LONDON: As customer experience – increasingly based on digital interactions – becomes a competitive differentiator, brands need to assess their current capabilities and understand where they may need to make changes, according to an industry figure.
In a WARC Best Practice paper, Delivering effective digital customer experiences, Jamie Brighton, head of product marketing for the Adobe Experience Cloud in EMEA, outlines the sort of capabilities that are required but stresses the importance of simply getting started with customer experience.
“Too many brands become paralysed by not knowing where to start or how to approach the adoption of a customer-centric strategy,” he says.
“Essentially, digital transformation is about people, process and technology and you need the right mix of skills and an environment for people to flourish in, as well as the right technology to enable them.”
His advice is straightforward: an evaluation of the existing set-up will enable a brand to see where changes are needed, formulate a plan and establish a benchmark against which it can assess the impact of the changes made.
Brighton sets out four basic rules for getting the customer experience right, starting with knowing and respecting the customer. “You must be able to anticipate, predict and deliver what the customer wants, often before they even ask for it, whilst respecting privacy.”
Second, every department within an organisation has to speak in one voice. “If a customer responds to an email or SMS on their mobile device, that information should be taken into account the next time they call in to the call centre or view the website on their desktop computer.”
Thirdly, brands should use data to understand where a customer prefers to interact with it (and when, how and why) and then reflect that in investments in the experience on those channels and devices.
Finally, every time there is an opportunity to deliver an experience to the customer, it must be a relevant, engaging, useful or delightful one.
And remember, says Brighton, “Getting a customer to the information they need efficiently can be just as delightful to them as showcasing the latest video or VR content experience”.
In a WARC Best Practice paper, Delivering effective digital customer experiences, Jamie Brighton, head of product marketing for the Adobe Experience Cloud in EMEA, outlines the sort of capabilities that are required but stresses the importance of simply getting started with customer experience.
“Too many brands become paralysed by not knowing where to start or how to approach the adoption of a customer-centric strategy,” he says.
“Essentially, digital transformation is about people, process and technology and you need the right mix of skills and an environment for people to flourish in, as well as the right technology to enable them.”
His advice is straightforward: an evaluation of the existing set-up will enable a brand to see where changes are needed, formulate a plan and establish a benchmark against which it can assess the impact of the changes made.
Brighton sets out four basic rules for getting the customer experience right, starting with knowing and respecting the customer. “You must be able to anticipate, predict and deliver what the customer wants, often before they even ask for it, whilst respecting privacy.”
Second, every department within an organisation has to speak in one voice. “If a customer responds to an email or SMS on their mobile device, that information should be taken into account the next time they call in to the call centre or view the website on their desktop computer.”
Thirdly, brands should use data to understand where a customer prefers to interact with it (and when, how and why) and then reflect that in investments in the experience on those channels and devices.
Finally, every time there is an opportunity to deliver an experience to the customer, it must be a relevant, engaging, useful or delightful one.
And remember, says Brighton, “Getting a customer to the information they need efficiently can be just as delightful to them as showcasing the latest video or VR content experience”.
Sourced from WARC
