Businesses world over have adopted a digital-first approach, not just by deploying the state-of-the-art tools and technologies to optimize business functions but also delivering omni-channel experiences for garnering a higher customer lifetime value.

Not only are customer choices, priorities and habits complex but so are their purchase patterns. It is becoming increasingly complex to identify the preferred channel used by the customer to access the web, visit a brand website or even read this blog post! Thus, there is an urgent need for businesses to leverage cutting-edge technology to optimize their customer journey and experiences for building a lasting relationship with their existing customers and reach out to the prospects.

In this blog, we will discuss how brands can optimize their digital customer experience initiatives to gain optimal returns in 2021 and beyond.

1) Understand your Audience & Their Needs

Most brands create communications that are centred around their own products- highlighting their distinct features, such a siloed messaging often creates a disconnect between the brand and its customers. To deliver impeccable customer experience, brands need to put in a deliberate effort to analyse customer pain points, conduct competitor research to position their brand as a one-stop solution addressing all their customer needs.

Understanding your audience is a pre-requisite for creating engaging customer experience that drives customer loyalty.

2) Evaluate Customer Expectations & Map Customer Behaviour

In this competitive world of business, where brands are in a constant battle to deliver digital customer experiences that stick and become the preferred choice of customers, it is imperative for brands to evaluate customer expectations and map customer behaviour.

As per a Salesforce report, 76% of customers expect your brand to understand their needs and expectations.

While customer expectations continue to evolve with time, research suggests that there are four major factors that determine the success of your customer experience strategy:

• Delivering omni-channel connected customer journeys
• Deploying personalization at every step of the customer lifecycle
• Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots for improving customer service
• Ensuring data security and protection

A brand’s customer experience strategy is driven by content, businesses must leverage their customer interactions to map customer behaviour and create unique customer communications across the entire customer lifecycle. Customer behaviour mapping helps brands develop a holistic perspective of the customer persona to create personalized content which improves customer experience.

3) Focus on Customer Engagements

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught brands the important lesson of compassion and the value of creating human connections. As more and more customers connect with brands digitally, brands must not focus on the volume of the content being delivered but on creating content that engages and inspires.

Brands must evaluate their content strategy to identify bottlenecks that are hindering their brand’s customer experience like:

• Absence of call-to-action
• Too much irrelevant content
• Different CX across multiple channels
• Complex customer feedback forms and many more

Leveraging a centralized customer experience platform can help brands deliver greater customer communications at scale and build lasting customer relationships.

4) Leverage Automation for Improving Customer Service

The rise of artificial intelligence and chatbots have enabled brands to deliver greater customer experiences across all customer touchpoints. Gone are the days when customers would patiently wait for hours on the customer service helplines to get their issues resolved! The tech-savvy customers of today prefer self-service portals with easy FAQs and 24-hour service.

According to IBM, chatbots can save up to 30% in customer support costs and can help businesses significantly improve their response time and answering up to 80% FAQs.

Leveraging automation and deploying chatbots will not only help businesses improve their customer service but also save operational costs and enable faster time to market.

5) Design & implement an omni-channel CX strategy

As per a report by Google, 85% of digital consumers start the purchasing workflow on one device yet finish it on another.

It is impossible for brands to decipher how and on what device their products and services are being accessed by the customers. Customers interact with your brand on multiple devices – mobiles, tablets, desktops, laptops etc, however they please and whenever they want, why is why, designing and implementing an omni-channel CX strategy is imperative for brands looking to maximize their business growth. Brands must deliver a seamless customer journey across multiple touchpoints to facilitate a cohesive customer service experience.

Customer experience in 2021 and beyond will encompass delivering personalized and contextual communications to the customers across all touchpoints and at the right time. It is time for brands to choose whether they’d want to adopt digital transformation and lead the pack or remain laggards.

Espire's endeavour to deliver customer-centric, digital & customer experience transformation solutions, and total experience by covering end-to-end services of multi-experience (MX), user experience (UX) and employee experience (EX) will continue to remain our consistent focus in the years to come as we march towards our mission to have positive impact to our client’s revenue and profitability.