Table of contents

• Introduction
• How can gamification strategy drive sustainable engagement?
• How gamification can help drive better customer engagement?
• Top 10 Points

Introduction:

Customer engagement is one of the biggest challenges for businesses today as there are various aspects to a business in the form of customers, users, employees, and technology. It’s very important to have the right customer engagement strategies in place. Customer engagement strategies are directly linked to the company’s overall profitability and revenue-generating capability as they influence apps and other digital products.

If a business has highly engaged users, then it can have better brand recognition and loyalty with lower customer acquisition costs and better customer satisfaction and retention. Thus, the right customer engagement strategies will reduce the churn rate for a company and increase the number of active users and time spent on your app, and user growth through referrals and word of mouth.

How can gamification strategy drive sustainable engagement?

Gamification can be pivotal in implementing customer and employee engagement strategies that can solve the customer acquisition and retention problems of a company. Gamifying an experience does not mean creating a game to engage customers. Gamification is more about applying game-like mechanisms and mobile game design to a non-game context.

Gamification can help businesses to nudge customers towards certain behaviors by rewarding those behaviors. This helps businesses to better plan their future business plans as they have a better estimate of customer behaviors and thus, it can be used in improving customer and employee engagement strategies. Instilling these behaviors will eventually result in sustainable engagement.

How gamification can help drive better customer engagement?

The best thing about gamification is that it can be applied to different industries. Gamification can be used for training company employees, building marketing strategies, and mobile application development. Gamifying can optimize customer experience by making an activity more rewarding and fun to participate in. A combination of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators will motivate or push customers to become more engaged with the brand as a whole.

Here are 10 benefits of gamification specific to customer engagement:

Regular feedback and rewards

Customers like to be heard from the company regarding their queries and issues. Customer reviews or feedbacks can be very vital for organizations as it will help in improving customer engagement and rewarding customers for their continued engagement with the brand will improve brand loyalty.

Interface and user experience

Players prefer playing games that have a good interface and user experience. Leveraging gamification trends will ensure mobile apps, websites, and other platforms have a tailored approach along with being user-friendly and possess a good interface. A better customer experience will make customers coming back to an application or website which will increase the time spent on your website and eventually lead to more profit generation.

Training of corporate employees

Enterprises nowadays are employing gamification in their employee engagement strategies to tackle the challenge of staff engagement with the company. Deloitte for example used gamified elements such as badges, leaderboards, and status symbols which helped to reduce the time to certification for participants by 50 percent.

An efficient way of marketing

Gamification can be used in marketing by providing dynamic and entertaining solutions that can integrate into your website, app, or email campaigns to make user’s experience with your service more diverting and engaging. Carrying a sense of competition, gamification helps in triggering excitement in customers which in turn encourages customers to get eager for achievements and rewards.

Mobile application development

Mobile app gamification can help in applying gaming principles and gaming app design elements for non-gaming applications. Gamification enables companies to attract more users to any particular non-gaming application. Most app development companies prefer to create gamified apps which help companies to increase their online traffic.

Structured rules and goals

Games involve structured rules and goals. When gamification is implemented in campaigns and marketing strategies, customers feel motivated to attain goals, while sticking to the rules that you create. This allows the company to boost goal-directed behavior which could eventually serve as a purpose for call-to-action and making a purchase analogous to playing a game.

Achievable challenge 

Gaming involves providing the player with achievable challenges. Gamification can be used by companies to create a sense of challenge in customers which could be collecting certain points, making a certain number of purchases to get rewards. This can be used as a part of a marketing strategy and will encourage customers to spend more time on your app and make more purchases.

Strong plot or storyline

A good game generally consists of a good story or plot. Gamification can be used to create plots that will help customers to remain focused on the brand while making them feel that they are central to the brand-making process. Plots should be market-driven and create more engagement with users and boost brand loyalty.

Social connection 

Gamification can be used to improve customer acquisition and retention. Gamification should provide customers with opportunities to share their rewards, achievements, and their ‘plots’ with other friends or customers. Being socially connected with customers will help a business provide more opportunities to gain new customers and lower customer acquisition costs.

