CXOs are increasingly recognizing that stepping up their digital game would lead to more efficiency, innovation, and customer satisfaction. But the problem is, ‘where does one even begin?’ Experts recommend, it begins by mapping your digital customer experience journey – which is pretty much like a road trip. It helps brands in understanding their customers’ needs and behavior that can help improve the brand’s product or service.
In an exclusive chat with CXOToday, Vivian Gomes, Chief Marketing Officer, CSS Corp, discusses why mapping your digital customer journey is becoming more important than ever in the current scenario, the key challenges and opportunities in this space and how brands can develop their customer journey map, going forward.
Why is digital customer experience getting more important given the current business scenario?
Since the onset of the pandemic, the relevance of creating no-touch experiences has become even more apparent. The entire ecosystem today is evolving around virtual operations, especially, in the B2C context. Customers are becoming more empowered and self-service is a rising trend that is seeing applications in many fields as an enabler in facilitating seamless customer engagements. With this changing business landscape, mapping the customer journey becomes critical to creating digital experiences that will differentiate.
How and why is it important to map your digital customer experience journey?
Businesses today are dealing with digitally-savvy, conscious consumers whose purchase priorities and buying behavior have changed. With the digital highway wide open, brands are understanding the importance of using modern, new technologies such as real-time messaging tools, AI, automation, chatbots, and self-service among others to remove friction from customer interactions. Mapping the digital customer journey becomes imperative to ensure that customers receive a seamless experience and any impediments along the journey are removed.
What are the biggest obstacles companies are facing around digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience is a goal that is easier said than achieved. The key to providing best-in-class CX is personalization, which relies on gathering intelligence about the customer context. This calls for smooth and efficient data capture mechanisms and analytics-led decision making. With so much dark data that is not being used and functions operating in silos, organisations are still grappling with data ecosystems that are yet to mature. Also, many companies are caught in the web of technical debt which prevents them from creating agile infrastructure ecosystems needed to engage today’s consumers effectively. Finally, structuring CX calls for a cultural and mindset shift in the organization. All this takes time as there is an inertia that impedes progress.
What are your recommendations to CXOs looking at designing their CX strategy?
If we look at the evolving technology landscape, cloud technology, data analytics, AI, automation, and other next-gen technology enablers, which were considered cutting-edge before, have become table-stakes today. It is not only important to create a holistic plan to weave in these technologies into the overall strategy, but also to create champion change agents who will be willing to adapt to change and drive it at the grassroots levels. It is also important to build the right digital infrastructure that can support omnichannel experiences. Lastly, mapping the customer journey to create frictionless and empathetic brand experiences should be the way forward for companies.
It’s important to be mindful of trends in the digital customer experience space so that CXOs can quickly adapt their strategy to meet the latest industry insights and create an effective customer experience. In this video, Gomes talks about the recent trends in the digital customer experience space.
The original article was published here on March 5, 2021.
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