The Essentials of Providing a Memorable Customer Experience to Digital Customers
The impact made by digital channels today is so huge that even traditional business phrases like “Customer is King” have transformed into “Customer Experience is King.” The success of any customer-facing initiative is defined and measured by the outcome experienced by customers for the whole journey of using the new initiative.
In fact, IDC predicts that by 2027, one-fourth of global brands will leverage a new Customer Effort Score metric to replace the traditional CSAT scores because of the shift towards experience-driven strategies.
With the competition rising, it is no longer the number of features that attract customers but how your business is able to differentiate the experience from competitors for the same features. People may love your brand, but that’s no excuse for offering them a bad experience. According to research:
- 59% of customers would walk away after a couple of bad experiences
- 17% would stop doing business with your brand upon encountering just a single bad experience.
As we navigate the shift in preferences for the average digital customer, businesses must make it a priority to invest and implement the core pillars of a successful and memorable customer experience in their digital channels. Let us explore the top four essentials that are needed to deliver this exceptional customer experience today:
Availability of Channels
As pointed out earlier, a good chunk of your customers would leave with just a single bad incident or experience. In the digital economy, one of the most dreaded bad experiences of customers is the unavailability of digital channels — for example, an outage of key services through a brand’s mobile app or website.
Irrespective of the reasons behind the outage, customers would be frustrated about not being able to avail of the services through their desired channels, leading to rising negative sentiments for the brand. Whether your apps are built on the cloud or relying on in-house data centers, it is absolutely critical for engineers to keep the infrastructure constantly monitored to prevent any outages.
Performance Guarantee
Once availability is guaranteed, the next big area of focus is the performance and scalability of applications over time. The 2022 holiday season shopping globally resulted in over USD 1.14 trillion in online sales alone. This implies that traffic to digital channels is often unpredictable and occasionally over hundreds of times more than regular trends. For customers, the ability to get things they want from an app is the only factor that matters, irrespective of whether they access it at any time of the year.
For businesses, however, this would require a major focus on the flexible scalability of their computing power on demand. Moving to the cloud is a solution, but then they must ensure that they have the right cloud, the right controls, the proper configurations of services from the cloud, and much more. Only then would end users be guaranteed high performance any time of the year.
Personalization
Knowing what your customers want and what they hate and letting them know that their interests are considered while building services for them is paramount in modern digital experiences. Simply put, personalization is the key to delivering a winning customer experience across every interaction on a business’s app or website.
Adobe, in their recent survey, pointed out that 76% of consumers want brands to be knowledgeable about what their target customers would want and make efforts to deliver the same. On this note, it is important for businesses to cultivate a growth strategy that is deep-rooted in data-centricity. Data pertaining to customer choices and preferences must be the foundation of any engagement exercise a brand undertakes via its digital channels. This will help improve conversions and build trust, which will further help acquire more relevant personalization data.
Security
By 2025, it is expected that cybercrime will result in over USD 10.5 trillion worth of losses globally. As more consumer services move into the digital realm, a new wave of cyber threats that exploit vulnerabilities through initiatives like phishing, spoofing, impersonations, etc. are unleashing damage across business sectors. Delivering a memorable experience for customers also includes protecting their data and sensitive digital credentials.
Businesses must ensure that their mobile and web apps are guarded against known threats and always protected proactively from future threats through continuous monitoring by modern AI-enabled security solutions.
Conclusion
Building a customer experience that the digital-savvy consumer of today would love requires more strategic and far-sighted initiatives from businesses. It is highly unlikely that you would have the necessary expertise to pull off such digital assurance feats without knowing how well your applications are performing in real-time. This is where appNeura’s range of AI/ML-powered app performance management and monitoring solutions can be your biggest asset.
Get in touch with us to learn how your apps and websites can stay competitive in performance and availability all through the year.