Enabling a Seamless Customer Experience: The 4 Pillars of Experiential Excellence
By Waseem Kawaf, Vice President, Global Digital Experience, STANLEY Security
In the last two years, there’s been an acceleration of digital experience unlike any seen in modern history. Customers today expect convenient, simple, and on-demand experiences, and businesses must transform to accommodate these new demands.
With the bulk of the customer interactions moving to digital channels as opposed to in-person events or outreach, companies have been forced to pivot their customer experience strategy and execution. Customers expect to be able to reach out to brands via any channel, at any time, and on their terms. The challenge for many companies is that traditionally the customer experience has been fragmented and siloed across different teams working on different channels.
The answer is a structured approach to experience in the digital space that brings together all touchpoints and channels, informed by users’ expressed and implied preferences. While a sophisticated tech stack is an enabler of great experiences, it is vital that the customer – not the technology, alone – guide how you approach the experience.
The Four Pillars of Customer Experience, as described below, is the framework that STANLEY Security has applied to stay grounded in the customers’ needs. It has proven successful for us and has application to virtually any organization with a large and growing user base.
Pillar 1: User Experience & User-Driven Design
One of the most common mistakes companies make is to base experiential decisions on assumptions, not data. Instead, organizations should evaluate their user experience and interface based on what the data uncovers.
The design industry has a well-established approach to analyzing user experience that can be applied to every touchpoint across the customer lifecycle. Start by understanding the friction points and silos. For example, we noticed that the bulk of the conversations on our website were related to support, billing, and service. We shared that insight with key stakeholders, then optimized touchpoints across channels to relieve this pain point. Taking a deep look allows you to truly experience your brand from the customer’s perspective.
Also, a consistent design language gives expression to your brand’s experience across the digital landscape, from your website to apps and interfaces. As with user experience, it’s essential to take a deeper look at the data behind your brand’s design to continuously meet customers’ expectations and preferences.
For example, each of our design components is preference-tested with users on an ongoing basis, because needs and wants change constantly, and customers expect companies to keep up. In this way, we make user-driven decisions backed by data.
Pillar 2: Personalization via Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Businesses now have easy access to incredibly powerful artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools, which create opportunities for better experiences almost everywhere you look. Even “legacy” experiential platforms such as telephony systems are, in fact, truly digital channels.
Through natural language processing of customer calls and website chats, a business can map intents and teach virtual agents to understand these and respond accurately and consistently, 24/7, across phone, chat, social, and SMS channels.
In our initial use cases with this technology, we have seen a more than 50% reduction of customer hold time and a nearly 100% successful interpretation of intent and customer need. These virtual agents allow you to build a consistent and user-driven experience that is always evolving and optimizing to match the changing needs of customers.
Pillar 3: Marketing Automation
The next pillar is a global marketing automation engine that brings together all the user data from relevant customer experience platforms to understand and respond to the varying needs of customers and prospects throughout the buying journey.
Marketing automation enables you to reach the right contact with the right message and, just as importantly, feed this data into your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It allows you to measure engagement across inbound leads and monitor experience via chat, billing, and service channels to ensure that support and other needs are being addressed in a timely manner.
We have been able to create unique micro moments of delight with marketing automation as we build a one-to-one nurture flow and messaging and move beyond bulk sends of email to undifferentiated groups of prospects or customers.
Pillar 4: Continual Insights & Structured Data
Finally, a structured data approach on all your channels will help drive a unified customer experience. You can leverage open APIs and apply consistent tagging to data elements to centralize data from key customer experience channels into a real-time data hub – in our case, it now includes more than 300 million lines.
You can see both macro trends – like what your target users are searching for – and micro moments that illuminated the customer journey. Best of all, the data hub democratizes access to insights across your organization for continuous improvement of customer experience. Analyzing and applying these insights ensures you never rest on your laurels and can clearly understand areas for improvement in the short, medium, and long term.
Creating an Always-On Experience that is Frictionless, Simple, and Connected
Every company needs customer experiences that are truly exciting and delighting. Top brands understand customer experience as a dynamic and living force that needs to be nurtured and consistently developed.
A fully leveraged customer experience creates a powerful differentiator. Because it’s not just a question of technology: it’s the culture and discipline throughout the organization that ensures every customer interaction is thought through and optimized with the user at the heart.