Embedding Customer Experience at heart of Digital Transformation

If you look at traditional definition of Customer Experience (CX), its product of interaction that consumer has with an organization over period of their relationship. CX, if done right can lead to uptake of 5-10 % in revenue and 15-25% reduction in costs. Apart from having other benefits like reduced customer churn and better employee engagement.

Today, every organization wants to be an "Experience Organization". And people are willing to pay premium for those experiences. Since the time I have started using Uber, I have not gone back to hiring a local cab. Swiggys and Zomatos have been able to get higher percentage of my wallet share through sheer ease of ordering experience and personalization that they have embedded.

Whatever Business you are in, two things are ubiquitous -

a) Every Organization is a tech company and b) Experience is the new product.

Lets have look at what are the five critical success factors for getting customer experience right during digital transformation

1)     CX Vision - First and foremost having a customer experience vision is extremely essential. We need to put our customers in center and look at our purpose, need of their interaction with our organization and come up with a compelling vision. Articulate it in simple and crisp manner which our employees can relate to. Taking vision from boardroom to our employees’ DNA has to be driven by culture of the organization. For example customer experience vision of Disney is “We create happiness”

Customer Centric Vision aligned with organization's purpose and values, embedded into organizational culture

2)     From Touchpoints to “Journeys” – Most of organization focus on improving individual touch points that customers have with an organization. Reason being organizations are arranged as per functions. While customer experience is more horizontal. It cuts across silos. I recall when I was moving across cities, to have my fixed line connection moved I had to work with various departments of my telecom provider. All those individual touchpoints were optimized, giving me quality interactions. However, overall highly uncoordinated. Time for organizations to get themselves organized around customer journeys.

Manage end-to-end experience that shape customer's view

3)     “Market of one” – our customers, even those in B2B space are being used to customer experience being offered by amazon and Netflix and they are demanding same level of personalization, simplicity, intuitiveness and speed from us. Apart from competing on core products and services with our competition, we are also competing against these customer experiences. Get your analytic engines going to create that personalized experience for your customers.

Personalized experience driven by analytics

4)     Behavioral Psychology – According to research backed by data, even after CX has been improved using hard operational optimizations, it can be enhanced several notches up using elements of Behavioral psychology. So combining hard and soft approaches is crucial. Customer empathy, personal connect are the behaviors which every employee should be exhibiting and every touchpoint should be ingrained with. Constantly evaluate and invest in that human connect. For example, the same research mentioned giving our customers feeling of control as of one of the elements of Behavioral Psychology. And thus we have launched our Digital Catalog with Augmented Reality (AR) that allows customers to feel our products in their environment.

Empathy + Human Connect > Operations + Technology

5)     Business capabilities led Digital Platform – Most of the organizations tend to build their digital platform on basis of technologies like AI, ML, NLP, etc. I would propose arranging it around business capabilities like recommendation, personalization, forecasting, analytics, etc. While building our recommendation engine we realized we cut across technologies like ERP, CRM, ML and NLP. All these digital technologies when combined well are imperative to enhance customer experience. Getting it right will be key. Also, we need to ensure Omni-Channel experience is baked into digital platform architecture.

Business Capabilities led Digital Platform