How to Improve Customer Experience using Digital Transformation

The secret to winning the hearts and minds of your current and future customers.

The standards that customers hold brands to have shifted dramatically in the last few years. And at the same time, technology has been inspiring companies to reimagine every aspect of how they function in our increasingly virtual world. At the intersection of these trends is the potential for digital transformation to improve the customer experience.

Businesses have been digitizing their processes for decades. Companies using the speed and convenience of computers to improve the way they already work is nothing new. But digital transformation is different.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot about the way we do business. It generated increased pressure to decentralize work, and to offer flexible options for employees and customers.

Those pressures hastened digital transformation for a lot of companies. They also changed many customer experiences in ways that have proved popular. With smart digital and CX strategies, businesses can use technology to continue upgrading their customer experience.

What Does Digital Transformation Mean?

It’s difficult to imagine a modern business that doesn’t rely on computers. Digital technology is everywhere in our day-to-day lives, and business is no exception. Companies depend on computers for many of their crucial business processes.

Incorporating the convenience and speed of digital technology into existing business workflows is still an ongoing process for many industries. And by itself, this digitization can bring big advantages in efficiency and reliability. But true digital transformation goes a step further.

The digital world has features that challenge some of our most basic assumptions about life and work. Information is available anytime; meetings can be held over any distance; prototyping can happen in a virtual space.

Digital transformation is more than just the computerization of long-standing workflows. It’s the process of reengineering business — both the work environment, and the products and services your company offers — to take advantage of a new world of digital capabilities.

Why is Digital Transformation Important?

The COVID-19 pandemic required us to rethink a great deal about how we live our daily lives. Many of the pressures of the pandemic — social distancing, disrupted schedules, new and different personal responsibilities — aligned with some of the biggest advantages provided by digital transformation.

This meant that for many companies, the process of digital transformation sped up dramatically. Businesses prioritized creating the infrastructure that would allow them to meet with each other and help customers, virtually and flexibly.

How Can Digital Transformation Elevate The Customer Experience?

As customers interacted with this new digital infrastructure, their expectations shifted. And very few stakeholders, either customer or business, seem interested in going back to the way things were before.

Digital transformation intersects with the customer experience in several unique ways. A digital model offers customers more options to personalize their experience with your brand. They can choose how to connect with you, what level of service they want to receive, and what options are right for them.

Consumers appreciate the evolved customer experience that digital transformation makes possible. But how can your business use digital transformation to improve your own customer experience?

Present a Unified Multichannel Experience

It’s been a long time since a business could get away with being only a brick and mortar shop. Today, customers expect businesses to be available not just in person, but online and over the phone. They expect a buying process that caters to their level of need and knowledge , be it fully self-service or an immersive sales experience.

Digital transformation allows businesses to present a unified brand across all of their customer touchpoints. A robust point of sale system, together with a strong ecommerce solution, makes buying frictionless whichever avenue customers choose.

Cloud-based inventory management tools let customers see product availability in real time, whether they’re checking online or asking an employee in the store. And digitized brand assets, stored in the cloud, mean that any image or branding updates will be reflected across all of your storefronts, physical or virtual.

Create Flexible, Responsive Customer Service

No one ever wants to expect that their customers will run into problems. But it’s more or less inevitable that they will. And, more important than whether the problems occur or not, is how a business responds when they do.

The advantages of digital technology for communication are all but self-evident at this point. Businesses can make sure that their customers always have access to help or, on the other hand, that customers can reliably know when help will be available.

Advanced IP phone systems and live chat allow companies to create intricate routing flows, which can make use of interactive menus, automation, and customer data. They can use these options to increase the efficacy of their customer service teams, sending customers quickly to the people who will best be able to help them.

Businesses can also take advantage of cloud storage, wiki technology, and robust AI and search functions to give their customers a self-service option. This lets users save time, and benefit from the knowledge of your service team and the experiences of other customers.

Use Digital Tools to Personalize Interactions

Personalization and customization are the keys to this generation of consumers’ satisfaction. On the one hand, customers expect a certain level of control over their experience — the option to shape how they shop, and adjust a product or service to meet their unique needs.

But customers also increasingly expect brands to address them as human beings and as individuals. Digital technology has made it possible for companies to interact with customers on scales that are arguably unprecedented. But the disadvantage to huge customer bases is that individual customers are tired of feeling like a number on a page.

When businesses leverage digital transformation to really get to know their customers, it becomes much easier to shape the customer experience on an individual level. A detailed customer profile helps companies predict what certain demographic segments will respond to.

Purchasing and customer-service histories also help brands understand what their customers are looking for when they reach out. Customer relationship management platforms bundle all of this information in one place, so that you can anticipate what your customers need and quickly get on the same page when they contact you.

Offer Transparency and Data Governance

However, thorough personalization can cut both ways. In order to personalize experiences in the ways that customers expect, businesses need to collect a great deal of information about their audience.

Consumers are becoming more aware of the amount and kind of information that businesses collect, and some aren’t always comfortable with it. Allowing personalization requires ceding a certain amount of control. Handing some of that control back to the customer goes a long way toward building trust, as does transparency around how the information is handled.

A strong digital infrastructure helps businesses protect the information customers have trusted them with. It also offers the tools for customers to review, revoke, or approve the data that brands maintain. When customers have options, they’re happier with the choices they make.

Transform Customer Feedback into Insight

Measuring customer satisfaction is a well-established practice. But the number of metrics and options available only seems to grow, and there’s a wealth of information about customers available to businesses. It can be hard to know where to start extracting insights from that information.

Digital transformation can help here, too. Computers excel at handling large data sets, and data scientists — and, increasingly, artificial intelligence — excel at interpreting them. A variety of CRM platforms and other readily available software tools exist to uncover these customer insights. You can use these digital transformation tools to improve your customer-experience strategy.

Software helps companies automate the process of collecting customer feedback. They also make it frictionless for customers to submit it, increasing the response rate. Measuring customer satisfaction gives businesses a baseline sense of their performance, and can inspire more specific questions that will help you determine where you can improve.

As you drill down into your specific customer base’s needs and pain points, CRM databases and other survey tools help you to track the information over time. These trends let you gauge the success of your responses. You can create charts and graphs from the information in real time for your sales and customer service teams, which helps your employees connect their performance to real business results.

When businesses have communicative, responsive relationships with their customers, it becomes much easier to develop a customer experience that your audience will respond to. Customers want to feel like their favorite brands understand their needs. Digital transformation creates an information-rich foundation to improve your customer experience strategy.

Digital Transformation Can Unlock The Next Level of Your Customer Experience

The process of digital transformation moves companies more fully into the virtual world. The right digital infrastructure helps your business become more accessible, more adaptable, and more responsive.

Today’s customers are used to an always-on environment. They expect accessibility. They want to know that brands understand them, and they like to feel heard. Technology helped these expectations develop in the social realm, and it’s no surprise that they’ve translated to the business world, too.

The advantages that a company gains from a well-executed digital transformation are also huge potential advantages for your customer experience. If you approach your digital transformation efforts with a plan in place, your customer satisfaction can benefit as much as your productivity.

Hey, thanks for reading!

I’m Justin — I can help you to grow your profits.

Prior to coaching, I was the founder and CEO of an edtech startup, achieving a respectable 32% YoY growth and 76% profit margin over eight years before eventually selling.