3 steps in improve digital customer experience

Let’s get straight to the point.

By now, it’s well acknowledged that any business that wants to be in the game needs a well-defined digital customer experience (DCX) strategy. A well-designed DCX roadmap is a great way to drive customer retention and loyalty while ensuring sustainable business growth.

With the ‘why’ established, the next step is tackling the ‘how.’

Numerous industry surveys and reports highlight that while a sizeable number of CXOs acknowledge the need and urgency for a DCX roadmap, many face these three common questions:

When it comes to enhancing your digital engagement with customers, there are two common hurdles many businesses face. One is assuming that all customers fit into the same mould, and the other is fixating on isolated digital outcomes rather than overarching business goals.

Another challenge revolves around prioritizing and refining customer experiences. With businesses pouring more resources into digital engagement, there’s a never-ending stream of potential improvements fueled by new ideas, enhanced device capabilities, and the relentless advancement of AI. All these factors continually raise consumer expectations.

Staying stagnant isn’t an option. However, figuring out where to direct your focus and what will truly elevate your customer’s experience is tricky. Here are three simple steps that address the above-mentioned challenges and a great way to get started:

Step 1: Build a solid foundation that supports new-age customer-centric journeys

Digital customer-centric strategies are inherently built on the concept of speed, agility, and scale- something that traditional operating models and outdated legacy technology fail to deliver.

A brilliantly designed app that enables customers to apply online for a lease/loan won’t do your business any good if the time to funding eventually takes a month.

Today’s customers expect faster service delivery, quicker resolution for queries, and ease of doing business at the speed of clicks.

To begin with, you would need a centralized “hub” that connects all the disparate tools and applications from your ecosystem – one that integrates the basic building blocks of your business, people, and processes. The right cloud-based asset finance platform gives you a foundation that streamlines your existing business processes, builds frictionless information flows across the organization, and enhances efficiency across every customer touchpoint.

Digital technologies will continue to evolve and incorporate new tools and concepts. Platform-based foundations make it easier to add capabilities and tools in the future as needed without disrupting your IT landscape or day-to-day business operations. It allows you to pivot as market and customer demand change, build new applications or tweak workflows, and integrate with multiple applications to enhance the holistic customer experience.

Step 2: Define desired business outcomes before choosing the technology

….. and not the other way around. With a myriad of tools and applications available, it’s often difficult to choose the right technology for your business. It’s a classic trap many organizations fall into – building highly advanced, but overtly complex systems that overwhelm both the customer and end-users and lead to poor acceptance levels.

Customers might not recall the precise channel of interaction, but they will remember the overall experience. Regardless of the tech behind the scenes, they expect an omnichannel journey, whether it involves interacting with an app, conversing with a human, or accessing the services they desire.

It only makes sense then to work backwards and start with identifying the problem that you are trying to solve for customers instead of spending too much time and effort picking cutting-edge technologies.

Involving cross-functional teams and business peers helps you to identify two or three high-value use cases that promise strong customer value and business impact along with measurable and faster ROI (return on investment). These use-case lenses help you find best-fit solutions and create service blueprints that achieve the desired business outcomes.

Step 3: Become obsessed with customer feedback and data-driven insights

Customers are at the heart of every digital customer experience and that is where it all begins – leveraging data to map customer demands, understand their challenges, and how they expect you to solve them. Today, every customer journey relies on data, and analytics offer insights into the adequacy of these experiences in meeting customer needs.

By selecting the right lease management platform, you can modernize your data stack and empower additional business intelligence capabilities. This platform aids in consolidating and centralizing data from various sources within your application ecosystem to establish a unified database. You can further structure this data by cataloging and modelling it, enabling you to use it for advanced analytics, reporting, and business intelligence tools.

These insights provide granular details about the customer journey during every stage of the customer lifecycle, enabling you to prioritize investments, aid business decision-making and strategy, and monitor the impact of customer service initiatives.

For example, a leading global leasing company utilized customer journey analytics to identify pain points in their onboarding process, analyzing customer interactions and feedback to uncover bottlenecks causing delays in application approvals. Armed with this insight, they redesigned their onboarding process (incorporating digital application and document verification) and automated repetitive processes. As a result, the time taken from application to funding became 3X faster, leading to better customer satisfaction levels.

Bonus: Keep it short and simple

Your DCX strategy doesn’t have to look like something out of a sci-fi franchise. Build something that addresses your customer’s concerns and makes it easier for them to conduct their daily business and you have a customer for life.