Transforming the Customer Experience: Personalized, Meaningful, and Continuously Improving

Building a seamless customer journey boosts customer trust and, ultimately, advocacy for brands and their products, veteran IT executive Aboudi Roustom argues.

The digitization of the customer journey has elevated consumer expectations of the brands with whom they do business. No sector has been untouched by these advancing customer demands, from manufacturing to retail, healthcare to financial services.

It's no longer enough to simply offer access to commoditized products or services. Customers want more than basic, transactional interactions. They’re seeking immersive, personalized experiences and meaningful engagement. In order to meet those expectations, brands must foster dynamic collaboration with their customers.

As technology leaders, our companies are looking for us to make this possible. But experienced IT leaders know this is not as simple as flipping a switch. This is a true transformation in the customer value proposition that requires a radical rethinking – not just of the technology that underpins evolving customer experiences but, perhaps more importantly, the relationship between a brand and its customers.

Any transformation of the customer experience must start with a well-defined and well-articulated customer strategy that aligns with the company's product and service roadmap. This strategy must define new customer engagement levels as well as the tangible steps that need to be taken to acquire, engage, and retain customers to drive repeat business in today's digitized and highly competitive environment. In my IT leadership roles, this has meant creating a more seamless omnichannel journey for customers and collecting data about their needs and behaviors to guide the ongoing development of improved services and experiences. 

Giving Customers What They Want

In a previous role in the retail sector, I embarked on an omnichannel initiative to ensure more seamless transitions when customers are searching for and purchasing a product. This effort allowed the customer to start their transactions on one device and conclude them on another, picking up where they left the previous time.

At the end of the day, what we were building was not just a seamless, digital customer journey, though. We were building and maintaining trust through the delivery of customer experience excellence.

That required, first, rethinking the value we were providing, shifting the perspective from that of a commodity product or service to a true experience. We wanted to offer our customers not just a ticket per se – but a stellar experience from start to finish. To do this, we had to put capabilities in place to elevate customer engagement with customization. 

Secondly, we had to change our approach from that of providing access to a product or service to developing a collaborative relationship with our customers. If consumers enjoyed the experience and their interactions with the company, we hoped to convert them into ambassadors for our brand.

We were clear on both the potential of this transformation and the limitations. For example, we couldn’t offer pure customization at the individual level or collaborate with customers at every turn. The objective was to deliver a quality service that drove the highest customer satisfaction while maintaining profitability. Therefore, we needed a solid understanding of the customer's expectations for product and service delivery and — just as importantly — what they were willing to  forego. Often there is a gap between what customers say they want and what they might be willing to accept, which is important to understand in order to balance product profitability with customer satisfaction.

For example, a customer may want full visibility into the journey of their delivery from point A to point B with real-time updates along the way. However, they may settle for an estimated delivery date. Meeting the higher expectations would require the company to invest in advanced logistics technology and live-tracking capabilities, which may only be justifiable if it aligns with customer value and product profitability.

Our goal was to efficiently and systematically reduce the gap between what customers said they wanted in a perfect world and what we could practically and profitably offer, a difference that would normally occur whenever they interacted with a product or a service. To do this, we had to engage the customer through various means, continually increasing their engagement throughout the customer journey and then incorporate their feedback into the service offering. On the digital side of the house, this required developing robust customer data capture, analytics, and processing capabilities to assess the impact of changes at each stage of the journey.

Mapping the Customer Journey

We began the process by learning more about our customers' behaviors and then creating various personas. For each persona, we then charted the customer journey, identifying their various touchpoints with the product, including interactions with our systems, customer support, account managers, and so forth. The result was a customer journey map, extending from the point at which a potential customer began searching for a product to their actual purchase.

The digital team then started collecting data that would provide insight from each stage of that customer journey.  These initial efforts revealed some data blind spots. Our data team got to work figuring out how to collect that missing data to create a more complete picture of customer behavior during every interaction, and we invested in some new systems to make this possible. This became the foundation for cultivating stronger customer relationships. 

Digital CX Transformation: Journey, Not Destination

As engagement increased, we relied heavily on reviewing and analyzing data, the most important step in our digitization process. As we offered promotions, like discounts and redemption codes during low seasons, we tracked their usage. For example, we’d look at how many of every one hundred promotions were used and on what product. We also analyzed whether these promotions were used by new or repeat customers. Based on what we found, we could then fine tune the next campaign, reassessing how long the promotion should be available, making changes to the discount, or determining which products were most likely to see an uptick based on the promotion.

The results were positive. Early on, we began tracking a number of key performance indicators to help us assess progress. Chief among them was our Net Promoter Score (NPS) — a customer loyalty metric that indicates how likely a customer is to recommend our company, product, or service to a friend or colleague — which increased.

We also monitored system performance related specifically to how quickly search results were delivered. This was critical since we integrate with several other partner systems, and quicker response times directly related to increased customer satisfaction.

Such work to improve customer satisfaction, however, is never done. In today’s dynamic marketplace, the aim is to continuously look into improving various parameters for ongoing optimization of the customer experience. The higher a customer's satisfaction is, the more they are to recommend the product to family, friends, and acquaintances in their networks, resulting in increased revenue.