Integrated business planning

It is very complex to create a meaningful engagement through gamification if you considering only one aspect of your business. Integrating website or mobile app testing with behavioral economics with the help of data such as customer traffic patterns and purchase behaviors will allow companies to have a holistic approach during business planning and will help companies in the long run.

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Table of contents

• Data managed right- what next? Personalization.
• Top 10 mistakes to avoid in personalization strategy
  • Inconsistent and broken omnichannel experience
  • Data mismanagement
  • Lack of context and relevance
  • Absence of real-time offers
  • Limiting to addressing customers by their names
  • Lack of persona insights
  • Device and platform preference
  • Cognitive load
  • Lack of intuitiveness
  • Performance
• Levelling-up with caution

Data managed right- what next? Personalization.

We’re now in an age where more than two-thirds of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. It’s not just about competitive advantage anymore. Companies that excel at CX drive nearly three times more revenue than companies with poor CX. No wonder, more and more businesses have made CX the focal point of their business strategy, especially in 2020 as the word moved to digital and customers explored more ways of engaging with brands. Speaking of CX, businesses that didn’t have a strategy before were compelled to have one and the ones that already had it in place shifted their focus to improving and scaling it further.

In our previous articles, we talked about how you can benefit from the importance of getting the omnichannel strategy right, considering that many businesses often deviate from expected goals due to lack of a strong foundation to base it upon. In another article, we talked about how bad data can be an impediment to your CX goals and how you can leverage clean data to deliver maximum value. This brings us to the next post in our Transforming CX series where we talk about personalization. Personalization is something every business is in pursuit of.

Top 10 mistakes to avoid in personalization strategy

While it can get overwhelming as you tread upon your personalization strategy and roadmap, keeping a few points in mind will help you avoid costly mistakes. This article will make it easy for you to keep track of them as we talk about 10 of the most important ones. Avoiding these will  ensure that the fundamentals of your personalization strategy are strong and error-free.

1. Inconsistent and broken omnichannel experience

   As we discussed earlier, omnichannel is not the same as multichannel. Despite basic personalization elements in place, you can put your customers off if their interaction with your brand is inconsistent and broken. No matter which channel they contact you from, they should get the experience that makes them believe you really know them and the conversation is being picked up from where it was left off earlier.  On the reverse side, nothing beats a seamless omnichannel experience. Let’s take an example of Starbucks here. Their mobile app seamlessly blends in-store and online ordering experience. You also get personalized recommendations based on the location and season and can pay in the store through your app to earn reward points.

   Speaking of omnichannel experience, we also have our in-house omnichannel, customer engagement and gaming platform, Upshot.ai, that helps enterprises influence their customer behavior and drive sustainable business outcomes. Find out how can achieve great results by leveraging upshot’s capabilities.

2. Data mismanagement

   Data is the key to crafting a personalized experience but the lack of clean, informative data and inability to extract useful insights is likely to topple your efforts. Many times the data is collected without any intent. This leads to irrelevant data piling up, without any productive results. Also, the inability to manage data can impede your ability to offer good customer experiences- be it in terms of lags in fetching response handling or context mismatch. Using data effectively can open up a stream of possibilities for your business and enable you to earn more revenue, too. Amazon, for example, collects information such as customer’s shopping patterns, prices on other websites, the demand for a product, items in the cart and more. This enables them to fine-tune their dynamic pricing algorithm as well as show better recommendations.

3. Lack of context and relevance

   No personalization would be better than failed personalization. In an attempt to “fit-in” companies often overdo personalization and lose context as well as relevance. For example, offers for two for someone who has a history of ordering food for a single person only, sending offers related to leather jackets and shoes to someone who has a history of purchasing vegan apparel, or showing recommendation of new phones to someone who recently purchased one. The context here goes beyond what they have recently searched for and related recommendations. It expands to parameters such as their location, preferred channel, time of day, previous brand interactions, reasons for purchase and more. Establishing relevance and context can be learned from the partnership between Taco Bell and the navigation app Waze. Whenever a Waze user is near Taco Bell, they get an ad for the restaurant in the app, mentioning the time and location where they can dine-in. Similarly, Tesla, while promoting their automobiles, talk to their consumers about living a fossil-fuel-free lifestyle, thereby establishing great context.

