In the previous couple of chapters, we focused on SharePoint Online features and Office 365 tools that can help us build a Digital Customer experience (DCX). This chapter has been dedicated to understanding the DCX, evolution of DCX, industry trends, customer understanding, DCX use cases, differences between customer services and customer experiences, and upcoming trends in DCX.
Customer experience era
The Experience Era
While the eras of ERP and CRM were fundamentally about creating operational efficiencies, the experience era is about putting the customer at the center of everything that companies do.
Completing and enhancing their understanding of the needs and behaviors of their consumers will help businesses to differentiate through experience.
57% of customers want retailers to offer more than simply selling the product – Capgemini 2017;
52% of customers are more likely to change brands if interactions are not personalized – SFDC 2018;
78% of consumers abandoned their purchase because of a bad service experience – American Express 2015;
64% of customers want real-time interactions with companies they buy from – SFDC 2016;
80% of consumers with high emotional engagement said they expect the brand to know their individual preferences on a personal level – Capgemini DTI Loyalty Deciphered 2017.
Customer recommendations with proactively bundled offers and enriched experiences,
Propose personalized interaction products and services,
Deliver a best-in-class service experience.
Price, promotions/offers to get best deals;
Timing: customer service, delivery to address issues;
Simple interaction (web, app) for purchase;
Recommendations to get best product as per needs;
Loyalty program to retain trust;
Emotional expectations are honesty, trust, belonging, surprise offers, security, familiarity, reciprocity, and integrity.
Recent Developments in User Experience
Augmented Reality is estimated to be worth $108 billion by 2021. The year 2018 was a breakthrough one for AR. It is becoming a tipping point where it is likely to explode into Main Street and every home will have an AR device or AR-augmented smartphone. Digi- Capital.
The global machine vision market was valued at $7.91 billion in 2018 and by 2023, the global market is expected to reach $12.29 billion – a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.61% - https://www.visiononline.org
According to Gartner, more than 50% of organizations will invest in chatbots and bot creations as compared to traditional mobile apps development by 2021.
- Grand View Research has predicted that the chatbot market is expected to reach $1.2 billion on a global scale, in less than ten years. The market will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 24%.
Figure 3-2Recent evolution of user experience. The following acronyms are used: VR: Virtual Reality, AR: Augmented Reality, API: Application Programing Interface, AI: Artificial Intelligence. Responsive web application: Application focus on customer understanding
Figure 3-2 shows different types of the latest digital technology revolution adopted by industries to create maximum impact to enrich the customer experience. Mixed Reality, Computer Vision, and conversational extensions are some of the technologies adopted to enhance the CX. Under a mixed reality AR Kit for Developers on Devices and the Web, for example, an Integrated iOS device camera and motion features produce AR experiences in your app or game, VR product evolution, and availability at a lower cost such as Go Standalone Virtual Reality Headset and New ways to interact eye-tracking, gesture, touch and haptics, which is the science and technology of transmitting and understanding information through touch. Examples are vibration in a mobile phone or the rumble in a game controller, wearables, AR/VR experiences, and automotive infotainment. The second category of computer vision covers Vision API: Image, Object, Face recognition capabilities, for example, Google Cloud Vision API, assign labels to images, and quickly classify them into millions of predefined categories. Deep learning enabled video devices such as AWS DeepLens and AI Integrated Machine Vision, which are used by a camera or multiple cameras to inspect and analyze objects automatically. Conversational Extensions in the case of chatbots cover technology such as Natural Language understanding, sentiments, and personalization.
Customer Understanding
In Figure 3-3, customer information is captured in terms of a Basic Profile and Identities. Customer journeys are captured in terms of Interactions History, Motivations / Opinions, Actions, Services needs, Offers and Propositions, Responses, and Data and Insights. Customer scores are captured in terms of Loyalty, Propensity to purchase, and Lifetime Value. Customer Reactions are gathered in terms of Preferences, Influence, Interest and Activity, and Reactions and Mood.
