forget to address the necessary cultural shift needed to change workers’ mindsets, without which no digital transformation project will succeed.

To encourage a change in mindset from traditional to digital, business leaders need to effectively communicate a change plan, promote and expand a digital culture throughout the organization; and inspire an innovative environment where teams embrace change and look toward the future with the following five initiatives:

• Foster a leadership team with vision.
• Communicate a leadership agenda for change.
• Encourage a digital culture.
• Organize work to enable agility.
• Inspire collaborative, forward-thinking teams that embrace change. 

All and all, digitizing customer experience is beyond the CX team themselves. It is all about putting the customer at the center of everything then transforming the whole organization’s workflow and most importantly, the mindset. Our experts at SmartOSC have spent every single day communicating with clients to direct them to the right digital transformation mindset. We tell them that is the most fundamental step to make our collaboration a success and for the DX to work out continuously within their organization. The passion for creating a world better with technology has gained us pride with various achievements of our clients. Keep in touch with our experts and tell us your story so we can help.