4. Absence of real-time offers

   We are now moving to hyper-personalization where historic data may not suffice to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Both historical and real-time data are required now. Having the right data at the right time along with the right tools and the technology, of course, will enable you to deliver personalized content, offerings, and overall experience in real-time. Travel portals often show a pop-up message alerting customers about the potential rise in airfares, nudging them to book instantly whenever they sense that customer may leave without booking.

5. Limiting to addressing customers by their names

   As CX competition advanced globally, the expectations of customers changed. Mentioning their names in email subjects and notifications have become a thing of the past, way past. As of today, customers expect brands to not just know them but hear and understand them- and accordingly show them what they’d like to see. That is what keeps them more engaged and prompts them to explore what your brand has to offer. This is again where we want to emphasize value centricity. A customer, on a subliminal level, would start trusting your brand with their time and your emails won’t go unread or your notifications won’t be just cleared from the notification bar. Netflix takes personalization to the next level when they announced that they have a strategy focused on artwork that subscribers see when they explore catalog since thumbnails constitute about 82% of a subscriber’s focus while browsing. This makes the subscribers confident about the recommendations they receive as they perceive that the brand really “understands” them.

6. Lack of persona insights

   While personalization is mostly understood to be something of an individual level, and fairly so, there’s a lot more to it. You must categorize different personas and see what appeals more to them. For example, you may classify your target group based on different strata such as socio-economic A, B and C. A study indicated that high-income groups don’t want personalized offers for themselves as much as they want them for people associated with them- also called CUG (close user group) extension. A person working in a senior position in a company may need recommendations and custom medical insurance offers for their family members and not for themselves.

7. Device and platform preference

   Your customer platform preference needs to be taken into consideration to offer a better experience. Identify what content would have a better viewing experience on which device. Which platform would they be more active on? You’d like to consider their device before giving them, say, a 3D view of the product catalog, for instance. Similarly, if they are more likely to connect with you through your app instead of the website, you may want to consider something like “app-only offers”.

8. Cognitive load

   Your personalization must be easy for your customers to absorb. Do they have to follow multiple links to avail an offer? Does it involve too much reading of terms and conditions? How easy or difficult is it for them to understand the value proposition from the headline itself? Similarly, you do not want to put them off by creating a complicated experience where you make them provide too many details about themselves without understanding where it’s going. Complicated sign-up forms, difficult navigation, prominent features not easily accessible, etc are some of the factors that contribute to cognitive load.

9. Lack of intuitiveness

   From onboarding to becoming a loyal user, the entire journey must be intuitive and seamless. A big no here is trying to collect too much information explicitly along the touchpoints without the customers having a clue why that’s relevant. The intuitiveness should come from the very first interaction they have with your brand. Before you dive deeper into offering personalized experiences to them, begin with a standard algorithm that identifies them based on segmentation or where they’re coming from, what they search for and gradually develop it along the way. This is again where real-time behavioral data comes into the picture.

10. Poor performance

    A very important aspect here that contributes to the overall CX experience is performance. Before collecting data and running complex algorithms, evaluate your data handling capabilities. Often, things such as slow response times, crashes and more would cause a user to abandon your product or service before you even get a chance to craft personal experiences. An example would be too much time taken by queries in fetching information from the database that results in high screen-load time and subsequent navigation. Additionally, too many crashes, high data consumption, screen freeze, battery consumption are some factors one should be looking at to improve performance.