Industry Trends with Examples for Digital Customer Experience
Trends in DCX
Use Cases for Digital Customer Experience
Use case for DCX
Making Customer engagement seamless: This covers self-service, Trouble Ticket Management, Travel experience, and Concierges. One of the general areas in this category is self-handling of rescheduling tickets with increasing prices.
Employee on the move: This covers CRM sales applications, Audit and inspection, Field service applications, Requests and Approvals, and Life-Cycle engineering. In this category, the scope for DCX is employees working on fields as they have minimal access to technology as compared to people who work inside offices.
Digital Commerce: Omni Channel B2B commerce, Product Catalogues, and Employee Management. The scope of this category includes connecting a business to a business, independent of demographics.
Employee in Enterprise: Covers Payroll and Leave, Profile and Employee Management, Travel expenses, Claims management, and Performance management. DCX in this area will eliminate dependencies upon Human resources.
Digital Catalogue: Covers Branding websites, Customer Acquisition Portals, and Information Publishing. SharePoint Online will help in this area.
Dealer acceleration: Covers Quote Management, Audit and Compliance, and Stock and Inventory Management. In a sector such as Automobiles, it has potential scope for creating a DCX.
How Is the Customer Experience Different from Customer Service?
An employee from a service provider organization is the first point of contact, and he or she is either contacted by a customer by visiting a store or by speaking on the phone; and hence there is a business interaction creating room for the customer experience. This creates an opportunity for the service provider’s organization to deliver excellent customer service.
In general, customer service is an aspect of the entire customer experience. For example, if you book a car for a test drive over on the phone and the contact person with whom you are speaking with is friendly and helpful, that’s good customer service. In the case of movie tickets, if you arrive early and the cinema offers free popcorn during the show, then that’s a good customer experience. That’s how the two are different! A customer experience has transformed into a personal touch, friendly interaction, and mutual trust. Thanks to technology, companies can connect with their customers in new and profound ways. Customer Relationship Management tools help you view a customer’s purchase history and to predict future needs even before the customer knows they need it. The ability to predict a future need with tools will let you be proactive and attentive, and it means you can do things like provide similar products based on purchase history, marketing of products, and then get a 360-degree view of the customer.
Customer service still exists as an important factor, but it is no longer the sole focus of a customer experience. Now, a CX brings collaborative ways to strengthen customer relationships using digital technological.
Different Ways to Improve a Digital Customer Experience
As we mentioned earlier, a digital customer experience is all about providing an awesome customer experience using Digital technology such as SharePoint Online. However, Technology being the enabler, it does not mean that it is the only driving force. Primarily, technology remains the primary driving entity to drive DCX, but there are other aspects that we will investigate in detail in this section.
Build a Vision for Customer Experience
The initial step in generating a DCX strategy is to have a customer-focused vision that can translate and communicate to your organization in the most simple terms. The simplest way to build a customer focus vision is to think of creative statements that will serve as guiding principles. For successful organizations, their values are embedded into their culture, style of working, and design of the workplace. Also, it includes wow delivery through execution of service and being open to accept changes. Once principles are laid out, they will drive organizational behavior. All employees that are part of the organization should be aware and follow these principles by heart, and they should be part of all areas of training and development.
Get an Idea of Who Your Customers Are
The next step in building DCX principles is to inhale and breathe into life the different type of customers your organization is dealing with by developing support teams. If your organization decides to understand customer requirements, then surely they will able to connect and empathize with any circumstances that your customers face. One way to achieve this is by creating personas and giving each persona a name and personality. For example, Lydia is 37 years old, she adores new technology, and she is quite tech savvy enough to follow a video tutorial on her own, whereas Johan (42 years old) can understand and follow clear instructions on a web page. By creating personas, customer support teams can recognize who they are and understand them better. It’s also an important step to becoming truly customer centric.
Create an Emotional Connection with Customers
Most people say that when you want to create a DCX, then technology and emotion should connect together. Sometimes, it’s not what you say but how you say it in critical crises that matters most. One famous European company was able to connect emotionally with a customer, which turned into a popular story in a business management school. A customer was unable to return a pair of shoes due to her mother’s demise. So, the company organized a pick-up for the shoes without a cost and delivered a new pair of shoes as expected within two days. When the company became aware of the mother’s demise, they sent a bereavement card to encourage and console the customer.
