Designing Digital Customer Experience Initiative Strategies

By John Chan

With digital technologies transforming the marketplace, organization management must design digital customer experiences to deliver customer value as a means of prospering in the future. However, management cannot simply deliver customer value by fine-tuning their customer touchpoints. Rather, management must set up a connected Web of services and business functionalities to acclimate to their client’s transforming expectations. This connected Web of services and business functionalities should be extremely nimble and accessible via mobile, cloud and API technologies. Thus, digital customer experience systems will be more adaptable, accessible and match the needs of the customers in the current and future marketplace. Customer value can brought about via proper implementation of digital technologies. Here are the key points for establishing an ongoing digital customer experiences initiative:

• The organization must constantly develop their digital customer experience systems to keep up with the changing market demands. There may need to be multifaceted service arrangements via partnerships with other external organizations to enhance the organization’s digital customer experience systems.
• At present, digital business do not function on a conventional linear value chain. Digital businesses connect dissimilar parties such as clients, suppliers, the organization’s staff and external partners in a complicated Web arrangement. The digital business process will place partners, suppliers and clients within their own internal business processes.
• The new digital customer experience systems will uproot conventional business operating paradigms. The new digital customer experience systems will make the new business model permeable for deep collaboration with clients and external partners.

Simply creating a mobile app and declaring the creation of mobile app as giving the organization “Digital Status” will not suffice in today’s marketplace. By only creating a mobile app, the organization has just created another point of contact with its customers. To become truly digital, businesses will need a more transforming effort towards creating value for their clients. The organization should manage their digital business via a digital customer experience (DCE) effort .

For a DCE effort, the organization must become a client focused organization instead of just product/service focused. Customer experience expectations are continuously changing and the use of technology is key to how an organization’s clients will see the worth of the organization. In a DCE effort, management should:

• Digitalize the entire customer experience as the digital points of contact are not just single objects.
• Utilize customer experience methodologies such as customer journey mapping to comprehend their client’s activities and furthermore use digital technologies wherever appropriate to augment the significance of the organization to the client.
• Envision the organization’s products and services as digital experiences that supplement the real-life experience of using these products and services.

In my next blog post, I will discuss how organizations can establish a well-run digital transformation effort and how digital ecosystems will change the global economy.

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  John Chan is the ISM Software Lab Director, is responsible for software testing and defining the evaluation criteria for The Guide to Mobile and Social CRM and the CRM software offered on ISM’s Reviews Online service.