How to approach a new customer experience with digital technology ?
How to approach defining a new customer experience?
The english dictionary defines the noun “Experience” as, an event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.
Let us step back and reflect on our daily routines and understand how much of digital technology do we use. Today, we leverage some form of digital technology in almost all our daily interactions be it:
- connecting with friends, family, colleagues
- consuming news, entertainment, recreation games
- purchasing, travel, tourism, health care etc
These interactions leave an impression on us and we individually define it as our experience. Businesses need to focus on having the correct digital presence rather than “digitally present as well” because the digital platforms are the most used medium by customers and they have their own nuances.
Businesses should define the touch points they have with their customers, decide the critical ones to have on digital and leverage data for the various journeys the customer does with you, while:
- Searching for your services and products
- Considering the offerings
- Evaluating the options
- Interacting
Being searchable, social, informative, and reachable backed with data insights should drive your website design, the mobile app, social pages, directory listing and many more digital decisions to arrive at a new customer experience.
Let me elaborate the above points with some examples to highlight how data can play a key role and help you navigate.
- Searching for your services & products:
Everyone searches online and for everything, whether you are a B2C or B2B enterprise your product or services is being searched online. The customer today is informed, and it is popularly believed that 70-80% of the buying decision journey happens through the search online and the information thus obtained. Keywords, hashtags, review comments, frequent words, topic clusters etc all of this is data that can provide you contextual insights to address this part of the customer experience journey.
- Considering the offerings:
When a potential customer moves into the next stage of their buying journey, which is often named as the consideration stage in the middle of the marketing funnel, the customer needs relevant information. Here in lies the usage of data. Relevant information would mean relevant to me, any product or service will have different customer segments, different customer needs, and different customer personas. Being able to have data to define these sub segments and being able to present information accordingly becomes critical. For example, let us say you are selling online technology skill classes for professionals, it would be a good idea to have 2-3 personas defined in know more page, and help navigate the audience to it, say if you are a fresher, if you are a mid-career professional or a senior executive professional to different pages and information’s. The data that you already have or can obtain to define this becomes important.
- Evaluating the options
Considering and evaluating is usually seen by the same lens in the buying journey, however I would like to highlight this step in the middle of the marketing funnel being more nuanced than considering. I would say considering is the step where in information presented is consumed by the potential customer, and he or she may not have any seriousness of pursuing it. Evaluating is the step where in information presented is now being actively evaluated, and how do we know that? Data coming from the call-to-action events on your web or app downloads or CTAs in your social page which can indicate an intent. Going back to the example of selling online technology classes, the events of downloading brochures, starting a chat, time spent on the page or blogs with the clicks done, video clicks, filling up contact forms and many other such events can trigger data to be analysed at this stage.
- Interacting
Navigating from top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel and coming now to the bottom of the funnel in the customer journey where in the actual conversion happens, data needs to be looked differently. The above stages in the customer experience journey are assisting the potential customer in his or her buying decision, the actual conversion to a customer who purchases your product or service takes place with interactions with your business through channels and mediums established by you. Hence data from the channels or mediums such as email, web support, tele call, live salesperson meet, in showroom walk in, social channel, chat channel, or app where in you acquire your customer becomes very key.
Having relevant and good quality data around these stages of search, consideration, evaluation, and interaction becomes the foundation on which you can analysis and start building a new unique customer experience. Each product or service is different, some require high human touch point hence the search and consideration stages might be just more information focused, and the later one of evaluation and interaction could need more human interaction or live interaction focus. Some products and services may require low human touch hence all the stages of search, consideration, evaluation, and interaction could be online with minimal human interaction or live interaction focus.
One size cannot fit all, and in conclusion the linkages to the above stages in the buying journey is unique to the nature of your product or service and the correct data behind it will help you define the most effective channels, mediums, interactions, and customer experience needed to lower your customer acquisition costs.
Blog disclaimer: This is a professional weblog, and we have invited experts to share their thoughts, expertise , perspectives and knowledge. The opinions expressed here are purely representing their personal views and not those of any institution, employer or company.
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