How Digital Transformation Is Changing Customer Experience (CX)

The customer experience (CX) means everything to businesses, whether they are a digital e-commerce store or a brick-and-mortar location. High brand equity no longer means as much to customers as it once did. This means businesses have less time to get the experience just right.

In the U.S., 59% of customers will leave after several bad experiences. Managing the customer experience requires a multichannel approach and user-friendly technology. With digital transformation strategies, businesses can personalize CX and reduce the risk of driving customers away with bad experiences.

This article will address how digital transformation can help businesses create a competitive advantage. It will also discuss how Cobrowsing and Session Replays address the root of customer issues and inspire customer loyalty.

What is digital transformation?

The evolution of technology brings advantages to small businesses and enterprises, but CX remains a fundamental metric of success. Digital transformation is a company-wide effort to transform products, strategies, and business processes using computer technology. Typically, most businesses will find a flaw and look inward to find a purpose for digital transformation.

To understand the impact of digital transformation on the customer experience, companies must adjust their culture and adapt.

Why should businesses undergo digital transformation?

Every business wants success and should provide excellent customer service. But the main concern is the survival of the company. The COVID pandemic brought every organization's flaws to the surface. The event forced them to adapt quickly to a fluid market.

With supply chain issues, heightening market pressure, and expanding customer demands, adopting efficiency to transform CX became necessary. With excellent CX strategies, companies get long-term benefits like:

Increased customer satisfaction and retention
More data and better insights
Higher ROI from marketing and customer support

Many business leaders argue that digital transformation boils down to improving CX. While that’s true, it also offers opportunities to improve client interactions.

Increased customer satisfaction and retention

We’re fortunate that CX and digital transformation go hand-in-hand. But, how does digital transformation drive the customer experience? There are many principles that everyone should follow, but they rarely translate to an all-in-one solution.

Organizations can use personalized solutions, AI technology, and other pathways to promote higher satisfaction and retain loyal customers. With excellent customer service, 78% of customers said they would return even if they made a mistake. When companies offer experiences that address the customer’s unique situation, doing business is much easier.

This means organizations engaging in digital transformation must focus on the whole domain rather than a single process. Doing the opposite is like improving a mobile app’s registration process but not the dashboard or its features.

More data for better insights to make effective decisions

For business leaders to digitize the customer experience, they need to know where to improve it. Without digital transformation, data sources have no organization. Better data insights come from:

A unified approach
Consistent data collection
Robust data protection
Quick data translation

A stable platform for companies to analyze customer data makes them more informed about which opportunities they should pursue.

More ROI on marketing, customer support, etc.

Naturally, with better data collection comes lower risk and the cost of doing business. With the cost of business coming down, companies can focus on maximizing their CX. Ideally, a brand will see higher returns on their investments that come in the form of:

Understanding the customer and getting personal
Bigger investments in solutions for customer support
Digital transformation of social media and mobile apps

Digital transformation creates layers of success. Each layer offers access to more opportunities through continued innovation and customer support. According to Deloitte, 41% of companies with higher digital transformation levels reported improved sales and marketing.

How does digital transformation help businesses create better customer experiences?

Businesses know enhancing CX should be a priority for digital transformation. Still, only 6% saw significant improvements from their efforts in 2023. With such low expectations, business leaders continue to innovate rapidly.

Rapid innovations made sense during the pandemic. If CIOs continue pressuring their IT departments, it will lead to poorly integrated customer experience technology. Instead, companies should engage in a steady transformation process that maximizes benefits to them, their stakeholders, and their customers.

In short, the brand should focus on investing in opportunities that improve their customer’s experiences. Fortunately, investments like these usually align with:

More personalization or self-service options
Proactive, not reactive customer support
Better relationships across the board
Unified omnichannel experiences

Once digital transformation is underway, it’s much easier for brands to add more capabilities without the headache.

Increased personalization

Digital transformation spurs companies to identify their customers’ pain points for inspiration to add more capabilities. But it’s a tall order for companies who aren’t embracing digital transformation. The customer base expects brands to give them an individualized experience no matter how they access the services.

Better still, if their favorite brands are collecting data, they use that information to:

Understand who customers are and what they want
Make recommendations based on their past orders
Create a better multi-channel experience

Having the methods to collect this data is a step in the right direction. But without a way to execute the goals, it’s just data. Businesses need a CRM to take advantage of customer data.

Proactive customer support

Brands realize the customer is a driving force for digital transformation technologies. Because the customer is the driving force, the company should figure out how to help the customer before they need support. Proactive customer support techniques are the only way to help the customer before contacting them.

