Insights
4 ways a digital culture can help you put your customers first
Author
Jo Watts
Delivery Director
6 minutes
24th July 2024
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Customer expectations are growing.
In today's world where both time and money are short, it's no surprise that people are increasingly looking for seamless digital experiences, from accessing their GP online to rapid home delivery and flawless internet service.
Meeting these expectations, however, isn't necessarily just about delivering services faster online or providing an overwhelming range of choice for your customers.
Instead, it's about understanding what the customer really needs.
What obstacles are preventing them from making a purchase?
Where is friction slowing their experience down?
"The degree to which technology can help us provide great experiences to customers is a win-win. The main thing that underpins our culture is values, and I’m now seeing digital be integrated into every single one of those values – especially being customer focused."
Nigel Watson - CIO, Northumbrian Water Group.
Integrating customer success in your organisation means being flexible enough to adapt to the needs of your customers.
As Nigel highlights, a digital culture - one that empowers your employees to work smartly and is underpinned by the robust connectivity to deliver in any circumstance - will set you apart.
So how can a digital culture help you provide a frictionless experience for your customers?
1. Making things easy
Streamlining a customer experience is all about information.
Solutions such as Qualtrics can help you understand where points of friction are in a customer journey and make adjustments to your interface to address them.
At Virgin Media O2 Business, we're implementing listening posts so we can see if customers get frustrated at a certain point along their journey and drop off. The data can show when directing them towards call handlers at key moments of the decision-making process can help.
Too many customer journeys ending up at your FAQ page? An AI chatbot ready to answer questions within the checkout page could solve this. By using this customer data you can build solutions that address specific customer concerns, making things simpler for them and more effective for you.
For example, we helped Homebase achieve more for their customers by upgrading the wide area network across all Homebase stores, allowing team members to access systems and search for stock from virtually anywhere on-site to meet customer requests faster.
So make sure you're collecting and analysing your data to build an experience that works for every customer.
2. Getting personal
Embedding a customer-first mindset into your digital culture can have a significant knock-on impact on the overall success of your organisation.
On the one hand, it can help you build solutions that best match your customers' needs. This means evolving what you can offer to be more tailored and personal by focussing on outcomes rather than tech KPIs.
For example, we've seen technology play a key role for a care home customer, making it easier for nursing staff care to do more hands-on care for patients whilst administrative work is increasingly digitalised.
Technology's role here isn't about replacing people or making interactions feel less human. Instead it's about freeing up your staff to do the work they are trained and passionate about doing and ensuring everyone has access to the support and experiences they need.
For example, we worked with Falkirk Council to better support the learning of children across the school network by deploying iPad tablets to every pupil aged 10-18 and every member of teaching staff. Their new cloud-managed infrastructure now confidently supports more than 25,000 devices.
The use of robust SD-WAN connectivity has also meant reduced travel costs, as meetings and teaching can be confidently carried out online when necessary, removing the need to ferry pupils to different schools for subjects which their own school doesn't offer.
So instead of just thinking about how technology can help your work faster, consider how a digital culture can help you achieve more. This mindset shift will be crucial as the role of technology expands.
3. Staying transparent
Customers need to be at the centre of everything.
But friction is inevitable on the delivery of major physical projects. An effective digital culture can help you respond to that friction quickly and proactively to ensure it doesn't impact your customers' loyalty.
Feedback surveys at each journey milestone can help you collect data on the positives and negatives of every customer interaction, meaning you can build a picture of where common obstacles lie.
Use that information in open and honest dialogue with your customers – acknowledge their concerns and be clear in the steps you're taking to tackle them. Close the loop processes are also really important here in enabling you to delve deeper and spot customer trends.
Regular touchpoints like this ensure customers feel included in the decisions behind your evolving customer experience, leading to greater satisfaction that will boost your bottom line.
And when problems do arise, don't neglect the human aspect of the customer experience. We find that customers don't mind talking to us about the difficult and complex challenges they face. They typically just want options for interacting with us and sharing their feedback, and to see us actively trying to resolve any challenges we've caused.
Through both aggregated feedback and personal conversation, you can gain a better picture of your customer needs and be more open in how you respond to them.
Often you'll find the friction stems from small, incremental issues such as slow websites and buggy platforms. This is why the fundamentals of your infrastructure are so important.
Downtime on your website is damaging both to your bottom line and your customers' trust. Latency and lag throughout the digital experience can be the tipping point for a frustrated customer to abandon their purchase.
Digital essentials, such as high-bandwidth robust connectivity, can make the difference.
4. Building touchpoints everywhere
Businesses must increasingly build their presence in the digital world, according to a recent report from Capgemini.
It says by "enhancing their digital presence [and] offering seamless, human-centric experiences that merge the physical and digital worlds", organisations can ensure customers can find them wherever they are.
In the simplest form this looks like the proliferation of touchscreen devices at customer services areas such as airports or restaurants. But in the long term this could mean migrating your storefront into the metaverse or using digital avatars to interact with your customers.
Whatever your digital journey might look like, achieving customer success means thinking about the bigger picture. Take the time now to understand the wider cultural shift required to understand how customers are increasingly relying on technology to guide them through everything their business does.
We've already seen technology be used to transform industries, making organisations more efficient and empowering employees. By building a strong digital culture for your organisation you can turn the spotlight onto your customers and help them achieve more.
Ready to get started building a digital culture for your customers?
Explore more insights in our Digitial culture Insider series
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