Author
April 27, 2023
Creating a positive customer experience is a key to any business success story. It is a highly iterative and circular process, relying on the quality of communication between the business and customer. With proper customer experience management a business learns where they have met, exceeded, or fallen short in meeting their customer’s needs, and these insights become integral to improving revenue and future performance. Building a 360 degree customer view—a comprehensive consolidated collection of all of a customer’s data—is an extremely valuable tool in this process of accurately capturing customer behaviors that may indicate opportunities for improvement.
It goes without saying that an improved customer experience is also a huge benefit to the customer themselves… they don’t want to have a poor experience with your business any more than you want them to!
Research shows companies that shift to a more customer-first approach increase revenues by a factor of 3.5. But there’s also a growing sense that customer service can’t be done the old way in a world of changing consumer needs and technology like artificial intelligence, which has the potential to make dramatic improvements.
Forbes Customer Service Is Improving For Many Americans, And Here’s Why
Customer Service vs Customer Experience
Customer service revolves around a purchase, involving interactions before, during, and after a transaction.
Customer experience is a broader term that refers to the overall impression a customer has of a business. This experience encompasses not only the customer service interactions, but all other impressions in the customer journey and could include anything from seeing an ad for the brand, downloading their app, joining a loyalty club, leaving a review, or interacting with a brand’s social media content.
An optimized customer experience successfully incorporates all of (or at least most of) these interactions.
4 Key Benefits of an Integrated Customer Experience Strategy
Although customer experience will always bridge both the online and offline spaces, the shift towards digital commerce in the past decade has caused a customer experience transformation. More digital interactions mean more data, and that has prompted a huge increase in customer experience metrics now available for businesses to aggregate, analyze and act on.
Using integration to harness this data has provided opportunities for businesses to construct a far more accurate and nuanced 360 degree customer view. Using these insights as the foundation for your customer experience strategy empowers a positive customer journey that is beneficial for the business and customer alike:
Improved Insights
This opportunity for a 360 customer view hinges on the ability to capture all that data and then turn it into meaningful information—a challenge that is only set to grow alongside the huge data sets you rely on. Not only can smart integration support the increasing size of the data sets, it is also the best solution for handling the other main pain point a business will encounter with this data: it is generated from many disparate sources and systems.
Integration connects those systems to see how a customer journey truly unfolds across an omnichannel experience. This accurate “big picture” view is foundational to constructing the right solution for your customers.
Seamless Omnichannel Customer Experience
While it is important for a business to see how a customer’s journey unfolds as they move between different channels, ideally the customers themselves should be only scarcely aware that the messaging is following them as they move. From promo email to Instagram feed to every one of the microservices powering your website, for them, it should feel like a seamless experience of your brand and your business.
Hyper-Personalization
Through integration, a customer’s historical interactions such as recent purchases, browsing on the site, even previously abandoned carts, can be drawn upon to deliver a personalized customer experience in real time that is tailored to the unique preferences, needs, and behaviors that are communicated via a collection of actions. Tools can be integrated that make use of this data to recommend products of interest, or offer discounts and loyalty rewards to increase engagement.
A well-executed personalized customer experience reduces the friction a customer might otherwise ensure in locating items they want, meaning fewer barriers between them and a successful purchase.
Stellar Service (even if something goes sideways)
Every challenge can potentially present an opportunity. Though counterintuitive, integration can help elevate a customer’s experience with a business when the customer runs into issues. Through empowering a business’ employees (or even AI chatbots!) to quickly and easily access the information needed to further the customer journey, intelligent integration provides the flexibility to swiftly course-correct even within an omnichannel customer experience.
This can take the form of a customer service agent being able to pull up a client’s history to resolve a warranty issue without them having to dig for a physical receipt, or a store clerk being able to find a desired out-of-stock item and ship it to a customer’s home. This ability is incredibly valuable in preventing churn and can even turn potential negative client experiences into positive ones.
Digibee for Customer Experience Optimization
If you’re considering integration to maximize your customer experience solutions, partner with Digibee. With real-world experience helping businesses like Payless integrate the retail information systems of 200+ stores in 15 countries, we understand what you need to support your customers, whoever and wherever they are.
Because we know a business can’t just close their shop for updates, we have flexible integration solutions that allow you to run your legacy systems in tandem with new platforms for business continuity and a seamless customer experience.
Learn more about how Digibee can support customer experience management, book a demo to see our solution in action.
