Have You Checked the Boxes for an Excellent Customer Experience?

The key insights shared this year will be cornerstones to succeed in transforming your brand’s customer experiences in order to meet growing expectations. Here’s a compilation of the insights on improving customer experience management, data management, and digital transformation, plus some tips on how to prepare for the new GDPR regulations.

Continuously improving customer experiences

With so many options available to users in the digital landscape, customer loyalty is becoming fragile. In this climate, customer trust is a precious commodity that comes from positive user experiences. It is built through a collection of consistent, compelling and personalised interactions that a customer has with a brand across all touchpoints throughout buyer journeys. If a brand wants to compete and be successful over time, it’s crucial to deliver a bespoke and positive customer experience.

The key steps to an optimized customer experience involve putting customers first, understanding customer needs through informed research and feedback, identifying key customer touchpoints and managing them holistically. This means developing a customer-centric organisation and understanding that successful customer experience management (CXM) is a continuous process that requires agile adaptation and development along the way.

Extracting the right data insights

Deriving the right insights from data is especially relevant right now. Data insights gathered from users that interact with businesses across customer journeys allow brands to build a picture of who their users really are, their pain points, and what specifically motivates them.

Content shock and the large volume of information being distributed online means that brands are facing real challenges in extracting the right insights from the data they have, knowing what to measure in the first place, then how to draw useful and relevant insights from that data and then channel it into customer-focused marketing. Crucially, data insights and resulting creative decisions could help organisations to stay relevant and competitive in a rapidly developing climate.

Leveraging data through machine learning

Given that digital marketers are dealing with huge amounts of data and constantly shifting customer expectations, machine learning could help us to learn from this data. In coming years, delivering personalised experiences for customers will become increasingly significant. Our users are leaving clues and information every time they carry out actions online. It's now up to digital marketers to take advantage of that. Machine learning is providing businesses with the opportunity to leverage valuable data to truly understand customers, and to continue to develop that understanding through social and behavioural developments.

Coping with complexity in digital transformation

A key reason businesses are failing in digital transformation is rising complexity in software and business structures. Managing complexity has become crucial to business change programmes, both in terms of software complexity and business complexity. Digital transformations inherently hold many layers of complexity, and therefore, should be considered as more than the sum of their parts, and navigated in a way that carefully manages complexity with the correct processes. Indeed, organisations must not only reduce complexity, but also gain clarity in the midst of essential complexity, with the end goal of optimising customer experience.

Embedding agility

The Agile movement has made its way into the enterprise world. To be at the forefront of technological development, large enterprises are turning to agile methodologies to operate with the same flexibility found within startups. Simply applying agile approaches to processes, however, does not guarantee success. How can agility be leveraged to the benefit of the enterprise? It’s key to remember that agility is about mindset rather than resources or tools.

Enterprises need to do it right by fostering communication, flexibility and fast delivery, and avoid employing yet another process.They need to carry out the planning properly and re-evaluate their plan over time, focus on goals and measure results. They need to keep it simple, making sure they have the setup needed.

With new GDPR regulations due to be enforced on May 25th 2018, the impacts of these new rules on digital marketing have been a popular concern. Organisations now need to prepare effectively for these new regulations to ensure compliance. However, for forward-thinking companies, the incoming regulations could actually have positive effects in helping to secure a competitive advantage in digital marketing, especially regarding moment data and macro data.

Despite this, it’s clear that businesses will need to ensure that the collection and management of EU citizens’ personal data is a top priority to ensure compliance, in particular, regarding new consent management restrictions. By improving the quality and nature of the data that marketers are gathering from users, the incoming GDPR regulations could, in fact, help businesses to provide customers with even further personalised journeys and brand experiences.

Enabling personalised, omnichannel customer experiences

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of marketing channels, and therefore, ensuring seamless transitions across multiple touchpoints is more crucial than ever. Businesses now need to develop the capabilities to deliver personalised and automated customer experiences so that their brands can win, time after time. Organisations must move beyond simply investing in digital marketing tools or a technology stack: They will need to apply a more holistic approach to managing customer experience, connecting the dots between digital marketing platforms, marketing automation, analytics, breaking down silos and bridging the gap between marketing and technology.

Businesses must choreograph consumer experiences in which moment-by-moment brand interactions are rewarding for both customers and organisations themselves. This means breaking down channel silos and ensuring consumer data can journey with them, resulting in a personalised omnichannel marketing approach that places the consumer and their seamless brand interactions at its heart.

Succeeding in digital transformation

Digital has fundamentally changed the way people consume media, develop brand preferences, and choose products. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting brands and consumers, and reinforcing the need for businesses to undergo digital transformations to stay relevant and competitive.

The building blocks for implementation start with making sure content is relevant and delivered in an intuitive and digestible interaction. Then the technological and data elements can be implemented, and the operational processes optimised to support new digital touch-points, and finally, the organisation’s culture may also need to be transformed. Technology alone is just one part of the digital transformation story.

Forging ahead to exceed customer expectations

Managing customer experience is a continuous process, particularly if a brand wants to win time and time again in this ever-changing environment. There are multiple elements to consider on the journey to transformation, and more learnings to discover in the future. Tune in next year for more insights on how to transform your customer experiences.

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