The pandemic has disrupted the rules of engagement and how customers interact with a brand. Now that the dust has settled, we might ask ourselves how is it going to affect customer experience in this coming-of-age contactless era?
The impact
Contactless is the new need. Customers’ expectations and priorities have completely changed. The need is convenience, comfort, agility and omni-channel.
Organisations have found it difficult to adapt to these changes with remote working, limited resources, and lack of access to on-premise business-critical applications. With the competition still at play, the need was to quickly shift gears and find a way to accommodate digital strategies into their existing blueprint.
Organisations have adopted multiple digital strategies including cloud-based services, digital customer experience platforms integrated with chat-bots, automation, and omni-channel marketing. This is just the beginning of a new normal.
The Strategy
CIOs and CDOs have profoundly evaluated and created long-term digital plans to sustain the turbulence as well as create a new footprint for the future. They have managed to completely redefine their customer experience (CX) strategy in order to provide rich customer experience and customer support. Let’s look at some of the initiatives taken up by organisation as a part of their digital transformation.
- Manpower to AI
AI has been in talks for years but small business were still finding it challenging to invest in disruptive technologies due to cost constraints and a lack of confidence across the board. But COVID changed it all. From being a potential line item for the future, AI was soon embedded and seen as a go-to strategy to garner customer data, gather business intelligence and derive ROI-worthy results. It did not replace the existing incumbent talent pool but became a weapon of choice for them. It helped the management to use the time and skill set of these resources to brew other critical projects that helped in delivering better customer experience and service across channels.
Tools such as chat-bots, voice-bots and cloud-based data warehouses have helped organisations to improve their CX and gather analytics to provide product recommendations, post purchase services, resolves issues, and maintain their SLAs.
- Omni-channel Experience
It’s not just about having best products anymore. Organisations need to change their approach with changing customer priorities. The new wave of millennials prefer convenience over loyalty. There is a noticeable churn in customers with organisations who have stuck to the traditional approach and have shown disregard towards digital transformation. Customers need organisations to understand, sometimes pre-meditate, their concerns, and provide a quick resolutions. This can only be achieved if there is an omni-channel platform with data visibility across tiers. Omni-channel tools eliminate data siloes and bring all the data at one place. Be it a web presence, a physical store visit, or a mobile application click, omni-channel binds all customer-facing interfaces together, integrated at the back-end, and helps in better CX and data visibility across the board.
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Also Read: Is your organization ready for the new normal?
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- Data Security
With the digital approach, CIOs need to rethink their security strategy in tandem with the new normal. Organizations need to invest in a robust endpoint security service which enables them to protect the data that is accessed remotely by the workforce. They need to have a comprehensive compliance in place that adheres to the new policies, and invest in security certifications that could help them gain customer’s trust to engage in the future.
Next steps
Organisations must adapt to the new normal and invest in digital transformation to enhance their customer experience. There has to be a top-level sponsorship for the same in order to prevent bottlenecks and future discomforts. The responsibility of the transformation should not be solely on the IT but across processes. Taking small steps initially such as building a digital roadmap, automating redundant processes, leveraging incumbent workforce and enhancing their capabilities, making them future-ready, and finally backing it all up with a robust security layer could catapult an organisation to the top.
Clover Infotech helps organizations by analysing their current technology landscape to create a tailor-made digital strategy with optimum utilization of the budget to enhance their customer experience and achieve better ROI.
