Want to create flawless digital customer interactions to improve customer experience? Read these 6 practical tips

Customers who want to contact your organization, but get caught in a dead-end chatbot, are sent from pillar to post by telephone and have to provide personal details for the third time... These are situations that you as an organization probably want to avoid in order to improve the customer experience improve on a continuous basis.

But how do you approach this smartly as a (large) organization? In this article we explain what the stumbling blocks are and how you can solve them using 6 practical tips.

Stumbling blocks that get in the way of good customer interaction (and therefore customer experience).

1. Complexity in the (legacy) IT landscape
2. Complexity within the organization
3. Data quality issues

Everything to help the customer personally, interactively, contextually, but above all, easily.

Organizational structure & internal interests as stumbling blocks

Many organizations have a complex organizational structure with many different processes and systems, despite the Agile working methods and necessary change power. This is mainly due to internal contradictions between departments. Marketing is focused on the customer, the IT department focuses on security & compliance and Business on (rapid) changes. As a result, it remains a challenge to implement new solutions and processes that make interaction with your customers easier and more personal. And thus improve the overall customer experience!

Systems vs. wishes

In addition to the above organizational complexity and internal conflicts of interest, a lot of IT capacity is lost to maintaining complex and outdated systems. These systems are essential to maintain your organization, but difficult to combine with the wishes of departments that quickly respond to changes in the market.

What can you do specifically as an organization to improve customer experience and customer interaction?

Business takes the lead

It is important to get things up and running quickly. The systems you use to interact with your customer must work. The Business department within organizations must take the lead in this. Of course, in consultation with the IT department. If you do not do this, in practice it happens that an employee takes matters into his own hands, takes out the credit card and purchases an online tool himself. It is nice that an employee takes initiative, but as an organization you want to maintain an overview of the customer contact systems that are used.

Approaching customer interaction outside in

Ultimately, it is important to approach customer interaction as outside in as possible. Not looking at it from a systems perspective, but from the actual customer needs analysis. From there, Marketing or Innovation should be given the space to look outside the box at compact solutions that can realize innovative, hyper-personalized customer interaction. Everything to help the customer personally, interactively, contextually, but above all, easily.

The role of IT

The role of IT becomes that of a business enabler where they take ownership of successful experiments and integrate the solution into the IT landscape. While retaining flexibility and the option for as much self-reliance as possible for the Business. Only then can they quickly make changes to customer interactions. For example, when a new product is launched to enable digital self-service not only for your customers, but also more or less for your internal organization.

Summarized in 6 practical tips:

1. Don't be afraid to experiment with new solutions and channels.

There are certainly options in the cloud to do this in a fast, safe and responsible manner. Make sure that IT is involved from the start in a proactive or facilitating role.

2. Look for a party with experience in customer interaction that dares to move along.

Specialized parties can often switch quickly and deliver at modest project costs without too much overhead. This is not a party with one solution looking for problems, but a party that has broad (best of breed) knowledge of customer interaction.

3. When choosing tools and processes, ensure that business & marketing can be self-reliant.

This saves you a lot of time and efficiency because Business can make changes to customer interaction itself.

4. If you choose a (cloud) tool, make sure it is an 'enterprise ready' solution.

Think about scalability, security, integrability and functionality, so that you can grow later and the transition to an IT sanctioned and managed solution is easy.

5. Think carefully about the reusability of data and content.

Better yet, about implementing a customer interaction layer where you have control, where you connect all complex IT and can offer good, uniform content for many channels from one solution and also guarantee data quality.

6. Think about the role of people in the process, for example by offering a 'live take over' or other escape.

Not everything can be digitized (reality is unruly) and not every person reacts the same to digital processes.

* The translations on this website are provided by G-Translate from Dutch