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Home / Insights / Thought Leadership / Through My Lens: Digital Customer Experience
August 12, 2024 - by Carlos Pimenta
Customer experience remains a highly competitive battleground for capturing customer attention and loyalty. What factors contribute to a great customer experience that enables organizations to stand out?
Constantly evolving customer needs and behaviors require companies to continually optimize customer journeys to ensure consistent omnichannel customer experiences (CX).
Social, political, economic, cultural, competitive and technological factors shape how your customers behave at a macro level. Businesses were caught off-guard when the pandemic struck, and many scrambled to serve changing customer needs prompted by social distancing. It not only changed customer behavior, it also prompted more companies to adopt a digital first mentality.
The second factor is making your customers feel more valued, and one way to achieve that is through personalization. According to a 2023 Medallia Market Research survey, 82% of consumers say personalized experiences influence the brand they end up purchasing in at least half of all shopping situations. The third factor is that customers want things to be easy and convenient. As humans, we are pre-disposed to do as little as possible. Your brain, for example, consumes 20 percent of your body’s energy daily. It is one of the reasons why many people prefer to use self-checkout machines at grocery stores. These machines are designed to be quick and easy to use, reducing cognitive load and making the shopping experience more convenient. Or, when you visit a mall, many will park as close to the front door as possible.
Marketing activity generates a lot of the interaction data, like search intent, browsing history, sales, customer service etc. This data can sometimes be siloed and needs to be stitched together to understand more about your customers so that you can market to them more effectively. AI can help you integrate all the omnichannel data to give you a more holistic omnichannel view of the customer journey. Furthermore, it can help you predict future behavior based on current interactions, and generate personalized content and offers.
Intelligent AI-powered solutions can resolve everyday customer issues based on historical data, freeing human agents to focus on more complex queries. By identifying patterns in customer behavior, AI algorithms help build more valuable long-term relationships.
AI hallucinations remain a challenge and can also negatively impact the customer experience. An AI chatbot agent that hallucinates can generate fabricated responses when AI models are trained on incomplete or biased data.
The second pitfall is brand differentiation. If you use AI to generate all your content, you won’t be able to build a brand voice or provide differentiated messaging. Overreliance on AI for content generation coupled with its lack of emotional intelligence can lead to unpredictable outcomes.
To minimize risk, train AI models on your brand voice and tone, and the audience you are targeting. Supplement the model with examples of high-performing content that exemplify your brand voice and tone. Incorporate human oversight and creativity in your content strategy and execution to build a connected customer experience.
Companies exist to serve customers, so it is mission critical to take a customer first approach. If you are not serving their needs and provide them a poor customer experience, competitors will thank you. After all, PWC research shows that 1 in 3 customers will stop doing business with customers after a poor customer experience.
We at Synoptek are in the experience transformation business. We understand that each client has its own unique set of challenges, so our approach is consultative. We take the time to work with organizations to understand their business goals and objectives, where they are on their customer journey, and why they need to transform how they do business with their end customers.
We use customer journey mapping to help our clients reimagine a future state experience. We then choose the technology stacks needed to power those experiences and have design and engineering teams work on bringing those experiences to life in parallel.
We also work through the business process changes needed and change management required to support this entire experience transformation.
You will find that we are the last customer experience transformation partner you will ever need.
With 33 years of experience, Carlos, the Vice President of Customer Experience, specializes in Digital Experience transformation, helping clients transform and grow their businesses across various sectors. He has a proven track record of driving growth and operational efficiencies, leading teams that deliver compelling consumer experiences, including Fortune 500 brands.
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