Just having great product offerings is no longer enough. Product centricity is a relic of the past, and a customer-centric approach has emerged as the leading strategy for attracting, engaging, and retaining clients. Modern-day consumers want customer-centricity personalization, but few companies are ready to deliver it. In our guide, you’ll discover how to effectively meet customer needs and achieve a successful customer-centric digital transformation.
What is Digital Transformation in Customer Experience?
Digital transformation, in short, is the process of implementing and integrating various digital tools into a company’s workflows. This often means switching from usual solutions to new, more advanced ones. For example, going “paperless” and moving all of the documentation to the cloud and keeping only electronic documents from now on can be considered a part of digital transformation. However, there is a lot more to it; such transformation is not just about using different technologies but also digitizing customer experience and finding the proper channels to contact your target audience.
Technological advancements go hand in hand with ever-changing customer needs. When something new emerges, people want to try it out first-hand. Once they get used to it, they also want to see the technology used by their favorite brands. One example is TikTok, a platform many people had mixed emotions about. Still, it became a massive platform for boosting user engagement and improving the online experience. Many similar digital solutions and technologies can play a significant role in creating an outstanding customer journey, so accepting this transformation, rather than resisting it, is essential.
Why Everyone Should be Customer-Centric?
Being customer-centric means prioritizing the customer’s perspective and needs as much as the company’s, consistently placing the client at the heart of all operations. Customer-centricity offers numerous benefits for both customers and businesses. Let’s explore them:
- A deeper understanding of your customers and their needs.
- Higher profitability: customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable.
- Increased customer lifetime value, where the customer is far more likely to come back for repeated purchases instead of seeking business elsewhere.
- Improved customer retention rates.
- Stronger brand perception.
- Reduced likelihood of customers leaving for a competitor.
- More chances that the business will stand out.
- Better overall customer satisfaction.
Key Stages of a Customer-Centric Digital Transformation Process
We define six stages of the customer-centric transformation process:
Business as usual
The need for change is understood and accepted. However, existing digital tools and solutions are not being used to their full potential, and the current customer experience strategy is often fragmented. At this stage, insights from analytics are not used for further decision-making, and all measured efforts from different departments are isolated.
Present and active
The business starts to explore the capabilities of customer experience analytics. The company researches, experiments, and tries out new approaches and channels. Employees now realize that change is coming, and more are taking action within their departments to promote test-and-learn programs, experiment, and learn. At this point, resistance to change is the biggest challenge.
Formalized
The digital transformation journey has begun. The company can identify measurement gaps, find more opportunities for digital transformation, make informed decisions based on analytics, map out a customer journey through various touchpoints, and create digital learning programs.
Strategic
As the company focuses on integrated experiences across all channels, omnichannel, content, and loyalty metrics gain increased importance. Customer experience and digital customer experience have become top priorities. Employees across all departments and company leaders realize and appreciate the importance of change. Change agents have more impact on decision-making processes. Technology roadmaps are synchronized with overall digital roadmaps.
Converged
The digital revolution within the organization is already in full swing. New business models help break down silos, unify processes, and streamline operations. Teams use analytics to make data-driven decisions, and improvements are made in real time. Digital transformation goes beyond creating a customer-centric digital transformation and now includes the lifeline of the business. New talent is attracted, with more people being hired and trained.
Innovative and adaptive
The company is now entirely digitally transformed, and the customer is at the heart of all processes and operations. All employees have the skills to create fulfilling customer-centric journeys and are ready to innovate and experiment if necessary.
7+ Steps for Effective Customer-Centric Digital Transformation
How can you create an engaging customer journey that has a real impact? These are the seven steps for achieving effective customer-centric digital transformation:
Set your goals
Digital transformation has many benefits, but do you understand its advantages for your organization? Such a huge change is guaranteed to have a big impact on an organization’s processes and workflows, which is why it’s crucial to have an understanding of why it’s implemented in the first. Doing something just for the sake of it is not going to bring any success, even if it’s portrayed that way. If you are not sure about your goals for digital transformation, use these questions to set the course for your digital transformational processes:
- How do we envision the customer-centric future of our company?
- What should customer engagement look like at our company after digital transformation?
- Who is our target audience, and how will our digital transformation benefit them?
- How can digital transformation aid the company in solving customer’s pain points?
- How can digitization enhance your personalization and omnichannel strategies?
- What digital products, services, and content can we offer our clientele to meet emerging needs and demands?
- What key performance indicators (KPIs) will we use to measure the performance of our digital solutions and the success of our digital transformation?
- How will we incorporate new technologies into our workflows, and how comfortable is our company with experimenting with emerging tech?
These questions are a good start for defining digital transformation for your business. Of course, there is more to it, and it’s best to explore this topic with a team by your side, learning more about digitization and its benefits. The most important thing is to know your goals and how customer-centric digital transformation fits into them.
