Partner Article

Creating customer experiences fit for digital natives

A viral video demonstrates the experience today’s consumers expect. A man hands his little girl, about a year old, a tablet, and she gleefully swipes the screen to turn its digital pages. He then takes the tablet and hands her a magazine. She swipes its pages, and nothing happens. After repeated attempts to turn the page, she begins to cry in frustration.

This little girl is a true digital native, weaned on technology that the rest of us have learned to embrace later in life. But embrace it we have! According to the State of Retailing Online report, store-based retailers reported an average 135 percent year-over-year growth in sales from smartphones and 86 percent from tablets in 2013. Consequently, more than half were planning to make mobile efforts a top priority in 2014, focusing on key areas like responsive design and mobile site optimization. If you’re not one of them, you will not be delivering the experience consumers expect, and they are likely to look elsewhere.

What they are looking for, whether they are consciously aware of it or not, is omni-channel consistency: a consistent quality of experience across all interaction points on their purchase journey. This unified encounter of your brand from PC to mobile to tablet to physical store is necessary, but it’s not easy. It requires significant executive buy-in, technology investment, organizational change and frontline training. Most organizations feel overwhelmed when considering where to start transforming their business. Fortunately, the same demographic and technology trends pushing your company towards omni-channel can be harnessed to help you unlock which initial steps are the most important to your customers.

If anything has encouraged the basic human desire for instant gratification, it’s the instant-access, 24/7 nature of the Internet. What used to require a trip to the library or the video store now requires just a few seconds and clicks. Consequently, consumers now want to provide instant feedback about their interaction with your brand – especially if that interaction was negative. According to a recent research study by eDigitalResearch, 75 percent of consumers stated that they now expect to be able to provide feedback on their experiences “in the moment” beyond email and via both digital and analog channels such as social media, feedback surveys and live chat or telephone support.

What should you change first in your omni-channel implementation path? You will learn what experiences to focus on changing first as you listen to the voice of the customer (VOC) at key transactional points in each interaction channel. This is called an Omni-channel Listening Strategy and it gives you a strategic roadmap for where you should apply your investment to make the highest returns. Your customers are desperately seeking ways to tell you the hot points that are causing them the most frustration. But how is this done on a practical level?

A VOC method that is proving effective for leading telecoms is to send short SMS surveys to subscribers as soon as they have activated a plan. The survey asks about user friendliness of their online customer portal or the quality of support delivered by the field or contact center. Customer feedback is gathered in real time and immediately routed to the frontline to take corrective action. Dashboards also conclusively highlight key pain points.

A method that works for the banking sector is to use VOC listening to identify process changes to in-branch service and online banking, and to reduce frustration from account opening and loan application processes. There is no guesswork in this process since the customers are specifically highlighting the areas for immediate improvement in the omni-channel customer experience.

It’s important at this point to look before you leap – in other words, to lay the groundwork before implementing your omni-channel strategy. Today’s consumers are hungry to give you feedback, and it is easier than ever for them to do so efficiently through their mobile device. However, your company must be operationally ready to absorb and process tremendous volumes of inbound data, garner actionable insight and then disseminate it to the frontline where they are empowered to take corrective action with the affected customer. With today’s socially connected consumer, the backlash is significant from being perceived as paying lip service to customer feedback. Avoid this risk by partnering with a reputable CEM platform provider with deep experience set in your industry.

An omni-channel strategy is essential in this high-touch age. Digital natives expect instant customer interaction and a consistent experience across all touchpoints, but you need to be smart about your implementation. Get executive buy-in, commit to investing in the needed technology, and prepare for organizational change and for training your frontline. In order to pinpoint your customer pain points, create a VOC program so that you can hear directly from your customers about what they want and how they experience your brand. Their feedback will fuel your forward progress.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Syed Hasan .