Customer experience and digital transformation are two concepts that we have been hearing about for years. But, in many organizations, they have always remained nebulous, something to be aspired to perhaps, but not taken entirely seriously. Yet, for both concepts, the pandemic has been a forcing case, pushing the ideas front and center.
You can see increased interest from customers and potential buyers if you are lucky enough to help businesses digitize a process or enhance how customers communicate with them. A case in point is that Twilio recently acquired Segment for $3.2 billion to help develop data-fueled apps to connect with customers.
While building a positive customer experience has never been exclusively digital, the digital side of it has taken on new urgency at a time when it is hard to communicate with customers in person.
As COVID-19 took hold this year, corporations, big and small, suddenly realized that digitally was the best way to communicate with their customers. At that point, when other methods of communicating with each other were severely limited, digital transformation became the friend of the customer experience.
Digital transformation at the level of customer service is not just a question of front-end and customer-facing functionality, let alone touchpoints. It also calls for a roadmap for such a holistic plan. You need to begin somewhere and stage in practice, but the end goals require it to be achieved sooner or later. At the same time, the enterprise-wide solution is a starting point and a level of change.
People are by far the most critical aspect of the management of customer service and of a holistic approach to maximizing customer experience, both internally and to the customer. If your goal is to achieve optimization of customer engagement, you have to ensure that the digital touchpoints and resources are important enough that customers want to use them often.
