Is Your Business Ready for Today’s All-Digital Customer? Here’s How to Get Started

The all-changing customer expectations and the ever-evolving technological advancements have made today’s business landscape very slippery for those failing behind the digital transformation wave.

It’s now harder to market, sell and engage your customers as they have all become digitally savvy and expect nothing less than a satisfying experience whenever they digitally interact with your business.

They have, in essence, become new all-digital customers that was predicted years ago. And serving this customer means getting it right on all your digital footprints.

Online shopping research done by Salesforce revealed a 43% increase in online customer traffic, a 56% growth in customers using digital platforms and devices, and that 20% of buyers contributed up to 54% of all revenue.

These figures are interesting and predict a very important trend going forward. That your business must be ready for the all-digital customer if you wish to stand a chance of competing with the rest in any industry.

The indistinguishable line between the online and offline worlds continues to blur more every day with mobile banking and tools, virtual customer service, and robust shopping experiences. It’s nearly impossible to serve customers without employing digital channels.

7 Indicators Your Business Is Ready For The All-Digital Customer

So, how do you get your business ready for the digital customer? We explore our top 7 ways to get prepared. Here’s how to know whether your business is ready for the all-digital customer:

You deliver excellent digital user interactions across all devices

Uber is a clear example of a brand providing an excellent digital experience for all-digital customers.

With an intuitive interface, users, whether on the website or using the app, can easily and quickly find whatever they are searching for.

Each element on their site is clearly labeled, and concise descriptions are tacked below to allow users, even first-timers, to know without thinking what each is for.

When thinking about building a seamless digital experience, the first step is to understand customer behaviors and to map their journey.

You will want to focus on identifying key moments in their journey where brand perceptions and loyalty are formed and then, optimize those critical moments for the best possible experience.

You attract more customers

Awareness is important in your business as it helps build, maintain and protect your reputation. All-digital customers need to be engaged digitally.

Get things running on social media platforms and optimize your operations to suit the all-digital customer who is more concerned with online activities, products, and services that your business has to offer.

Make it easy for customers to find you online and offline. Optimizing your website’s SEO is also another great way to help your all-digital customers find you.

You provide a consistent user experience across channels

Starbucks sets a good example and does a pretty good job of harnessing the power of consistent omnichannel experience to build authority and trust with their all-digital customers.

The Starbucks app allows users to order and pay for their coffee before going to the shop to pick it. While on the surface, it looks like any other company app, its real power lies in the integrated strategy behind it.

The experience is as frictionless as possible since customer data is updated all through and it has eloped cut the in-store waiting time for customers, thus, queues are a thing of the past.

You accelerate your ‘speed to insights

Customer-centric businesses thrive on customer-centric insights. They require fast, informative insights in near-real-time, across multiple areas to help make decision-making easier for all-digital customers.

While traditional marketing research remains important to understanding customers, adding digital sources such as voice analytics and behavioral data into the mix lets businesses get closer to their customers, and even faster.

 You align key performance indicators to desired business outcomes

It makes no sense to begin an all-digital customer transformation effort unless you’re able to measure business impact from it, hence the importance of linking KPIs to the outcomes of your efforts.

This means tracking and analyzing the impact on your process, financial, customer, and workforce-related measures, and leveraging a defensible and extensible metrics framework to manage everything seamlessly from A-Z.

You make your experience never-ending

An excellent all-digital customer experience strategy takes into consideration what happens after users become customers.

And, of course, ensures even after the sale, that customers continue to enjoy a memorable experience with the brand. Amazon is a company that sets a good example of such.

From the moment an order is confirmed, Amazon sends an email notification that has all the details about the purchase to the customer.

They also send the order tracking number so the customer can track their purchase.

You shifted toward a self-service dominant customer service strategy

All-digital customers do not have strong channel preferences and prioritize obtaining a resolution above all else.

Businesses should focus their efforts on resolving customer issues completely via self-service channels with only the most complex cases being directed to live-channel reps to deliver a high-quality service experience and maintain customer loyalty.

This in turn helps businesses to make money from maintaining brand loyalty. It is also an added advantage also when it comes to the presumption of innocence to protect brand reputation.

How to get started on transforming your business to become all-digital customer ready

Now that you know signals, it’s time to learn how to get started on the journey. Below are considerations to undertake.

Define your strategy

Ask yourself where you want your business to be and what purpose you want your business to serve your customers.

You need a plan that not only outlines which technologies need to be adopted but also protection from digital disruption.

That’s why understanding your core systems and processes to identify opportunities is critical before harnessing the potential of digital transformation.

Reimagine the customer journey

In an HBR survey, 40% of respondents say customer experience is their top priority for going into digital transformation.

Every experience with a customer impacts their overall brand perceptions, taking an approach that focuses on relationships with customers is a clever move.

Still, in the same survey, 72% of respondents reported they are excited about the shift to digital as it creates new opportunities to create better relationships with customers.

So, if you’re looking to improve your customers’ overall experience, invest your time and resources into technology that enhances business relationships.

Create an agile, flexible IT environment

Cloud adoption is a must when it comes to matters on IT. 86% of businesses believe that cloud is an important aspect of the digital transformation and being business ready for an all-digital customer.

By easily connecting to your customers’ databases, you can easily be able to create a 360-degree view of them and be able to even predict what they may need so that you can incorporate it into the activities your business is partaking in to be business ready for today’s all-digital customer.

Personalize the customer experience

Today’s buyers want to be treated as unique individuals; therefore, you have to know their data.

Today’s customers report that they are more likely to buy from a company that remembers their name, knows their purchase history, and is able to recommend more based on that history.

The best thing about this is that customers are more than happy to have their data used. However, be keen and take tight measures to prevent hackers from bypassing codes and doing damage to your business’s data. Otherwise, you will incur serious consequences.

Have a seamless multi-channel experience

Technology is a very powerful tool that has enabled all-digital customers to get what they want, whenever and wherever they are.

Make sure that your team is ready to respond to potential online customers within the shortest time possible. If you delay a response, you may probably miss a customer or damage your business reputation.

It is important to be ready for your all-digital customers as they have the largest dominance. Being business ready for today’s all-digital customers takes major technological changes that have been aforementioned above.

Do you have what it takes to serve today’s all-digital customer?