In today's globalized and hyper-connected business environment, maintaining customer engagement is a critical factor of success. Modern consumers have more options than ever before for nearly every product or service they use — and each one is as close as the nearest internet-ready device.
To capture the increasingly divided attention of customers, you aren't just up against the other players in your specific corner of the market. Effectively, you're up against every other company in the world. If you want your business to stand out from the competition, you need to deliver experiences that defy consumer expectations and turn fickle customers into loyal patrons.
When it comes to finding new customers and retaining old ones, digitizing is no longer an option — it's a necessity. Over the past few years, businesses of all kinds have been steadily shifting from familiar ways of doing business to new digital technologies that promise streamlined processes, enhanced productivity, and elevated customer engagement.
Why Your Business Needs a Digital Transformation
Giving your company a digital transformation means switching all of your business operations to digital technologies, like cloud networks and automated management systems. According to Statista, global spending on digital transformation hit an estimated $1.6 trillion in 2022. By the end of 2026, that number is expected to total about $3.4 trillion.
The results of a recent McKinsey Global survey suggest that the current digital transformation trend is directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to that survey, executive respondents credited the pandemic with hastening a migration to digital technologies at their own businesses by as many as four years. The majority of those respondents say that much of their focus has been on digitizing customer experience in particular.
Much like the pandemic changed how companies conduct business, it also changed how customers interact with businesses. In particular, consumers were driven to online digital channels en masse thanks to lockdowns, social distancing, and other COVID-era safety precautions.
Now, customers have a whole new set of expectations for the businesses they patronize. Those expectations are built upon their exposure to digital technologies that prioritize customer experience. Business Wire reports that 86% of customers say they would likely cut ties with a business after even a single unsatisfactory experience. In a post-pandemic world, it's incumbent upon businesses to meet these expectations and craft experiences that boost customer satisfaction and retention.
Digitizing the customer experience is how businesses are doing just that. By offering experiences that are enhanced by digital technologies, businesses can satisfy consumer desire for experiences that are personalized, immersive, and consistent from channel to channel.
From segmented email lists that send highly targeted messages to individual consumers to customer onboarding software that keeps users supported and engaged long after the initial purchase, digitizing the customer experience helps businesses succeed. In fact, when you adopt digital, customer-centric approaches, you can:
- Increase average sale orders
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Boost productivity and efficiency
- Improve adaptability
- Increase engagements
Go Digital and Personalize Your CRM
One of the key benefits to businesses of digitizing the customer experience is that it enables you to collect a huge amount of customer data. That data has enormous potential to boost business. For example, it can reveal operation inefficiencies and give you insight on how to improve, enable you to make informed, data-based decisions more quickly, and innovate new products and services based on historical trends.
It can also help you personalize your customer relations management efforts. By analyzing a range of customer data, including identifying details, demographic information, and customers motivations as consumers, you can tailor every interaction to individual specificity. You can also personalize the marketing that each of your customers receive.
Some of the most common digital solutions for personalizing CRM include:
- Segmentation: Segmenting your customers into different groups based on demographics such as age, gender, or location allows you to target them with marketing messages that are relevant to their lives and how they use your services. It also helps avoid inundating them with material that doesn't interest them.
- Dynamic Content: With a personalized CRM system you can incorporate dynamic content into your website, mobile app, marketing emails, and more. This is content that changes based on the data about specific customers, delivering the personalized experience customers expect.
- Custom Landing Pages: Similarly, you can create custom landing pages that are tailored to specific customer segments. When customers from a certain list visit your website, they'll be greeted with information that's tailored to their exact needs.
- Behavioral Tracking: You can learn a lot about a customer's preferences, expectations, and needs based on how they behave when they use your website or mobile app. You can use that data to develop individualized content and experiences that keep customers engaged.
Streamline Your Multichannel Experience
Another huge benefit of digitizing customer experiences is the positive impact it can have on the quality of your multichannel experience. An optimal multichannel experience delivers customers consistent interactions no matter what channel they happen on.
Customer support is one example. These days, it isn't enough to have a single hotline or email that routes to a help desk. When a customer uses your product or service, they expect to be able to get hold of you — or a representative — quickly, easily, and conveniently. Whether they reach out over the phone, by email, or through the app, they want information that's correct, current, and helpful. Keeping help consistent across channels can go a long way to improving the overall customer experience. In fact, 55% of customers say they feel "emotionally connected" to a business when they have the option of accessing support on the channel of their choosing, according to Gartner.
Give Your Onboarding a Digital Transformation With OnRamp
Keep your customers engaged by offering streamlined, sensible customer onboarding. You'll get them up to speed in no time with OnRamp, the best customer onboarding software available.
With OnRamp, you can easily automate your onboarding processes with our customer playbook templates and build dynamic onboarding plans that guide your customers through the process one step at a time. Then, the OnRamp software lets you track customer progress so you can identify areas for improvement and make adjustments. It's an intuitive and easy-to-use platform, offering a no-code customer portal for non-techies and techies alike.
Are you ready to transform your customer experience? Try OnRamp today with a free demo!
