10 Ways to Improve Your Digital Customer Experiences

Whenever customer experience professionals are asked how important it is to improve their digital experiences, they affirm that it is absolutely critical. But, there is still an ongoing struggle to identify what digital experience improvements they need to make. 

Customers today need to have great experiences when they interact with an organization's digital presence, but what can businesses do to improve digital experiences? A new report from Forrester Research, “Top 10 Ways to Improve Digital Experiences,” shares 10 pieces of advice:

10. Flex Your Analytics. A factual basis can be established for understanding where visitors go inside a website or app as well as what they do.

9. Conduct Expert Reviews of Digital Touchpoints. There’s user data and then there are “heuristic reviews,” where experts — who can either be users meeting the characteristics of targeted users or usability experts — try to accomplish specific customer goals.

8. Reach Out to Customers. Get feedback from the people who are encountering the digital experience, with data is derived from surveys, customer feedback forms, emails, support calls, chat sessions and social media posts.

7. Adopt User-Centered Design Process. This involves customer research, idea-generation and iterative prototyping.

6. Take Advantage of the Inherent Characteristics of Digital Touchpoints. This provides the sane advice to use the features — and the size of the screen — of your targeted device. These can include interfaces that are optimized for a touch tablet screen or real-time data in a mobile app that changes content or offers based on location.

5. Get Outside Help When and Where You Need It. This includes tech help as well as specialists for, say, researching customers in their native environments.

4. Plan for the Post-Launch. This is often overlooked for how those great features and customer feedback are going to be maintained over time.

3. Bolster Your Brand. This is a common focus of companies looking to enhance the digital experience. But this distills the wisdom down to understanding your company’s positioning or supporting brand attributes in what is seen and done.

2. Measure Digital Touchpoint Performance Against Business Metrics. This offers the advice to figure out business objectives, ways to get there, how to measure customer response from all digital and non-digital channels and ROI.

1. Unify the Overall Customer Experience. This is a hot topic, as companies and their agencies try to present a unified experience across channels, which means a data consistency about the customer’s interactions and a consistency of feelings about the brand.

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCic

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Virgin America’s Safety Video Gives Customer Experience a New Song and Dance

Thanks to the digital revolution, customers are in control - they want what they want, when they want it. Customers have access to virtually all the information they need before you know they’re interested, and prospects are similarly informed before you even know they exist. Such access to information is disrupting the way you market to and connect with your customers. So, listen up.

In a world no longer able to compete by having the best product or price alone, today’s CMOs need to find new ways to reach and customers. Traditional marketing like print and broadcast are still relevant, but in order to reach today’s consumer, they need to do more. CMOs must own the customer experience (CX), both within marketing and across the enterprise.

CX is the primary reason Virgin America developed a following whose passion rivals that of Apple fans. A loyal fan base is a rarity for the airline industry, which tends to be hated for a flying experience. And it’s an experience that usually kicks off boringly with the safety demonstration.

How many times have you been on a plane where nobody is watching the safety demonstration?  This no longer happens on Virgin America. The airline has found a way to hark back to what the flying experience was all about – entertainment. It has created a unique in-flight safety video, presented with a catchy tune, dance moves, performers and humor, the airline makes one seriously engaging video. In fact, Virgin America released it on its social channels and within a couple of weeks it reached over six million views on YouTube.

The bottom line is that CX is essential for brand success.  Organizations looking to use the customer experience as a differentiator would be better served finding synergies between the CMO and CXO to create that awesome customer experience – and a competitive edge. By finding synergies that amplify the skills the CMO brings to the organization, companies can remain competitive in a rapidly evolving and complex business environment. The CEO too must embrace customer experience and it must become part of the corporate culture of an organization. It “belongs” to everyone – from the people who answer the phones to the people who create, develop the products.

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc. 

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Is Your Customer Experience Holiday-Ready?

There are only 43 days until Christmas. Are you ready? Is your company’s customer experience ready?

You better be. This year, the first full night of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving coincide for the first time since 1888. Now, thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices, holiday shopping can be done from a variety of sources — in-store, mobile and desktop. No matter where customers are, most expect to have the experience stay the same.

It the past, stores didn't start to prepare for the holiday season until after Thanksgiving, and there was an expectation that you shopped when the stores were open and if you missed out. As shopping online became popular, retailers needed not only to maintain an active in-store presence, but also manage inventory online. Some stores stay open 24-hours between Thanksgiving and Christmas, making it easier than ever to find the perfect gift any time of day or night.

If you're not focused on turning customers from browsers into buyers, you can bet that they will go elsewhere to make their purchases. So, how can retailers prepare to handle omnichannel marketing and help customers find the best products at the right prices?  

Businesses Reimagine Customer Experience with Microsoft Dynamics

Software giant Microsoft is helping businesses differentiate themselves in the market with its Microsoft Dynamics technology. According to Microsoft Business Solutions executive vice president Kirill Tatarinov and Microsoft International president Jean-Philippe Courtois, people and businesses can reimagine the way they engage with customers, build brand relevance, and collaborate to stay ahead of the ever-changing market and business environments.

"This is truly the era of the customer where people are more informed and better connected than ever. Businesses urgently need solutions to unite and empower their people so they can best serve and nurture their customers," Tatarinov said. "Microsoft is positioned to deliver agile, integrated business solutions that will help organizations in this new era by delivering amazing customer experiences."

Microsoft Dynamics designs modern business solutions that empower individuals with intuitive tools that allow them to do their best work. Our proactive, easy-to-use business applications adapt to the way people and systems work, enabling businesses to rapidly deploy and be forward-looking in an ever-changing world.

The company also recently unveiled 18 new predefined and configurable process templates that include sports management, healthcare, government and nonprofit, and more. Delivering on the promise of giving customers access to their CRM information on any device, Microsoft confirmed the availability of new touch-optimized experiences on Windows Phones, iPhones and Android phones that give customers powerful functionality and analytics on the go, without a separate license fee.

To make it easy for businesses to buy Microsoft Dynamics CRM to use with Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft is introducing a global pricing promotion that lets eligible existing and new Microsoft Office 365 customers purchase professional licenses of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and get up to a 40 percent discount on the price of the CRM license, giving them significant value for their technology investment.

In fact, Metro Bank, Great Britain's first new high street bank in more than a century and an early adopter of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, is using the new solution as the foundation of its customer-first strategy.

"Metro Bank is driving a revolution in banking. We aim to create fans, not customers, and we have a culture that is all about surprise and delight," said Paul Marriott-Clarke, commercial director, Metro Bank, in a statement. "Microsoft Dynamics CRM is our platform to engage with customers and along with Yammer, SharePoint, Office 365 and Lync is helping us to deliver our promise to offer customers the very best in service and convenience."

About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big Design, Customers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.