Levelling-up with caution

We are now at that point in the digital era where to say that CX is important for businesses and emphasizing it would sound absolutely ludicrous. It is now expected that almost all businesses in some way have adopted CX strategy and paid attention to the element of personalization. What we are looking at right now is how to make it effective, competitive and profitable. With exciting ideas and innovative strategies available to implement, overwhelming decisions can be made. Therefore, the path must be navigated with caution. You must lay the foundation well and level-up after careful deliberation around your customer behavior, the market and your existing capabilities. As you scale up your personalization efforts, you’ll encounter ditches that you must avoid and that can happen only if you pay equal weightage to the things you must avoid as you do to things you must include in your strategy.

At [x]cube, we have helped global enterprises drive results with our robust CX strategies. From customer retention, lower cost of acquisition, faster conversions to improving brand perception, we leveraged a mix of technologies to enable enterprises to achieve it all. If you’re someone who is looking to achieve results by adopting, improvising or scaling CX strategy, you’re at the right place. Get in touch with us for everything CX!

The post Transforming CX: 10 Things to Avoid while Offering Personalized Experience appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Table of contents

• Data at the core of superior Customer Experience
• 2020 accelerated digital transformation and focus on CX but “clean data” remains a challenge
• Don’t let bad data topple your CX goals
• What’s the fix?
• How can clean data be leveraged to deliver new-age CX?
• Conclusion

Data at the core of superior Customer Experience

Data is foundational to CX and creating a seamless, friction-free customer journey. In a survey conducted by Deloitte, 49 percent of respondents said data analytics helps them in better decision making, 16 percent said that it enables key strategic initiatives, and 10 percent say it helps them improve relationships with customers and business partners. How, you may ask. Data helps businesses to identify potential customers and reach them across every platform and channel. Effective data analysis empowers businesses to get valuable insights into every customer interaction along the journey. Meaningful data helps brands strengthen their omnichannel experience delivery which in turn helps customers feel heard and understood.

Insights from extensive datasets also helps brands navigate risks such as placements of unsafe or inappropriate content based on geographical context. Above all, the most significant benefit is a unified customer profile that contains all the information related to customer transactions, behavior and more. This way, a brand gets to truly know their customers whenever they’re interacting with them. Results? Customer retention, engagement, revenue growth, increased profitability and higher customer lifetime values.

2020 accelerated digital transformation and focus on CX but “clean data” remains a challenge

As we witnessed the largest transformation in almost every industry, we realized that capabilities that were just in the works until a year ago, were developed and deployed quickly. To meet emerging customer needs and keep business afloat, new digital capabilities developed overnight. But one thing that didn’t catch the attention of many businesses was data-more precisely, clean data. Digital capabilities were in place, CX became a hot topic, but dirty, unstructured, disconnected and irrelevant data became a challenge. This reason made it challenging for many businesses to realize their digital capabilities to full potential and deliver the CX they had hoped.

Don’t let bad data topple your CX goals

Imagine an unsynchronized CRM that relies on past data entries. Now if a customer calls up to check the status of, say, their credit card application, and the CRM shows different entries from different moderators, which one would you use to tell the customer the latest and most accurate information? In another instance, imagine if a customer shipment is in Dallas but the customer service shows that it’s still in Houston.

Data may not be the easiest part to work with, but it is definitely a critical component of any digital transformation initiative and even more important from a CX perspective. Businesses might be launching new CX initiatives but they won’t be fruitful in the long run if the data in isn’t clean.

What’s the fix?

Disconnected and dirty data doesn’t show itself through net promoter score surveys. Your customers won’t explicitly tell you that data is the reason behind their negative experience either. The first step isn’t to get into data clean-up or create cross-system connections or even establish usage standards. The first step is to understand and highlight the limitations of current data and then see what actions are needed. Businesses also need to understand that data collection and management is a company-wide initiative. Every department collects specific pieces of data about the customer which later help in giving them an overall experience at every touchpoint.