Foster customer-centricity in your organization
What makes a company customer-centric is that it is those who genuinely care about customers and keep them in mind during every interaction. Everything depends on the mindset, as the best way to provide a client with excellent service is to have first-hand experience of customer-centricity. Start with inner interactions, activities, and processes, ensuring that every employee understands the principles of a customer-centric company and is treated in line with those principles. Educate your employees and regularly update your learning programs, adding more information about new tech, trends, and practices.
Another thing you can do is empower employees to perform better and pay more attention to their customers. Reward them for their efforts and provide honest feedback and recommendations on enhancing their skills if you see areas for improvement. By engaging with your teams and creating positive experiences inside your organization, you turn your workplace into a space where everyone can be inspired to get better versions of themselves.
Build omnichannel experiences
In the modern age, people have profiles on at least 2-3 social media channels while watching news, reading books, and talking to others to get information. What does this mean? Having just 1-2 channels for interacting with customers won’t be enough. Instead, it would be best if you created a seamless transition across the channels your clients prefer to use. 75% of consumers want a seamless omnichannel experience, while only 25% are satisfied with the experience they currently receive. According to Google, omnichannel consumers have a 30% higher customer lifetime value.
When building your omnichannel strategy, focus on finding the right channels and connecting them instead of using those channels to share some content and facts about your brand. Don’t force your audience to read the same thing twice. Instead, ensure a smooth flow between channels, where everything you share across them complements one another rather than repeats.
Personalize customer journeys
76% of consumers state that they are more likely to shop with a brand that personalizes, with 78% saying that they would make another purchase from a business that offers personalization. A personalized customer journey is critical to customer-centricity, which makes it a huge part of your marketing strategy.
First, you need to understand who you will personalize your content for. Learn more about your audience, their likes and dislikes, what they look forward to when they open social media, and what kind of content they usually read or watch for over a few seconds. Gather data non-intrusively through surveys, questionnaires, and even just talking sessions on different platforms. Engaging with your audience and discovering more about them is the first step toward successfully personalizing the customer’s experience.
Choose the right tools
It’s impossible to have a transformation journey without proper instruments and solutions. To know what kind of tools are best for your business strategy, determine your goals first. By asking the right questions, you can clarify your vision and gain a clear picture of where your company is headed. With a strong understanding of your future objectives, you can then choose the best tools to drive digitization and enhance customer centricity. Here are some of the digital tools and solutions you can adopt at your organization:
- Digital solutions (e.g., Digital Content Factory).
- CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce and HubSpot).
- Communication platforms (e.g., Slack and Microsoft Teams).
- Content management systems (e.g., WordPress, HubSpot, and eWizard).
- Knowledge management platforms (e.g., Confluence, Notion, and Sharepoint).
- Cloud storage systems (e.g., Google Drive, Google Cloud, Dropbox, AWS, and Microsoft Azure).
- Applicant tracking systems (e.g., HiBob).
- Social media marketing tools (e.g., Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok).
- Data analytics tools (e.g., Microsoft Power BI and Google Analytics).
- AI-powered tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Secoda, Jasper AI, and DALL-E).
There are so many incredible tools that the list can go on for much longer. It’s important not just to choose a couple of tools and implement them into your company’s workflows as quickly as possible but also to make sure that the chosen software is the best pick specifically for your business. Do all of these tools help you tackle some of the business challenges you’ve been facing? Can these instruments aid you and your employees in achieving your goals? Can these tools be smoothly integrated into already existing systems and processes? Do they offer scalability as your business grows? Consider all of these questions before making a final decision.
Evaluate your progress
Your digital transformation won’t be just a straight road to success. You will deal with difficulties, your teams will sometimes resist the change, and not all of your efforts will reciprocate. And that’s to be expected; what is important to do is ensure that you find the most effective methods for achieving customer experience along your journey and know whether something works or not. To do that, you will need to have clear key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some of the metrics you can measure:
- Customer satisfaction;
- Customer retention rate;
- Churn rate;
- Customer effort score;
- Digital engagement;
- First contact resolution;
- Click-through rate;
- Customer lifetime value.
Offer an effortless onboarding process
According to Salesforce, 74% of consumers will switch to another brand if the chosen company doesn’t provide a smooth and clear purchase/checkout experience. If you want your client to feel valued, make sure you value their time as well. There are many tactics you can implement to ease the onboarding process, such as:
- Personalized guidance based on data entered by a customer;
- AI-powered chatbots;
- 24/7 live chat;
- Accessible FAQ section;
- Automated account creation;
- Interactive walkthroughs;
- Simplified registration forms.
Remember to use as many visuals as possible to make this process easier for all types of learners. Just plain text or a ton of images won’t do, as some users may find this approach irritating and opt to switch to a different brand instead.
Closing Thoughts
Digital transformation and customer centricity are the two pillars of business success in the modern landscape, and they are most effective when fully aligned. If you are ready to embrace customer-centric transformation, your focus should shift from “How much can we earn this quarter?” to “How can we provide value to our customers today?”. Soon, you’ll start to see notable changes.
To learn more about customer-centric digital transformation, visit our website for exclusive guides, webinars, and events. And if you would like to take your customer-centric strategy to the next level, let us know, and our experts will contact you back in no time.
