The need for digital transformation of the customer experience has never been more critical. Customers have gone beyond demanding quality products and services to demanding seamless interactions, personalized engagements, and effortless access to products and services across multiple touchpoints.
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This has raised the need for companies to adopt digital transformations and strategies to win prospects, retain customers, and stay competitive. This is essential for manufacturing and utility companies.
What Is Digital Customer Experience?
The digital customer experience is the experience customers have when interacting with a company through various digital channels and touchpoints. This experience cuts across all platforms, including websites, mobile applications, emails, social media platforms, voice assistants, etc.
The need to deliver an excellent digital customer experience has never been more critical. Customer expectations are increasing, industry competition is becoming more intense, and the need to improve efficiency and reduce costs is high.
Why Embrace Digital Transformation?
Changing Customer Expectations
Digital transformation of the customer experience begins with understanding and meeting the changing expectations of customers. While the pandemic and resultant digital transformation has brought many advantages to manufacturing and utility companies, it has increased customer expectations. Customers now expect seamless digital access across all touchpoints, from websites to mobile apps, social media, emails, and voice assistants. They want the same experience on websites as mobile apps, and companies big on customer acquisition and retention must meet these expectations.
By modernizing the customer experience across all touchpoints, companies show that their customers are always their top consideration. This earns them the trust of their customers and makes it easy to win new ones through referrals.
Increased Industry Competition
Digital transformations have enabled customers to go through the entire customer journey, from product discovery to purchase, online. This transformation has also levelled the playing field for industry leaders and new entrants.
Prospects and customers interact with at least one digital channel before purchasing from a company. This places companies without advanced digital customer experience systems at a disadvantage. This means that companies can have amazing products and services and lose sales to those with inferior products and services simply because they fail to deliver an excellent digital customer experience.
Improving customer experience is critical to staying ahead of the industry competition, and this begins with having a top-level digital customer experience strategy focusing on exceeding customer expectations. With a robust digital CX strategy, innovative companies go beyond winning the trust of existing customers to turning customers into loyalists and advocates who refer their friends and colleagues.
Increased Workload on Customer Service Departments
Digital transformation of the customer experience increases the productivity of customer service departments. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, customers’ shopping behavior has completely evolved. Customers expect to carry out all transactions from the comfort of their homes without stepping into a brick-and-mortar store. This new shopping behavior increased contact points as companies had to make their websites, mobile apps, social media channels, and customer experience platforms easily accessible. This handed customer service departments more responsibility and made the work even more overwhelming.
Improving CX with functional self-service platforms reduces the workload on customer service departments, allowing them to focus on more complex customer requests. This reduces customer agent workload and increases productivity and CX delivery. The more the tickets are resolved on time, the more trust and loyalty the company gains.
Access to Customer Data and Insights
Digital transformation has enabled companies to provide excellent customer service through studying and understanding customer pain points, shopping behavior, preferences, etc. These data are made available through digital touchpoints, and the more digital channels a company implements, the more data and insights are available to them.
The insights gathered are valuable for informed decisions on product quality and ways to deliver an even more seamless customer experience. They can also be used to personalize customer interactions and make other vital data-driven business decisions.
Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings
Digital transformation of the customer experience helps streamline processes, automate tasks, and reduce manual efforts. This is evident in how chatbots, voice assistants, and other self-service systems reduce the workloads of customer service agents, allowing them to focus on more complex customer problems.
Need for Personalization and Customer Engagement
Manufacturing and utility companies can provide personalized services with data from digital experience platforms. Personalization increases customer engagement, increasing sales and average order value (AOV).
Winning customers’ loyalty isn’t a walk in the park; companies must show a certain level of customer-centric commitment to get customer trust. Personalization is a part of these commitments, as customers expect companies to understand their needs and preferences and tailor the services and messages they get to satisfy those needs.
Omnichannel Engagement
Digital transformation enables companies to engage with their customers through multiple channels, including websites, social media platforms, mobile apps, voice assistants, emails, and more. Delivering excellent omnichannel engagement goes beyond making these channels available; it makes it possible for customers to start discussions on one and migrate to the other without reinitiating their interactions. This can be critical to saving customer time and increasing CS output. Customers can initiate orders on their mobile apps and complete the process on their computers without adding the items to their cart repeatedly.
Omnichannel engagement is vital to delivering an excellent customer experience, keeping customers happy, and boosting sales simultaneously.
Improving Customer Experience with Digital Transformation
Improving customer experience is critical for manufacturing and utility companies to meet customer expectations, convert prospects, stay competitive, and drive growth. While future-proof companies are leveraging digital CX technologies and the benefits they bring, others are still dragging their feet and missing out. Companies must wake up and realize that digital transformation is the new normal, and improving CX is key to staying competitive and generating results.