Here are some ways in which you can maintain clean and up-to-date data:

• Data integrity must be part of the company culture since it spans across all departments
•  If your current data is all over the place, start by consolidating it into one organized centralized space such as a spreadsheet before you start importing it
• Maintain data uniformity by setting standard input guidelines
• Identify and remove duplicate records
• Regularly review and clean your data

How can clean data be leveraged to deliver new-age CX?

CX was already projected to be a brand differentiator, surpassing price and product. In fact, more than two-thirds of companies now compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from only 36% in 2010! But with dynamically changing customer needs, behavior and expectations, even CX excellence has become an arena of competition in itself. 

At [x]cube LABS, we helped one of our clients, Dr. LalPathLabs, solve the customer problem of having to wait for the reports by leveraging machine learning to predict the estimated time of Report, including the estimated time of various phases of the lab testing and exceptional delays. Like any other learning model, this one was dependent on the availability of clean data, too. The prediction was dependent on multiple parameters that were closely interconnected and influenced each other in more than one way, implying the need for relevant and standardized data as input. 

We also enabled Mann+Hummel to improve their filtering solutions with smart capabilities which gathered information on customer experience and based on that, added features which removed a bunch of manual tasks the customer had to perform. Reiterating, we used data to eliminate customer pain points as far as possible.

This is just one of innumerable examples of how we leveraged the power of data, coupled with emerging technologies, to drive CX transformation. We also have our in-house customer analytics and engagement platform, Upshot, that combines actionable analytics, campaign management and powerful tools to shape user behavior. The platform delivers new insights into user segments and enables fine control over the user’s in-app experience.

In current times, it is critical to get an all-round view of your customer behavior to design great experiences for them and clean data is what enables it. Once you have a good hold on the quality of your data, you can explore the potential of CX in different ways.

• Real-time CX

  As businesses utilize more and more data to understand their customers better, it’s about time that real-time CX becomes the new in-thing. Customers today have a strong desire for instant gratification, which means increased expectations  not only of the product but also the overall experience provided associated with it. This is where  real-time CX comes into the picture. It’s about serving customers at the very moment they engage with your business. This can include any activities that meet the needs of a prospect or customer as immediately as possible. A very common example of real-time CX is offering customers a support channel like live chat that allows for a nearly instantaneous response.

• Consistent customer journey experience

  A study found that 45 percent of CX leaders define CX as “the customer’s aggregate perception of your company based on all their interactions with your brand, product or service.” In simple words, this implies experience throughout the customer journey from initial interest and purchase to customer service and every touchpoint in between. 65 percent of consumers say that a consistently positive experience through their entire interaction would make them a long-term customer of the brand. And this can be achieved only if there’s relevant and up-to-date information about consumer preferences is available. You can teach each touch point, gather necessary information, analyze the data and provide them contextual and personalized experience.

• Integrated and streamlines CX approach

  According to a report, one out of four CX executives say not having the right people involved is a constraint that prevents their team from implementing a streamlined CX approach. In order to succeed in CX strategy, businesses should look at CX as an essential part of the whole business, not just a part of it. To excel at delivering seamless experiences, understanding and drawing insights from individual-level customer data is a must. This essentially requires reimagining processes and taking a data-driven approach to break down silos across the organization. 

• Customer data platforms

  Customer touchpoints are spreadout across multiple systems such as CRM, social media and more. To securely unify all the data and eliminate redundant records, a customer data platform can help. The data managed this way can be used to decide what will encourage customers to stay loyal and even assess the potential LTV of a customer. Going one step ahead, clean data can also be fed to AI models for predictive analysis that can compare usage patterns of new customers with longer tenured ones can help project the ones which are more valuable..

• Hyper personalization

  Hyper-personalization takes personalized marketing a step further by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time data to deliver more relevant content, product, and service information to users. While personalized experiences are mostly confined to addressing the customer by name and keeping track of preferences, hyper-personalization takes it to a much higher level. It deciphers and acts upon customer data in real-time. Some features of hyper personalization include: instant identification, immediate access to information about every interaction, on every channel, understanding customer issues and knowing how to solve it, based on the captured data. But transitioning to a hyper-personalized model requires infrastructure with new technology that captures customer data in real-time, across all channels, in a unified way. 