Many firms still aren’t proactive with their customers because they are reactive departments. However, about 73% of customers who had a great experience with a proactive customer service call saw a positive change in company perception. At least 87% of customers say they want proactive contact from a company.

This means brands need to get on board with using technical support software that can improve the customer experience.

Better relationships

An “always-on” approach naturally places more demands on customer support teams. Should support teams chase down customers and call or email them for feedback? Probably not.

Even though 49% of customers still prefer calls, you can establish a better relationship with multi-channel approaches. Customer feedback is invaluable. Companies need it to gain the proper insight to improve.

Businesses have other approaches they can use.

Online feedback tools
Customer surveys
Automated Contact forms

As business technology evolves, it empowers customers to get what they want when they want it. And better customer service providers will use AI to match expectations and maintain response times.

Cohesive omni-channel journeys

The central message of digital transformation is to provide a consistent experience for the customer across any platform. As it turns out, this syncs nicely with improving your brand’s omni-channel experience. If customers encounter problems, they want quick resolutions without explaining their issues in five different ways.

It’s no surprise that 33% of customers say that explaining their problems multiple times is poor customer service. The customer journey is always happening online, in-store, or on mobile apps. Creating a consistent experience takes a seamless technological approach.

Digital transformation technologies

No technology allows businesses to read their customer’s minds. Customers will reveal their intentions through specific actions. Technology solutions enable business leaders to prepare and predict what customers need by using:

CRM systems
Multi-channel CX software
Technical support software
AI chatbots

The above methods can provide a stable multi-channel experience to inspire customers to become company advocates. Let’s expand on each of these options.

CRM systems

Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs) are online tools that simplify and centralize customer engagement. These systems combine customer data from different sources, typically through integrations or IoT devices. In return, companies get a full view of their journey.

CRMs reduce the legwork it takes to monitor multiple customer channels. These tools use the insights to make sales and marketing more efficient. Many CRMs also use trained AI models to analyze data, provide personalized marketing, and anticipate proactive support needs.

Multi-channel CX software

Multi-channel Customer Experience (CX) software integrates a brand’s websites, social media, email, and physical stores into one lean system. The goal is to deliver a memorable experience to the customer, regardless of the channels they use. As companies digitize themselves, their customer-preferred communication channels become more diverse.

Multi-channel CX software helps companies meet customers where they are, enhancing the overall experience with seamless interactions everywhere. Using multi-channel software offers a better viewpoint into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. This information allows teams to design more targeted marketing strategies on any platform.

Technical support software

Technical support software, like Fullview, has built-in features like session replays, cobrowsing, and console logs to speed up ticket resolution. These features remove sources of customer frustration. Fullview’s Cobrowsing and console logs provide a simplified view of any issues.

With Cobrowsing, agents can start a simple video call with users live in their their app. Agents can take control of a user’s screen and resolve any issues quickly.

Agents can also use annotation tools to help users focus on specific features as they assist them. With session replays, CX teams can auto-record user sessions and watch them back to see what caused the issue.

Representatives can see:

What pages users visited
Where they clicked
Whether they showed frustration signals like rage clicking
Whether they ran into errors or bugs while using the product or service

Console logs help CX representatives work backward from the data to create better customer experiences and troubleshoot effortlessly. Console logs can also uncover flaws in software design that need tweaking. Assisting customers this way creates the personalized experiences they want, driving satisfaction and loyalty.

AI and conversational intelligence

Many people have high hopes for what conversational AI tools can do for businesses. Customers want AI to make customer service quality better. About 48% of customers believe AI should save them time when they contact a company.

AI-powered chatbots may not imitate a human conversation this year, but can save customers and companies time. Once trained to recognize phrases that reflect customer intent, AI can live chat and send replies that solve problems. And for those worried about the ROI on chatbots, the future’s looking bright.

AI chatbots can save companies 30% per year in customer support costs. With those cost savings, it’s no wonder many businesses want to incorporate chatbots into their omnichannel strategy.

Conclusion

Business life is steadily becoming more digital every year, giving way to an always-connected society. As businesses adjust, they can keep the customer experience top-of-mind with CRMs, multi-channel software, Cobrowsing and session replays, and AI-powered chatbots. With a better understanding of customer preferences, businesses can personalize their interactions and anticipate proactive support needs.

As customer demands drive more change, companies must stay open-minded. With Fullview.io, brands can review customer interactions and resolve issues quickly. Use Fullview's features to create a continuous digital channel experience that promotes customer loyalty and drives growth.

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Sources last checked on: 17-Nov-2023