2020 COVID-19 was the ‘moment when everything changed’ in business. It’s no longer a luxury, but a must-have for any business. Personalization is the key to any great experience. This requires data and lots of it. A wide variety of digital customer experience management tools is available. What are the benefits of using customer data?
What is digital customer experience?
The digital customer experience is all interactions that customers have with your company that is powered through digital solutions. These could include your website, social media, mobile and email as well as IoT and wearable devices. Kiosks, call centers, and physical locations are all examples. The goal is to improve those experiences and more specifically, your customers’ perceptions of the experiences you provide.
86% of customers will pay more when they feel they have a great experience. PWC reported that customers are willing to pay 18% more for a good experience. 58% say they’ll switch companies because of poor customer service. Digital customer experiences that are personalized, timely, and context-driven provide the best customer experience. They can be accessed across any channel customers prefer.
Your customer service and support interactions are just as important as sales and marketing. A comprehensive approach to customer service that encompasses the entire customer journey is ideal.
If you have a digital customer experience strategy that is correct, you can expect to see a potential increase in the lifetime value for your customers.
Key capabilities for digital customer experience tools
Digital customer experience tools should be able to deliver consistent and effective engagement throughout the customer’s lifecycle. Large organizations often have a variety of systems and applications. These platforms called digital experiences platforms, tie together these tools and others to create a comprehensive, integrated package. All these solutions can interoperate to pass data back and forth, resulting in better personalization, efficiency, and a consistent customer experience.
These platforms have the following key capabilities:
- Context-driven experiences that are based on customers’ interactions with your digital touchpoints
- Personalized experiences are based on customer behavior, purchase history, and location.
- Customer engagement from end-to-end
- Communicating with customers at the right time and using the right device
- To deliver rich and interactive customer experiences, it is important to effectively manage and store information in all formats.
- Helping to identify unhappy customers or passive customers, and assisting in the development of cost-
- effective marketing campaigns to increase their value for the company
Also read: 15 key to Make Sure Your Customers will Open Your Emails
Personalization relies on quality data
Personalization is the cornerstone of great digital customer service management. Personalization is becoming an integral part of great digital customer experience management. It is essential for customer acquisition, retention, satisfaction, and growth. Forbes reported that 91% of customers are more likely than others to buy from brands that offer relevant offers and recommendations, while 72% say that personalized messaging is the best.
Personalization is a key component of your digital customer experience strategy. You need data. It is possible to create more relevant customer experiences throughout the customer journey by combining data from both first- and second-party sources and reporting these insights to sales, marketing, and CRM. Each step can have it’s own messaging that is tailored to the individual.
Customers are increasingly demanding greater control over their data, and governments have begun to legislate to protect privacy. We’ve seen industry giants like Google or Apple make moves to significantly lower the use of third-party data for digital customer experience tools.
These developments might not pose a problem for your digital customer service strategy, as it may seem. McKinsey explains that great customer experiences are actually driven by first-party data, which is information that you receive from your customers under their permission.
McKinsey states: “Highly customized customer experiences, when offered millions of customers using proprietary data are hard for competitors to copy. These experiences can help businesses to not only differentiate themselves but also gain a competitive advantage by being executed well.
Some of the most popular digital experience platforms now include integrated customer data platforms to help with personalization. The OpenText(tm), Experience Platform now comes with OpenText Experience CDP. This allows you to connect all customer data to create personalized experiences at each touchpoint. These customer data can be combined with digital customer analytics to provide more targeted communication and engagement.
The benefits of digital customer experience management
A digital customer experience strategy that maximizes customer data for personalization can have significant business benefits.
1. Deliver a ‘single source of the truth’ for each customer
Organizations often find themselves overwhelmed with customer-facing systems. These systems can span multiple departments and cover the entire customer journey. Many of these systems can create silos of customer data that prevent collation and sharing. Customers may be required to give their information again when they interact with new teams. Or, a team might be equipped with incorrect information. This can lead to a significantly reduced digital customer experience.
Digital experience platforms allow you to create a single source of truth for customer profiles. This breaks down silos and allows information flow between solutions and teams throughout the customer journey. This allows you to create experiences that are relevant to every customer at each touchpoint.
2. Create dynamic customer profiles
Your digital customer experience strategy should make your customers feel that you are listening to their needs and providing relevant content. It also helps them anticipate what they will want next.
Once you have a single source for truth for every customer, you can create a dynamic customer profile. This will allow you to track each customer’s journey through your company from one department to the next. As your customer interacts with you, the profile changes in real-time. This allows digital customer experiences to evolve instantly as more information about the customer becomes available.
3. Achieve personalization at scale
To reap the full benefits, you need to be able to personalize at scale. According to McKinsey personalization with large or multiple segments of customers can often lead to a 2% increase in total sales. It requires more than the ability to collect customer data from multiple sources. This also means that you must be able to apply AI/machine learning to this data. Digital customer experience management tools need to be able to handle large data sets in order to provide insights for every customer.
4. Improve experience across the customer lifecycle
While digital customer experience is often viewed as the domain of your marketing team but extends beyond that. An enterprise-wide digital customer service program can be a benefit to all customer-facing functions. It uses customer data for engagement and other decisions throughout the customer journey. This allows you to have access to the most current, accurate customer data in your digital experience platform. It also allows for full integration with related systems like content management, customer relationship management (CRM), ERP, and even customer journey matching.
Also read: 10 Best Big Data CRM Tools To Grow Business Sales
5. Improve governance of customer data
The GDPR and CCPA set a high standard for personal data protection and there is more legislation in the works. Companies must be careful about how they collect, store, manage and distribute customer data. This is unacceptable. Solutions such as OpenText® Experience CDP allow you to centralize all customer data. This allows you to use a single governance policy for the entire customer journey. It can also be audited when necessary.
Types of digital customer experience services
There are many parts that go into delivering a great customer experience, especially digitally. New digital customer experience technologies are constantly emerging that can increase your customer relationships’ breadth and depth. This creates a complicated environment that can prove difficult to navigate for even the largest organizations.
Companies are turning to the best-of-breed companies for digital experience to create exceptional customer experiences and smooth customer journeys. There are many options for digital customer experience services available. The partner you choose will be determined by your business needs.
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