Likely to recommend your product or service
Likely to repurchase
Less likely to shop around
Much less price sensitive
Captures customer feedback in real time
One of the ways to capture the DCX is by requesting that the customer answers a customer satisfaction survey, share their story, or capture testimonials. In addition, you can call a customer and request feedback. This activity needs to be performed soon, once the customer request is closed. Sometimes it is good practice to connect customer feedback to a support team member who worked on the requests, and this practice will help to capture performance.
Another is to openly share an escalation matrix with customer so that if they are unhappy, then feedback can be shared openly, and the organization will improve the process.
Quality Management Framework for Team Development
To a DCX for customers, we need to not capture feedback but also implement this feedback; in doing so, a customer will understand that their feedback is valued by the company and will give them a sense of satisfaction. As a company or service provider, it is of prime importance to know what customers think about the quality of the services you offer compared to the customer experience values you have defined for them. Modern organizations or service providers perform feedback assessment based on inputs received over phone and email communications from the customer side. A quality management framework (QMF) will take it one step further by creating a training calendar for a team’s development through coaching, eLearning, and group training.
Action Regular Employee Feedback
Many organizations have an annual survey process by which they capture overall feedback from your team on how they handled delivery, customer engagement, and the businesses ability to deliver an exceptional service. In the 11-month survey nothing happens, but continuous employee feedback can play a vital role using feedback tools that will allow teams to openly share improvement ideas on the DCX and for their managers to recommend how teams and leaders are moving toward the business goals. Using platforms such as Yammer or Teams, internal feedback and continuous improvement can be captured and actioned. You can also create a Facebook page or Twitter handle to receive customer feedback on the Web.
Measure ROI from Delivering Excellent DCX
After investing time, money, and energy to build principles for the customer; emotionally connect with the customer; and capturing continuous feedback and processing it, it is of the utmost importance to measure ROI or how it is paying off and what will be revealed in business results. Measuring the DCX experience is one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations. Some companies use the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS, which calculates a score based on a straightforward question asked to a customer based on satisfaction.
Run Projects on Agile Delivery Method
Agile Delivery Methodology
Agile methodology may vary from company to company but remains aligned toward industry standards. It starts with Strategic Vision and Customer insights, which include understanding company goals, business challenges, and customer journey with the brand. The next phase involves planning and implementation that covers project goals, current state, future state, and implementation plan. A later stage consists of a system test that covers User Acceptance Testing before going live; and finally, a stage consists of measurement and optimization covering the opening production environment to users, support transition, and conversation rate optimization.
DevOps Methodology
DevOps methodology
Front-End UX and UI Generate High Levels of Digital Customer Experience
Focus areas of UI and UX
Applications and Services That Enable DCX Transformation
Application and services for DCX
Upcoming Trends in Digital Customer Experience
Trends in DCX
- Conversational interfaces
Combination of chat, voice, or any other natural language interface aiming at transforming user interactions into human conversations
- Predictive personalization
Methods of delivering to each individual unique experiences and personalized content, both meeting and anticipating his expectations, in real time
- Customer understanding
Continuous effort to capture, process, and analyze customers’ data in real time from interactions, journeys, events, and emotions in order to build a holistic view of the customer as well as an actionable insight of its needs, expectations, and brand empathy
- Employee augmentation
Features augmenting the employee in decision-making and unstructured data analysis, improving his focus on customer-facing activities with more efficiency, reactivity, and relevance
- Cognitive Process Automation
Connection of smart learning systems with conventional process automation
Summary
In this chapter, we have touched on various parts of the DCX such as Evolution of DCX, Industry trends, Customer understanding, DCX Use cases, differences between customer service and customer experience, and upcoming Trends in DCX. Now, with experience with SharePoint Online features, Office 365 tools, and DCX, we can start developing smart and intelligent portals using SharePoint Online.