Successful customer experience strategies boost digital transformation in organisations

Disruption is a widely used term in today’s lexicon. It can be defined as the impact when incumbent organisations are slow in addressing or even unable to address changing customer expectations appropriately, rendering them vulnerable to swift new age competitors.Digital Transformation is the opposite of Disruption and can be defined as organisational change enabled using technologies and business models to improve performance. The most important objective of digital business transformation is to improve business performance.There are well-defined business outcomes of a digital business:

• Creating valuable relationships with customers across multi-channels to deliver better experiences.
• Allowing people to communicate and collaborate effectively wherever they are and using whichever applications and devices they prefer.
• Accelerating the rate of transformation of an enterprise into a digital business.
• Minimising risk while keeping the business safe and compliant.

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Representational Image[/caption]Changing consumer habits Digital technology influences Indian consumers’ decision, what they will buy and how. As India moves towards the digitised era, the overall impact will be deep and broad. New technologies have caused a shift in customer expectations, resulting in a new kind of modern buyer. Mobile devices, apps, machine learning, automation allow customers to get what they want at the point of need.Customers today want seamless experiences regardless of channel. It is imperative that all the channels in any organisation need to be blended to provide a single, user-friendly customer experience.The current realityDespite the best intentions to develop a connected customer journey, organisations are still struggling to overcome the challenges of systems’ integration issues and inconsistent data formats. The prime reason for this is the siloed approach to customer experience (CX) where engagement channels are managed separately, and tracking is done by individual channel owners, offering limited visibility of the CX journey across channels. As a result, CX delivery is hugely inconsistent — a problem that is compounded by not having defined and integrated customer journey strategies. Simultaneously, business units must share intelligence and configure data consistently making it fungible across groups. It is imperative for organisations to better understand their user channels and integrate their customer strategies to create a positive and connected customer journey.Building blocks of CX-enabled business strategyThe era of the customer is here. CX is recognised as the number one driver of digital transformation and the top strategic measurement for organisational performance. The right CX approach can help organisations stand out from the competition and contribute to their commercial success.Successful CX strategies need fundamental design thinking. It is important to design something that is relevant to customers and thereon everyone in the organisation gets aligned with the vision.Organisations that are revolutionising customer engagement are doing more than just revising their processes and points of contact — they’re transforming their thinking and culture. They are also recognising and incorporating the value of traditional customer interactions. While service, fulfilment, and marketing processes are largely digital, human interaction is brought in at the point where it’s most valuable.An interconnected strategy that reaches all areas of the organisation will go a long way to bridging the gap between where organisations think they are and what the customer experiences.Securing the experienceIt is estimated that 25 percent of cybersecurity threats are associated with new digital channels and could slow down digital transformation. While cybersecurity is seen as a core risk for organisations that want to introduce new AI and service automation technologies, many organisations are anticipating that automation will help improve their threat-detection proficiency and compliance, give them greater visibility of where risks may occur, and accelerate incident response times.Analytics for CX is both the top business and technology trend, indicating a closer alignment of strategy between the two. The diminishing involvement of CX teams in the design of their own technology solutions is disconcerting. So is the drop in the use of technology systems for workplace productivity, and a decline in agent analytics.Partnership breeds successWith budgets under pressure, organisations will require a strong business case to develop the experience stack and automation capabilities. It is imperative the integration partners are well skilled to address the challenges of integration, inter-operability and multiple channels, making them all work seamlessly. A good technology partner is paramount to ensuring that a robust CX strategy and execution plan is evolved. The technology partner is expected to work with organisations in drawing up an optimal digital roadmap that will help orchestrate the organisation’s journey including the pace of adoption that borders on risks and outcomes.The author is the Solutions Director & Leader — Digital Transformation at Dimension Data