Digital transformation is demanding a fresh approach to customer engagement. Failure to provide adequate levels of customer engagement can be as detrimental as a failure to transform, here’s why.
As Australia’s mid-market IT and business leaders grapple with infrastructure modernisation in order to stay competitive, they must also keep a close eye on customer engagement.
The smart device revolution has given everyone access to digital, but access was just the start of a new engagement paradigm. Nowadays, customers are much more prepared to engage and transact across digital channels in addition to in-person and over the phone.
Multi-channel is now a must
With buying and engagement patterns changing fast, there are new risks of not offering a digital customer engagement options and a multi-channel approach.
First up, there will always be a certain type of customer who sticks to a preferred channel, regardless of the options. There is no need to throw out in-person or phone engagement to go digital, and vice versa.
With buying and engagement patterns changing fast, there are new risks of not offering a digital customer engagement options and a multi-channel approach.
The change is most apparent among people who will quickly switch channels for convenience or when looking for an alternative service provider. For this type of customer digital is a must as they will be active across Web, mobile and emerging channels such as wearable technology.
Multi, or “omni-channel”, is a necessary approach to any customer experience modernisation program with the goal being a frictionless, enjoyable buying experience across multiple digital platforms, including Web, mobile, social, voice and in-person.
Integration at the core
Behind the scenes, to succeed at digital engagement, the organisation needs to have a good level of integration every step of the way.
Integration options include:
- Marketing activity: Where are customers coming from and how are they rating the brand?
- Sales activity: What is the call to action? It is important to see what marketing works and how customers are completing a sale.
- Communication and feedback: Have good feedback options and communicate well at every step in the engagement, including the ability, but not the necessity, for people to call you if anything is going haywire.
- Partner for fulfilment: You don’t need to try and take on a whole supply chain and there are many options for connecting to a digital fulfilment partner and back end. Connecting this to your back end and then fulfilment via strong and traceable automation is key to avoiding the “50 lane highway” issue.
- Consistent view: In most cases you can keep and existing engagement channel, but more integration is needed to prevent people having to treat each channel as separate. Having to explain “who you are” and why they are engaging is a source of huge frustration for customers.
Customer engagement has changed forever and prudent organisations will use digital to improve the experience across the whole architecture, not just one touch point.
– Anthony Woodward is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Accelera
