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Editorial

The Link Between Digital Transformation and Customer Experience

4 minute read
Greg Kihlstrom avatar
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Even if improving customer experience isn't your primary goal in digital transformation, it is important to understand how CX connects to your initiative.

Companies have many reasons for prioritizing digital transformation initiatives. While operational efficiency and streamlining of processes are clear benefits, improving the customer experience is the most outward facing and even internally visible because of things like customer complaints, lackluster sales and customer attrition. Because of this, organizations need to ensure their digital transformation efforts put at least an equal focus on customer experience as any process or operational gains and improvements.

Even if improving customer experience isn't your primary goal in a digital transformation, it is important to understand how CX connects to the other aspects of your initiative. Let’s explore the link between customer experience and digital transformation a bit further.

Customers Feel When There Is an Internal Disconnect

How many times have you, as a customer, tried to resolve an issue with a product or service you have purchased, only to get the runaround? In the vast majority of cases, this is not because anyone at that company is intentionally trying to be difficult or waste your time. Instead, there is almost certainly an internal disconnect between one part of the organization and the one you are dealing with.

This could be anything from lack of data or systems connectivity, to a lack of communication between teams, departments or divisions. Regardless of the source of the issue, you as a customer feel the disconnect, and it detracts from the customer experience.

Even if the primary objective of your digital transformation is to improve internal processes or the flow of data from one system to another, how you implement this can have a dramatic impact on how customers experience interactions with your business. Remember this as you plan your transformation initiative so you can fully realize the gains that are possible from a more seamless experience.

Related Article: How Customers Can Break Down Your Organizational Silos Once and For All

Learning Opportunities

Better Data Integration Means Greater Personalization

Customers not only reward companies that personalize their marketing and communications, they have come to expect a high degree of personalization in the interactions they have with brands. Often, the reason why companies don’t offer greater personalization to their customers is because they are lacking the alignment, systems and data integration, and streamlined processes that enable it.

When you are able to see and understand more about your customers because your digital transformation has made it possible to do so, you can enable greater personalized messaging, offers, and customer service, to name a few of the benefits. This creates a better customer experience, builds more customer loyalty, and is likely to increase repeat sales.

If your digital transformation doesn’t have greater personalization as one of its objectives, you should consider the opportunity cost of failing to offer this increasingly important customer benefit.

Related Article: Personalization Prep Work: Is Your Content Ready?

Real-Time Measurement Improves the Customer Experience

In addition to better alignment of data and processes, your digital transformation can allow better usage of real-time insights and information. This means you can have better oversight over orchestration within the customer journey, regardless of where an individual might be within it. You are also able to gain more robust measurements of where, why and how customers experience challenges within their journey that provide more insight than simply surveying them once they have completed an entire process.

When you have this type of real-time data collection that shows what a customer is doing (or wants to do) and what the internal people, processes and platforms are doing behind the scenes, the efficiency pays off with a better customer experience as well as potentially countless other benefits such as cost-savings, less room for human error, and more.

Keep CX in Mind for Any Digital Transformation Initiative

While there can be many benefits to a well-executed digital transformation, creating an improved customer experience can have some of the most lasting impacts. Organizations that understand this and plan their transformation initiatives with CX in mind from the start stand to benefit greatly in the long term.

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About the Author

Greg Kihlstrom

Greg is a best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations on customer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency in 2017. Connect with Greg Kihlstrom:

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