Enhancing the customer experience for great results

 -understand the pivotal role of digitization in making the customer feel valued.

Today’s world has one common characteristic regardless of the form of development in vogue or which part of the world you find yourself in. Digitizing operations to enhance the customer experience is increasingly becoming essential for ensuring you have a good grip on your capacity to engage, satisfy, and earn loyalty while generating value.

The customer journey is more interesting and fulfilling with a strategy that integrates physical interactions and a reasonable amount of digitization to ensure that your reach in the market is extensive enough. I say this with caution knowing that our local ecosystem is picking up the pace a tad slower than others.

Let me explain. Today’s business climate has largely been influenced by technological advances such that in our daily lives, the lines between what we do online and physically have blurred. Consequently, marketers and businesses are compelled to respond as people change their behaviours, to keep pace with market trends.

Just this week I was introducing a colleague to a restaurant in Accra run by a relative of mine and no sooner had I mentioned the business to him than I saw him straight away go on social media to learn more about the business products and services. Digitization has extended the marketplace place enhancing the visibility of brands more swiftly than would have been the case say a decade ago.

That digitized businesses have a very significant advantage in the market goes without saying. Using video channels, internet Radio, mobile phones, displays for banner ads, digital outdoors, and any other form of digital media coupled with face-to-face interactions has become the norm for many businesses whether large or small.

Digitization has paved the way for adopting tools to engage audiences more proactively. The common trend is to use social media to engage the market in ways that have triggered the concept of personalization between brands and customers. This is vital for businesses, to reach out to targeted audiences (e.g. demographics), and use more cost-effective strategies than traditional marketing methods.

Businesses can now focus on a digital strategy to grow by adopting practical ways of using these marketing channels to grow their businesses and to deliver unique experiences to their existing and potential customers. Note YouTube for example which has emerged as the second biggest media for marketing after Google. Also noteworthy is Google, the best search engine for products and services.

Businesses who want to grow and make a profit will use Google with pay-per-click capabilities, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for enhanced visibility, and Google Analytics for capabilities to determine who your audiences are, what they are doing on your website.

To effectively digitize your business for an enhanced customer experience, you should consider the following key steps in your strategy. First, assessing customer needs. This can be obtained through research to identify customer pain points and expectations. It will pave the way for creating a tailored digital experience.

Second, using social media to streamline customer interactions and provide personalized support. Third, providing intuitive interfaces for digital platforms to ensure customers can easily navigate and engage with your services. Fourth, develop a reasonable balance between technology and human support, this way the customer feels valued and understood. Fifth, analyze customer feedback regularly to identify areas for improvement.

Understand Customer Needs

Recognizing customer needs is critical, as today’s customer has very high expectations. According to research, 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs, and a positive experience can lead to repeat purchases for 91% of customers. Customer needs are essentially the problems or pain points that they aim to resolve through products or services.

YouTube the video streaming platform for example provides customers with a channel where they can effectively search for learning and knowledge about products or services through video enhances engagement that ultimately leads them to purchase or patronize our products.

Digital touchpoints enhance our capabilities to observe customers’ interactions and experiences with the products or services we are offering. It requires that we place ourselves in their shoes to enable us to identify explicit (easily recognizable) and latent (less obvious) pain points from their perspective. The customer journey from end to end can best be observed through our digital touchpoints such as our website, or social media handles provide.

To get the best value out of our websites we can use web analytics tools to track user behavior and identify drop-off points in the customer journey. This means our websites must provide functionalities that enable us to measure and conduct surveys regularly.

It provides measurable results, enabling us to analyze the effectiveness of our campaigns and make necessary adjustments in real-time. Enhancing business adaptability is crucial in today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where consumer preferences can change rapidly. If we want to be intentional about the customer experience we must be strategic about how we deploy our digital handles.

An integrated approach as mentioned earlier will suffice here. A mix of physical and digital touchpoints with a clear policy of engagement will ensure that the experience we deliver is consistent across all touchpoints. We must leverage this by conducting surveys at different touchpoints to gather qualitative data on customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.

Social Media  –  the new Marketplace

Social media has emerged as a major spoke in the customer experience wheel. It is often referred to as “social commerce.” It allows users to buy and sell products directly on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. They enable us to integrate e-commerce functionalities into social interactions.

These platforms have introduced a range of shopping features enabling users to explore products and complete transactions using the relevant apps. For example, Instagram has a dedicated shopping tab where businesses can showcase their products, while TikTok has implemented shoppable livestreams that allow real-time interaction between brands and consumers.

Social commerce is a strong influencing factor among younger generations, particularly Gen Z and Millennials, who are increasingly using social media as a primary source for product discovery and social engagement. Research indicates that 40% of shopping is now conducted by Gen Z alone, highlighting the importance of these platforms in shaping purchasing decisions.

The social commerce market is projected to grow significantly, it is estimated that global sales through social media could reach $2.9 trillion by 2026. This growth is driven by the increasing number of users engaging in online shopping through social platforms.

By utilizing data-driven insights, brands are better able to allows affiliates to create targeted campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments. Here businesses compensate third-party publishers, known as affiliates, for generating traffic or sales through their marketing efforts.

The model allows companies to leverage the reach of affiliates to promote their products or services while only paying for successful transactions, making it a cost-effective marketing strategy. Cristiano Ronaldo leverages his immense popularity and influence as one of the world’s top athletes. He works through partnerships and endorsements, which serve as a model for affiliate marketing strategies.

