Digital transformation is a trendy buzzword these days, and every business wants to offer digital services to its customers. But before undertaking any such initiative, one has to consider the goals one hopes to achieve. Most large organizations with existing legacy systems and siloed data just want an automated digital alternative for existing manual services, incrementally creeping forward towards a full digital transformation of all their processes. But here’s the question - are your customers willing to wait?
The goal of every digital transformation project, no matter how broad or targeted at a specific process, should be to improve the customer experience.
This is a list of digital transformation projects that will help you improve the customer experience, instead of simply automating an existing manual process.
1. Identify customers and personalize engagement.
Get customers to provide identity and purpose of the visit when they schedule an appointment. This means that you already know who they are and what they are coming for.
It helps personalize customer engagement if everyone getting in line has already been identified and segmented as per service, demographics and other factors.
2. Engage customers on the digital channel of their choice.
The whole point of a digital transformation exercise is to meet clients where they prefer to be. You can’t just offer online application forms on your website, while your customers spend all their time on Whatsapp or Facebook.
Start engaging customers on your website, email, mobile apps, social networks, etc., and make it a uniform brand experience for all these channels.
3. Continue the conversation seamlessly across channels and devices.
Now that you’re doing multichannel customer engagement, it’s easy to take it one step further and go omnichannel. This means that no matter what channel your customer contacts you on at any stage of the process, the conversation can be seamlessly picked up by any staff member who responds from where it was in the previous interaction. The customer flow and journey are uninterrupted, even while they and you are switching from website to branch, phone and then exit via email or app.
That’s about as close a digital strategy as you can get to offline, in-person customer engagement by a group of employees who are all aware of who the customer is, what they want, and how to respond. If you are omnichannel, then you are omnipresent.
4. Collect feedback through smiley buttons, NPS or other means.
It’s incredibly simple to get feedback from your customers on digital channels, but most businesses choose not to bother their online visitors with that extra step.
The simple fact is - if your customers are not happy with your product or service, then you have to know, so you can fix the broken customer experience. Add on feedback mechanisms such as smiley buttons or an NPS push notification, and you’ll hear alarm bells ringing if customers start complaining.
5. Optimize your website pages for language, relevancy and speed.
SEO is probably not something you want to think about at this point, but you can at least offer your digital visitors a better experience. It’s about fixing simple UX issues, such as fast-loading webpages, multi-language options, and relevancy of the content that your targeted audience wants to read about.
Did you know that a visitor to your website doesn’t wait more than 3 seconds while a page is loading? After that, you’ve lost a potential customer. How many more customers do you think you’d get if your webpages start loading just 1 sec faster? Do you know what is your website’s Pagespeed score, and why it matters? Just check it out here.
What if a large group of your target customers are in a foreign country? How many more customers would you get by offering a translated version of your website in their language?
Make it easier for people to find you online, and easier to access your site and find what they were looking for. That is what Google will also reward you for, with more visitors.
6. Set up an instant notification system for fast response to customer queries.
Integrate website contact and feedback forms with your customer management system. Establish a way to move leads instantly, in real-time, from all digital channels to the right team member - on their phone.
Make your team respond instantly to any and all customer queries. That by itself improves the customer experience and metrics such as first contact resolution (FCR) rate, regardless of how the staff tackles the issue after the first contact.
7. Use AI chatbots to provide standard responses to customers.
Another popular digital transformation project these days is the use of an AI chatbot. You can reduce response time by offering a chatbot that instantly answers frequently asked questions. Integrating your chatbot with the above instant-response tool will further improve the digital customer experience.
Anytime the chatbot is unable to satisfactorily answer a question, it should be seamlessly handed over to a human customer service rep. Ensure that the human representative who takes over has the entire transcript of the chat with the AI chatbot as a reference, so that the customer doesn’t have to repeat everything again.
Make use of technology to improve the customer experience and the human element in it. Talk to your customers when they are looking to speak with you. That should be the ultimate achievement of digital transformation.
December 16th, 2019 ·