With the increasing trend in using internet as a service, Clients became more and more exigent and companies have begun to rethink their strategies to ensure they stay relevant to modern Customers.
After having all collaborators, products portfolio, processes and technological architecture aligned with the right digital mindset, it is the time to focus on how to deliver an unforgettable and profitable digital user experience. Having a good customer experience directly impacts customers brand loyalty, higher satisfaction levels, increase cross-selling and up-selling, word of mouth and consequently reduce churn.
To achieve these results, there are 6 essentials steps that companies must do to deliver a successful digital user experience:
1. Follow Industry Trends / Competitors’ Strategy / Customer Needs
All digital specialists should actively research on what are the national and international industry trends. This information will provide an overview of what it is going on in the entire industry, enabling to be always a step ahead or at least not to falling behind competitors.
It is also important to pay attention of what are the new functionalities and structural developments competitors are launching in a regular basis. This exercise is fundamental to be clear of what are the company digital channels value proposition and differentiating points from competitors.
Finally, to provide a good digital Customer experience appreciated by users, it is key to understand what their needs are and what is more intuitive to them. All this information should be collected by speaking directly to Customers, for instance through market studies (different types of interviews or focus groups) user testing or A/B testing.
2. Clear Customer Profile
To improve Customer experience, it is crucial to understand who my Customers are, where they are, what they do and what they like. Typically, this research work is made by marketing teams so they can precisely define their audience and engage directly where Customers are, by determining a clear set of messages to enhance experience in an effectiveness and efficiency way.
However, companies need to realise that their digital audience may differ to the Clients who mainly prefer to speak directly with a collaborator either on a branch or over the phone. In this regard, digital channels team must understand their users profile, preferences, priorities, necessities, pain points/ frustrations and motivations while using digital channels. With this information it will be possible to provide a better and customized Customer experience to target audience through digital channels and consequently increasing conversion rates.
Once more, if companies do not know to whom there are speaking with, how can they expect to get good results and Clients engaged? Mass-market communications and experiences are already pre-historic!
3. Omnichannel Platform
Omnichannel is the capability of providing the same set of services across all the channels, both digital and offline. This means that Clients should be able to perform the same operations, whether they use digital channels, contact centre, a branch, or any other available channels.
A true omnichannel platform should also provide real-time data synchronization between different channels. For instance, Customers can start an operation in one channel and finish it in another without the need to provide the same data repeatedly. Also, it is not convenient to Clients to start an operation in digital channels and be obligated to finish it in a branch or by contact the call centre.
Today’s consumers expect to do anything, anywhere, in the channel of their choosing with zero friction. So, one of the worst things that can happen is being inconsistency across Customer touchpoints.
4. Good Design System
Design system is a style guide with all the rules of visual elements, components, behaviours and branding that teams use to design and develop a product. Having a single source of truth will allow the delivery of a consistent Customer experience and message across all digital channels and make Customers feel contextualize in the brand each time reaches a new channel.
Brands guidelines that traditional companies used before are not applicable to digital since it does not consider usability. This leads to create experiences which damage users’ brand trust and negatively impacting their browsing behaviour. And we already know the result of a bad Customer experience: overall decrease Customer satisfaction and increase churn rate.
5. Acceptable Time-To-Market (TTM)
TTM stands for the length of time of the whole implementation process of a product, service or new functionality, starting with the generation of an idea, the whole design cycle, technical development and finally go-live.
Companies where digital is not in their essence are struggling in having an acceptable TTM. For instance, this happens because of the bureaucratic validation process each time a functionality is launched, some inabilities of core systems or by do not having multidisciplinary teams.
In terms of opportunity, the reduce in TTM can easily represent an increase of Customer satisfaction and experience, a step ahead competition, and depending on the product or service that it is being launched, a higher market share and a boost of margin revenue.
6. Be sure of Digital Channels Real Value
Digital ecosystem is not a fancy concept anymore, it is already a proven profitable channel to reinforce the engagement with existing Clients and bring new Customers on board.
As an example of financial services industry, Mastercard’s 2019 Digital banking Study reveals how crucial mobile banking has become to most people in Europe, finding that 84% of Europeans use mobile banking on a regular basis which encompasses, account management, transfers and payments. Also, year by year there is a notorious increasing in the willingness of purchase banking products through the respective digital channels.
These trends should lead companies to foster the cross-sell and up-sell of banking products turning this point of contact way more profitable. Moreover, digital channel has a lower cost-to-serve than another channel. Taking advantage of this tool is wisdom!