Provide intuitive interfaces

Enhancing the customer experience through intuitive interfaces can best be achieved through deliberate strategies that focus on understanding user needs, simplifying interactions, and ensuring consistency across all platforms.  This makes it imperative for us to include in our processes thorough user research to understand customer preferences, pain points, and behaviours.

This requires more than just ticking the boxes with your online campaign. Whatever your approach it is essential that you drive a system that enhances your capacity to understand very accurately the needs of your customers and design interfaces (points of communication) that assist them to engage with you painlessly.

A good resource in this process is a digital touchpoint where you have functionalities that will drive a high conversion rate (Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your touchpoint that complete a desired goal – a conversion – out of the total number of visitors to a website and marketing campaigns).

This should be coupled with feedback mechanisms, that allow users to share their experiences easily. The goal is to foster interaction, build relationships, and enhance brand loyalty. Whether it is a big corporate or small business the strategies are fundamentally similar. A good starting point is to create user personas and map user journeys to help visualize the experience and identify areas for improvement.

Planning your digital interfaces is a good leverage to scale up your business. Share genuine stories about your business to resonate well with audiences. Provide insights into your products and engage the audience by offering them opportunities to share their thoughts about your business.

Listening to them will enable you to learn firsthand which areas need improvement. A restauranter will share details on the menu to inform existing and potential customers. Social media handles such as Instagram, Facebook, X, WhatsApp, and others offer flexible engagement patterns. What better way to engage the market than to build a community of satisfied customers. The interactions at these touchpoints are great opportunities for continuous improvements.

Technology vs human support

What we seek in this instance is a situation where there is a seamless integration of technology and human support to enhance the customer experience (CX). It is about creating a balanced and effective service model by increasingly adopting digital tools and leveraging these technologies while maintaining the human touch to foster genuine customer relationships.

The operative word here is genuine. When customers recognize that you have a genuine concern for their needs, they will reward you by staying loyal to your brand. This is best achieved through a combination of digital and human support. Don’t be afraid to start an imperfect process of digitization and learn the lessons to enable you to improve.

The reality is that a social media campaign may take six months to a year to reach maturity. Therefore, it does help a great deal while stepping up your social media engagement, not to stop using other tactics that currently enable you to reach your target markets successfully. While driving your social media campaign keep your eyes on results from metrics showing that social media is performing well before you abandon your current approach.

To know what to measure you must set goals for your progression to culminate in full integration. You can start by sending newsletters through your email. Target people by age, location, income range, and other demographic information.

The question to ask here is, why email? It has been discovered, that more than three times as many people have email accounts than Twitter and Facebook accounts combined. Email open rates, average 20 percent to 25 percent, making an email message more likely to be seen than the same post on Facebook.

And the click-through rate for email is about 50 percent higher than that for social media posts on Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps a WhatsApp group where you can engage and inform on a regular basis will be a good starting point. Use the principle of social engagement to birth the model and as you grow the concept will be replicable on the digital platforms. Simply put start traditional and migrate progressively to digital.

Analyze customer feedback for improvement

Here your goal is to gather insights from customer opinions, sift out areas for improvement and implement changes that will ultimately enhance satisfaction and loyalty. Although it might seem laborious it pays to gather data variously from a range of channels such as surveys, social media, customer support interactions, and reviews.

Using a mix of quantitative (ratings) and qualitative (comments) feedback will guarantee a comprehensive understanding of customer sentiments. Categories the feedback based on service speed, product quality, and customer support. Doing it this way will improve your capacity to identify common issues and strengths within the business.

Digital touchpoints facilitate effective elicitation and analysis of feedback from key customer touchpoints. There are several ways to do this. First, you can tag and categorize qualitative feedback data to identify trends. You can also segment customers based on shared experience and characteristics.

Furthermore, you can build funnels to see where customers are dropping off. If you upload a website to get value from it you will need an analytical tool to leverage information on the type of traffic that your website is generating. Google Analytics is a common tool to help you do this. Google is a software program that helps you find the information you are looking for online using keywords or phrases.

To get good value from this when you subscribe to the tool you get a plug-in that will help you analyze the traffic that comes to your website. How many visitors, where they are coming from, how long they spend on your pages, where people are bouncing off i.e. homepage, landing page, or checkout.

An effective digital strategy will position you to assess your customers more accurately and determine what their likes and dislikes are. What is critical in making this work is the need to pay close attention by dedicating a resource to managing your digital strategy. Remember what cannot be measured cannot be managed.  It doesn’t matter how small or big your business is. What’s important is for you to have a strategy that aligns with your business goals and work diligently to grow a sustainable digital path.

The 21^st Century is tricky. The term used frequently is volatility. In a volatile world, change happens very quickly thus requiring small, medium, or large businesses to keep their eye on the ball persistently. At the heart of the business equation is the customer who is now highly empowered and thus is better placed to make choices based on informed opinions and preferences. To keep pace with this uncertain trend we must all be learners on the path of digitization regardless of the type of business or size. Let’s say digital is the new currency and so your customer experience will improve when you become proficient in the New World! The digital world!

The Writer is A Consultant in Organizational Development and Customer Experience, and the Head Training at Service Excellence Foundation He can be reached on 059 175 7205

https://gh.linkedin.com/in/km-13b85717

The Customer Experience (CXP) Annual Conference Takes place on Friday 11 October 2024 at the Labadi Beach Hotel. The theme of this year’s conference is “Citizen Experience – we are customers