Companies who are yet to embrace digitization in their business operations continue receiving a wake-up call that, without going digital, there is no scope for their company. As per Gartner reports, 87% of businesses say that digitization is their top strategy. This clearly explains the immense importance digital transformation has on companies who wish to remain relevant to the future.
The interesting thing to note here is that this wake-up call for digital transformation is not driven by enterprise objectives. It is instead, driven by the customer. And any smart business would want to be where its target audience is, i.e., online.
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Digital customer experience – A new age success paradigm
Studies after studies show that customer engagement is key to enhanced toplines. By undergoing a digital transformation, you get to boost customer engagement to a new level altogether. Highly engaged customers buy 90% more frequently and spend 60% more for an average purchase.
These numbers speak volumes about the importance of digital transformation with the digital customer experience at the core of your evolution.
How to embrace an excellent digital customer experience strategy?
A good digital customer experience strategy works at multiple levels:
1. Sales teams
It is high time to replace postal mails and cold calling with targeted social selling. Your customers are more likely to be on social media, and this is where you start establishing the connection between the brand and them. Re-define existing sales tactics like waiting for the customer to contact you.
Instead, go out there on the social media platforms and introduce your brand, your corporate values, and your competitive USP to them. This inbound strategy can be sharpened by sharing targeted and relevant content so that you win their trust, and they send across business inquiries.
2. Marketing teams
The need of the hour is to scale down investment on offline channels (billboards, OOH advertising, TV, Print media). Instead, they can focus more on digital marketing. Send personalized messages to customers with strategically crafted digital marketing campaigns.
This way, when they really need a company like yours, they will remember your brand instead of competition. This step entails a deep dive into account-based marketing and email marketing that works.
3. Customer service
The age of fax and phones are long gone. Instead of waiting for them to call (i.e., be reactive), try to adopt a proactive approach in customer service. Be it responding to comments on social media, or providing helpful resources on community forums, you can do a lot to bring about this change.
Three ways to get started with digital transformation
It is a fact that the gap between aspiration and implementation keeps widening when it comes to digital transformation. The same Gartner reports states that almost all concur digitization to be a priority, but only 40% of the companies have brought digital initiatives to scale.
If you are on the cusp of this shift, then here are three ways to get started –
1. Agile IT environment
The first thing to check in this shift is to assess your IT readiness. It is not surprising that many companies willing to welcome digital in their business lack the necessary technology to implement and roll out a digital transformation strategy. Embracing cloud technologies can help you build an agile and flexible IT infrastructure within the organization.
With cloud technologies, companies fast become nimble enough to experiment with change without any impact on their bottom-lines. The dynamic flexibility you get allows you to test more projects and campaigns without taking a hit on the project’s sustainability.
One way to go about this is by connecting SaaS applications like big data analytics, web apps, mobile apps, and customer databases. This will present a holistic view of the modern-day digitally connected customer.
Such integrations will help you figure out the evolving demands and needs of the customers. With this knowledge, you can tailor your marketing strategies to target these needs for better conversion potential. It will also guide product development teams about what to focus on.
2. Personalized experiences
Imagine if you are a part of a mail blast with zero personalization. It certainly sounds annoying, right? The good news is that it is possible to target audience and personalize marketing messages in today’s times by embracing digital.
Investing in a robust and scalable CRM is the way to go here. These software applications let you gain maximum insights about your customers and provides you ways to treat your customers as individuals. CRM will have details of past customer interactions with your brand. This step will guide your future strategy of providing highly targeted marketing messages that fast track conversion.
3. Multi-channel approach
Today’s customers demand a seamless experience, whether they are online or offline. With technology, this can be made possible. Take the case of Burberry. The luxury fashion house seeks to fulfill eCommerce orders with a mix of both – local distribution centers as well as in-store. This action helps them to optimize stocks and accelerate delivery.
Its social media presence covers Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But it also has a fabulous presence on location-based social media sites like WeChat (China) and Line (Japan).
Such examples of multi-channel presence ensure that they can offer a real-time digital experience that is fast, personalized, and seamless. Bridging the offline-online divide helps your company to remain accessible 24x7x365.
To sign off
Digital transformation is the new age success accelerant that is prompting companies to re-define business models to cater to an increasingly digital customer. This is the new market reality. The only question then remains is this – When are you making the first move to embrace digital transformation?
