Customer experience has a dramatic impact on a company’s profitability and public image, especially in the most competitive industries and business niches. A positive experience can transform a new, one-time customer into a “regular,” while also generating positive buzz that can drive business forward. Conversely, a negative customer experience can be disastrous, with bad online reviews and harmful social media chatter causing irreparable damage to a company’s reputation. Fortunately, there are a number of measures that a company can take to improve customer experience using Digital Transformation.
How Does Digital Transformation Improve Customer Experience?
Customer experience refers to an individual’s impression and overall feeling after they have some form of engagement with a business. This can occur during a shopping trip, during a home visit from a service provider, as the result of a website visit, an engagement on social media or as the result of an in-person chat, call, virtual chat or email with a company representative.
Digital Transformation projects can bring significant improvements to a company’s processes, workflows and engagements, which in turn, may lead to vastly better customer experiences. This translates into greater long term profitability and a more competitive standing within the marketplace. Digital Transformation can be used to overhaul and improve virtually every aspect of a company’s digital presence, from an improved website, to enterprise software that leads to faster and more efficient workflows, or business process automations that lead to a reduction in the incidence of human error.
Identifying Challenges and Pain Points That Lead to Bad Customer Experience
The first step toward improving customer experience is to identify the areas where your business is falling short. You must determine what aspects of an experience or interaction are influencing the customer’s impression of your business. Here are a few key questions to consider as you evaluate customer experience.
- What processes or experiences leave customers feeling frustrated?
- Are there certain areas of the customer experience that leave them feeling underwhelmed or disappointed?
- Where can you make changes that will engage customers more effectively?
- Are you effectively engaging customers (or prospective customers) effectively on social media? On your mobile app? On your website? In store?
Companies can get a good idea of where they’re falling short by reading negative reviews, speaking with customers to elicit feedback or engaging customers with a survey. You may also review competitors to determine where they are excelling, identifying areas where you can make improvements that will give your business a competitive advantage in terms of customer experience.
Using Digital Transformation to Improve Customer Experience
A well-architected development strategy and a strategic Digital Transformation project can go a long way toward improving customer experience and changing the public’s perception of a company. There are three key components for bringing about a better customer experience:
Communication – Good communication is key for delivering a positive customer experience, from setting accurate expectations, to answering questions and addressing concerns, to turning a negative event into something more positive by communicating effectively. Your team members must be well-versed and trained on how to communicate properly, when to engage and how to handle challenging situations in a way that improves the ultimate outcome.
Collaboration – Collaborating with the client or customer is essential if they are going to walk away with a positive feeling about your business. The client wants to feel as though they’re part of the process, not an afterthought. This also ensures that the client’s needs and preferences are considered in whatever product, solution or service your company is offering.
Training – Employees must be well-trained and well-informed. This positions them to succeed as they engage prospective and current customers. Your business should have standard protocols and processes for various types of client or customer engagements.
Here are a few examples of how Digital Transformation can be used to deliver a more positive experience to your customers
Social Media – More effective social media management can lead to a vastly improved customer experience, as it’s a chance to engage in a way that leaves a great impression or you can reverse a not-so-good impression, turning it into something more positive. Social media also provides an opportunity to address the negative in a positive way. In the world of public relations, the manner in which you respond to something negative can go a long way toward generating positive chatter.
Mobile Apps – Mobile applications are a key engagement tool for many companies and they can easily influence customer experience. A positive app user experience generally translates into a positive customer experience, so this underscores the importance of comprehensive user testing for your enterprise mobile app. App analytics can also offer some very useful insights into user paths and how users are engaging on the app. This data will also help you to identify the areas where users are dropping off due to challenges or awkward user interface elements. You can also leverage your mobile app as a platform for soliciting feedback from users, gathering useful information on the user experience.
AI and Chatbots – Artificial intelligence-driven tools and chatbots can be very engaging, bridging the gap by chatting with existing and prospective customers. This is an efficient way to answer questions 24/7, reduce wait times, address concerns and pull visitors into the sales funnel with minimal effort on the part of your human team members. The key is to ensure that your chatbot technology is well-developed and tailored to suit your unique needs; otherwise, you could end up with a bot that’s more frustrating than it is useful.
Analytics and Cloud Solutions – An informed customer who can access information with ease is usually a happy customer. As such, easily-accessible data and analytics / insights access hold the power to inform and convert a prospective customer into a loyal and satisfied returning customer. You can achieve this by migrating data into a cloud-based platform where customers can access this information from any location with an internet access. Additionally, a company may opt to add an analytics dashboard to an SaaS platform or other similar service offering. These data insights can go a long way toward keeping customers informed, proving the value of your company’s service offerings in a quantifiable manner.
These are just a few examples of Digital Transformation projects that can revolutionize your company’s ability to deliver a positive customer experience. You’ll see improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, which leads to more sales and a higher profit margin. A company that delivers a great customer experience also becomes more competitive in their industry and business space. This is especially true if you opt to make changes in areas where your competitors are excelling so you bring yourself into a position of equal footing. Strategically, a company may also become more competitive by excelling in areas where competing businesses are failing. In essence, you can fill a gap that has been left open by your competitors.
Finding Success With Digital Transformation for a Better Customer Experience
To succeed in your efforts to improve customer experience through Digital Transformation, you must ensure that everyone is on-board at your business by offering training and orientation sessions. This will allow you to make the most of your technology and the opportunity as a whole.
You’ll also want to ensure you pursue all available opportunities for systems integration, so data flows between various platforms in an automated manner. Business process automation and workflow automation can also be advantageous as a component of these Digital Transformation projects, as you can streamline processes in a way that improves efficiency, boosts productivity and reduces human error. This technology can also be implemented to reduce wait times and even deliver certain services on a 24/7 basis.
Achieving a Solid ROI With Digital Transformation Development Projects
To achieve your Digital Transformation goals, you’ll need an experienced team that knows how to develop technologies that will address your pain points and challenges. That’s our specialty here at 7T, where we believe that a well-strategized IT strategy and Digital Transformation project can bring about great results. But you need the right development team with experience architecting innovative solutions for enterprise clients and startups alike. At 7T, we take a collaborative approach to enterprise development projects. We engage the client from the discovery phase to deployment. Our many Digital Transformation service offerings include process automation solutions, enterprise software development for ERP and CRM systems (among others), along with SaaS development for web apps and mobile apps, amongst others. We work extensively with cutting-edge technologies as we strive to help clients solve pain points, improve efficiency and achieve their business goals.
We’re guided by the approach of “Digital Transformation Driven by Business Strategy.” As such, the 7T development team works with company leaders who are seeking to solve problems and drive ROI through Digital Transformation and innovation. We then provide collaborative, multi-phased and impactful Digital Transformation solutions.
7T has offices in Dallas, Houston and Austin, but our clientele spans the globe. If you’re ready to learn more about Digital Transformation and what we can do for your business, contact 7T today.
