In today’s increasingly digital-led way of life, retailers, service providers and other businesses are digitalising more of their operations and dealing with customers across a range of channels – whether it’s via a website, mobile app, email and other messaging formats, social media or even the old-fashioned phone call.
But according to Daniel Homoki-Farkas, UK Managing Director of independent digital innovation agency, Supercharge, many companies and brands still aren’t paying enough attention to their customers’ user experience when they interact with them via these digital channels.
“More and more of our daily lives are moving to the digital domain,” said Homoki-Farkas. “But too many companies and brands are still making it too hard for their customers to engage and interact with them digitally. They still have in place complex user interfaces and fragmented customer journeys that are clunky, slow and difficult for their customers to navigate.
“They keep their various customer-facing channels in separate, disconnected silos that don’t communicate with and don’t update one another. As a result, the user experience for customers can be disjointed, repetitive and frustrating.”
“These companies need to radically overhaul their approach to the customer experience management in a way that both unifies and streamlines the entire process. Their focus must be to deliver digital interactions that are frictionless, intuitive and cool: and which are consistent across all of their customer-facing channels,” Homoki-Farkas added.
“The solutions already exist to achieve this goal: what’s needed is to focus completely on the customer, properly strategise the customer journey and then apply existing solutions in innovative and intelligent new ways to deliver the desired outcome.”
By taking the time to properly enhance and unite their customers’ digital experience, brands and companies can achieve significantly improved customer loyalty and retention. This creates new opportunities to cross-sell extra products and services, which in turn leads to revenue growth.
Homoki-Farkas’s call to action comes as the latest study from global technology research firm, Omdia, shows that, as the shift among companies to digital accelerates this year, improving customer engagement and strengthening digital channels (especially for B2C business) is a key focus this year for companies worldwide looking to bounce back from the pandemic-induced slowdown. Businesses also identify hyper-personalisation with omnichannel customer interaction as an important goal.
According to Omdia’s latest Global CxO tech and services agenda 2021 report, more than a third of businesses (34%) surveyed said that customer experience and engagement is their top business priority in 2021. Driving innovation ranked second (31%) and digitalisation of operations and processes ranked third (30%).
“Today’s digital customers have short attention spans and short fuses when they’re online. This means companies and brands simply can’t afford to be careless when it comes to the design and user experience of their customer-facing digital channels. You wouldn’t get away with your physical premises being complex, bewildering or unclear to customers – the same rules apply for your digital presence,” said Homoki-Farkas.