by Emmi Mehamedi, Consultant, June 26, 2018
There is no doubt that data has become the most valuable resource of modern business. When I think myself as a consumer or business customer, I expect companies to combine digitally intelligent tools and the data they collect to provide me with frictionless customer experience.
And with friction I mean anything that gets in the way when a customer wants to achieve their goals — buying a product, signing up for a service or using a product or service. Therefore extracting insights from the data, and rethinking how the data can facilitate interactions between customers and companies is absolutely vital for developing customer experience.
Interactions in digital channels give us multiple data points, that can be used to better understand and predict customer’s state-of-mind. Knowing how to act on these insights is what ultimately will speed up customer acquisition, lead to more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, and avoid unnecessary churn. In the end, success boils down to getting the most out of your data to understand your customers and their journey and being relevant to them.
Nortal helps its customers to become pioneers in seamless customer experience; an experience that eliminates friction. When we come to the client, we initially workshop with them to understand exactly where their strategic goals and priorities are. What are their pain points and is there one particular customer stage they need to focus on? Is becoming a customer too hard? Do they want their existing customers to buy more? We can help our clients set their strategy or, if they already have a strategy, we help them tactically by putting that strategy into action.
Once the strategic goals are set, we then focus very closely on various parts of the customer equation. This entails dividing up the company-customer interaction in multiple ways. It’s not possible, or even wise, to tackle them all simultaneously. To spot friction from customer experience, we have to understand the journey customers go through to interact with the company’s offering.
Frictionless customer experience, is it possible? Definitely! There are a few tricks to get started
We need to understand how certain customer groups behave and interact, how they become customers, how can we nurture the customer relationship to generate more sales and lifetime value.
Then we want to eliminate any obstacle that might prevent these customers from finding you, engaging with your offering or getting the most out of your offering. Each of the customer segments, stages and channels can be addressed separately, looking at how processes, digital tools and the use of data can support customer interactions.
To reduce friction from customer interactions, we need to re-evaluate if we are facilitating interactions between the company and the customer, and if we are providing the easiest way for a customer to decide and complete a task. Also do we understand the context where customers are interacting with us and are we being relevant to them?
We can help by challenging our customers to step outside of their comfort zone and taking the best technology to support engagement strategies and processes. We can also help our customers to identify what data need to be collected and processed, and what integrations are needed to create seamless data flow. The endgame is to have the data flowing automatically and reach the point where the client knows why they are collecting the data and how they are using them.
It’s important to understand that creating a frictionless customer experience doesn’t happen overnight. It requires companies to re-think their customer-facing processes and adopt a customer-oriented approach and use of leading edge technology. Nortal always works with the organization to make sure the expectations are managed and the teams and parties involved have the right skills, and if not, we provide the necessary competence and training. Although creating a frictionless customer experience takes effort and requires time, staying ahead of competition is a reward worth the wait.