Conclusion

56% of the companies now turn to data that captures the interactions of their most engaged customers to nurture their experiences. In fact, the most successful companies differentiate themselves from their competitors by creating a cycle of data-driven improvement and capitalizing on it to deliver new-age experiences to their customers. This requires having the right tech stack as a minimum investment that directly enables the data capabilities and applicable skill sets. But before implementing that, taking control of data should be at the forefront of the customer experience strategy.

The post Transforming CX: Leveraging Data to Deliver Maximum Value appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

In the last 10 years we have already seen many improvements and designs to provide greater customer experience specially when the customers interact with the companies and their brands in the digital world.

A research report by Gartner provides insights to customer needs:

• 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs
• $1.6 trillion is lost each year due to poor customer service
• Customers will spend 17% more for a good experience
• Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable

In the era of cutting edge technology, innovations are reaching new heights, companies need to focus on providing progessive designs to interact with their brands online.

There are top 10 design trends that will decide who wins the customers by providing an exceptional experience:

1. Graphic interface with gestures:

   By introducing gesture recognition, the focus is to eliminate UI interaction with buttons. Many companies are testing this feature and it’s in its early stage.

   For example an ecommerce company providing an app where customers don’t have to use buttons to purchase or place and order, a simple drag and drop gesture could add the product to the cart.

2. Zero (Interface) UI:

   The idea of zero UI was first introduced by Any Goodman, former Fjord director. Zero UI is all about sensory experience (gestures, movements, voice, and even thoughts and feelings) to cause a particular response from a device. Smart Artificial Intelligence devices and machine learning are two important parts of zero UI functionality. Its potential can be most beneficial for differently abled people and people with mobility issues.

   There are few experiences that support Zero UI concept-

   Microsoft Kinect– which allows us to change channels with just a greeting.

   Nest thermostats– which learn to anticipate what we want based on our interactions.

   The voice assistants of Amazon, Google and apps that replace our touch interactions with devices

3. Agnostic Interface: 

   According to a Google’s recent study, “90% users use several screens sequentially to perform a task over time”.

   We live in a multi-device environment where multiple applications are accessed on different devices such as wearables, tablets, smartphones, voice devices, televisions or computers etc.Users interact with these devices with different touchpoints and the design and interface become a complex part for the companies to develop.

   For example the consumer was using a browser to access a service on a computer then companies came up with “responsive designs” to give the same on the mobile phone, now came up with “progressive web apps.”

   But with the growth of technologies like Artificial Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality where designs and interface will be in huge demand in the future.

   Companies should conceptualize an agnostic interface as it can reduce latency as use moves across all devices.

   Nest Learning Thermostat is a most relatable example of agnostic interface.

4. Natural Language Processing:

   According to a global estimation, more than 200 million homes now have a smart speaker and are interacting with a voice assistant such as Google, Alexa, Cortana or Siri.

   As per Google 72% of these users claim that they use it in their day to day lives.

   52% of people keep their voice-activated speakers in their living rooms, 25% keep them in their bedrooms, while 22% keep them in their kitchens.

   We are witnessing a voice assistance revolution where homes, vehicles, phones etc are equipped with voice assistants.

   Advances in Artificial Intelligence will allow the tasks that are facilitated from these devices to become more sophisticated with cross-tasks such as sending an email with attachments, opening several applications or executing different actions.

5. Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality:

   There is a lot of buzz around the world for AR and VR. It’s being used in almost every field be it, ecommerce, retail, gaming, medicine or drug R&D.

   With the 5G, AR and VR can be utilized with full potential. It’s estimated that the market of AR/VR will grow more and sales are expected to rise to 65.9 million for late 2022.

   Pokemon go, a free Augmented Reality video game, achieved more than 100 million downloads in its first month of launch.

   Disease simulation in drug discovery & assembly of machine parts to eliminate errors  by using Virtual Reality.

