Creating a Seamless Digital Customer Experience
As foreseen over the last decade, mainstream customer interaction has become digital. Yes, the legacy brands of old – and brick and mortar retail spaces – remain. However, every industry has seen their ability to interact with customers disrupted or changed by growing technological advancements. Now, brands must strive for the coveted seamless digital experience to survive in the ever changing world of business. With this growing need, we’re more connected to the businesses we buy from than ever before. However, as debated in this Harvard Business Review article, just because new technologies are present, it doesn’t mean they all uniformly create a seamless digital customer experience.
Much like all CSR concepts, shifting towards seamless digital experiences must be tailored to each company’s needs and services. For instance, the interconnectedness of people and their healthcare providers has widened who can get seen by a doctor and has eased the process on the patient end tremendously. However, “care capacity is finite, and so the additional demand caused much more work and only slightly more revenue.” While bolstering the digital experience is a great positive for patients, the U.S. Healthcare System did not fully account for this, boosting activity while not similarly boosting capacity. If a business can easily extend their bandwidth and assist more customers, then digital experiences may solely be positive. However, businesses must weigh their options and find the perfect balance between the old and the new.
And the questions around digital experience implementation don’t begin and end at the company’s bottom line. While data collection can be very useful to personalize and understand customer choices, many consumers are growing frustrated with how frivolously companies collect and then sell user data. With this in mind, companies must weigh the benefits of data, asking themselves when streamlining digital experiences no longer outweighs the ire of their customers.
It is unavoidable; customers will continue to move online and they will expect the world of business to offer more convenience. Yet, at least for the foreseeable future, this does not mean jumping in full force to the technology and methods of tomorrow. Everything is in context, and company’s must find their own context to understand what rejuvenated digital experiences have to offer them, along with what they could possibly take away.