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6 Ways Digital Transformation Improves Customer Experience

Contributed Article by Himanshu Yadav

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The use of digital technology by an organisation to digitise non-digital products, services, or operations is known as digital transformation. Its implementation goal is to add value through innovation, reinvention, customer experience, and efficiency. 

It utilises digital technologies to develop new or modify existing business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market demands to improve Customer Experience. 

Digital transformation strategies or digitization has improved Customer Experience with the help of work efficiency, maximised revenue growth, and helped reduce operational cost and human errors.

Digital transformation is essential because it enables organisations to adapt to ever-changing industries and continuously improves Customer experience and  their operational processes. 

However, businesses should realise that focusing on improving customer experience should drive digital transformation. Companies can enhance their customer experiences by making digital workflows more human-centric by personalization, creating a seamless customer journey, and providing 24/7 customer support, etc., to improve customer experience. 

Businesses can ensure that they provide the best possible service to their customers by keeping the customer experience at the forefront of digital transformation.

How does digital transformation affect CX?

Digital transformation approaches all aspects of a business with a customer-driven, digital-first mindset. It leverages data to enhance faster workflows, wiser decision-making, and real-time response to market disruptions using AI, automation, and other digital technologies. 

Thus, this improves customer experience and opens up new business opportunities.

Customer expectations have increased with the increase in digitization. It began with new technologies that made information and work more accessible and effortless. Digital transformation empowers the business to adopt a broad range of solutions and services to improve customer experience. 

There is a digital tool to help with everything, providing faster, easier, and more accurate solutions that improves customer experience. 

Six ways in which digital transformation improves customer experience are discussed further in this blog. 

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1. Digital transformation helps personalise customer service

Personalization is all about how well you know your customers. Personalising the customer journey lets you develop a stronger bond with your customers, fostering brand loyalty. Personalization also serves as evidence to your customers that you highly regard them as unique individuals, going the extra mile to fulfill their distinct requirements.

Therefore, every customer interaction should be personalised to meet customer expectations. 

Digital transformation helps personalise customer service. Being available on all platforms to interact with your customers with ready responses, using efficient chatbots to solve basic and general queries, making sincere follow-up calls and emails, and empowering your support reps with the right resources help in giving your customers personalised care.

2. Digital transformation is enabling omnichannel customer experiences

The only thing worse than keeping today's customers waiting is providing inconsistent, incoherent experiences. Your bottom line is directly affected by the type of experience you provide. 

On average, companies with the best omnichannel experiences keep 89% of their customers, while companies with multichannel customer experiences keep 33%.An omnichannel customer experience is created by connecting individual touchpoints distributed across multiple channels, enabling customers to seamlessly continue their journey from one channel to another, picking up right where they left off.

To improve omnichannel customer experience, it is essential to carry out detailed information analysis and ensure the content information is updated and accurate, active in multiple platforms with consistent brand awareness, and integrated data in all the platforms. Digital transformation has helped ease the lengthy process of maintaining an omnichannel to improve customer experience.

3. Empowering customers through AI

With the advancement of technology, AI or artificial intelligence has become a boom for business organisations. AI is a tool that empowers customers as well as employees. AI facilitates a better understanding of customer behaviours. 

It collects social and behavioural data and analyses that data to get more comprehensive insights into consumer trends and behaviour. AI also provides 24/7 support to customers. Chatbots backed up with AI and virtual assistants help speed up the process of problem-solving. 

With the increasing complexity of consumer demands, businesses are under more pressure than ever to provide round-the-clock customer service. With so many channels providing customer support in the various departments of an organisation, agents can only handle some of it. AI enables businesses to offer scalable, automated customer care across multiple platforms, such as live chat, email, messaging, and phone. The technology is gradually integrating into all primary business functions, from marketing and sales to customer service, information technology, finance, and other areas.

4. Digital transformation is empowering agents to deliver highly engaging customer support

Digitization has provided customer service reps with better opportunities to deliver highly engaging customer support. With the right tools, agents get access to information that helps them give customers more accurate and speedy solutions. 

This has reduced customers' anxiety while waiting for their problems to be solved. And with AI, the agents can put some of the load off their shoulders. 

Customer service largely depends on knowledge exchange. And due to the demand in this sector, it often becomes difficult for the agents to find the correct data to help the customers. This is because every organisation has a vast amount of crucial data. Hence it is essential to store this data in a single integrated platform. Advanced technologies like knowledge base management software can be used to store and manage this data efficiently. 

Knowledge management tools have gained prominence as they help organisations to keep this data under a single source of truth and make it more accessible to the agents. This helps reduce long hold times and provides quick and accurate solutions, thus improving customer engagement.

5. Improves customer self-service

Digitization has empowered people in more ways than one. Self-service has become increasingly favored by customers as it grants them empowerment, choice, and convenience, significantly enhancing their digital interactions with businesses. Digital transformation improves customer experience and self-service opportunities.

With digital tools, productivity and operational activities are made efficient and perfect. Nowadays, customers rate an organisation based on their digital experience. Providing better engagement touchpoints through the company website and connecting customers seamlessly to the contact centre are also best practices.

Customers are becoming more self-sufficient and empowered, thanks to instant access to information wherever they are. Furthermore, organisations need help to meet their customers' increasing demands due to the sudden proliferation of digital customer-facing channels and touchpoints. 

Consequently, to enhance customer experience, leaders are increasingly adopting self-service customer portals. These customer portals can meet the modern customer's need for autonomy while reducing the effort support teams must invest in each customer interaction.

6. Elevated employee and customer satisfaction

Customer experience (CX) is concerned with the interaction between a company and its customers. It includes all interactions, no matter how brief or if they do not result in a purchase. 

Every interaction between customers and businesses builds a relationship, whether a call to a contact centre, exposure to an advertisement, or even something as simple as paying a bill. Most importantly, how customers perceive those experiences in aggregate is essential.

Digital transformation has improved customer experience and eased up the job of agents and service reps. Digital transformation has empowered customers and employees with tools that enhance customer satisfaction. Agents now have better opportunities to deal with customers. 

Taking feedback has increased, which has, in turn, improved customer service. Digital tools empower customer service agents to deliver a proactive customer experience- anticipating and providing accurate solutions before the problem escalates. 

Conclusion

Using technology to improve efficiency is one of the most powerful ways to transform your company. For example, the time and money spent on training new employees and updating digital resources can quickly add up for businesses. By leveraging suitable tools such as knowledge base software, you can effectively reduce costs while boosting productivity.

Tech-savvy customers expect a great experience across multiple touchpoints, such as mobile apps, social media, email, live chat, etc. Digital transformations are driving improved customer experiences. Therefore, adapting to digital transformation is a significant step into customer experience.