   Asian Paint implemented Virtual  Reality for their internal operations.

6. Personalized Customer Experience:

   Personalized experience is not a new thing, we have seen companies doing it to get customers attention and make them feel like priority customers.

   Companies like Sephora, Netflix, Amazon, Starbucks, The Home Depot, Airbnb etc have created such an environment where customers expect more from the brand during digital interactions.

   Personalized customer experience is a deep field where companies study customer needs, preferences, behaviors, choices, demography and socio-economic information.

   Some basic personalized experiences- a bot interaction where it uses your name, emails where you get exclusive deal code/offers, messages from brands to visit their platform soon (based on your last purchased date) etc.

   There is a lot that can be done, companies gather data from various sources and many departments are involved, they can start off  by creating a single source of customer data and bring all the departments together to create a unified personal experience journey for their customers.

7. User Research:

   There are various sources of customer data and one should understand that data is a crucial part in creating an exceptional user experience. Good data insights derive customer needs, choices and preferences.

   Companies use various techniques to target users, such as- usability tests, focus groups etc. It’s time when we need to see customers beyond qualitative research data.

   Digitalization has given many ways to collect quantitative data one such way is IoT enabled devices. Qualitative research and quantitative data help us get better user insights and we make better decisions. But various sources of information bring complexity.

   Machine learning and analytics are the future of user research where user patterns will be observed and predicted. Companies can create unique approaches to pull various departments together to nourish qualitative data with quantitative data.

8. Intelligent digital experience:

   With the use of new technology in the consumer digital world, the focus is on the concept of intelligent experiences or interactions.

   The word intelligence is a key to continuously improving  the customer experience, it refers to the ability to learn from existing user interactions in order to optimize future experiences.

   Customer journey can be improved in terms of personalization, efficiency and simplicity.

   Smart experiences are characterized by:

   1.  Relevant experiences that connect with the motivations and interests of the users
   2. Persuasive experiences that seek conversion: seduce, convince and sell.
   3. Personal experiences that address the behavior and context of each individual person.

   These are experiences that seek to satisfy users and customers but, above all, they aim to generate impact, growth and results.

9. Biometric Application:

   Biometrics are physical or behavioral human characteristics that can be used to digitally identify a user to grant access to systems, devices or data.

   Examples of biometrics-fingerprints, facial patterns, voice or typing cadence.

   According to the Ping Identity Survey “92 percent of enterprises rank biometric authentication as very effective to secure identity data stored on premises, and 86 percent say it is effective for protecting data stored in a public cloud.

   Spiceworks reports that 62% of companies are already using it.

   Biometric application reduces time, and makes the authentication process easier.

   Many banks have implemented biometric authentication on their mobile apps and ATMs.

10. Sustainability In Digitalization:

    The world is dealing with rapid environmental changes and in the digital world also it becomes a priority concern.

    The digital world reflects this concern with new content that communicates the sustainable policies of the companies and even changes how they do business.

    There are many companies that work towards environmental sustainability and openly tell their customers to follow the same in order to save earth.

    Companies can show how much energy their data centers use and how much carbon footprint they generate per year.

    Also, they can show how they recycle and reuse the product to promote zero waste.

    It’s a unique way to build a connection with users and it becomes an emotional touchpoint in the user journey.

Conclusion:

If you are reading this, which means you have paid attention to above discussed top design trends. It’s time for all the creators to consider the customer as a central idea during R&D and delivering new features to provide exceptional customer experience throughout the journey. To know more about crafting the right customer journeys for your customers, get in touch, and we’d love to have a chat.

The post Top 10 Digital Product Design Elements Behind Great Customer Experiences appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• What exactly is an omnichannel strategy?
• Why is an omnichannel customer strategy important?
• How can you get your omnichannel strategy right?
• Customer experience strategy isn’t built overnight- it develops from consistent efforts and multi-faceted strategic aspects

Introduction

Omnichannel has become an inevitable buzzword in every discussion centered around customer experience. And rightly so. The fact that most companies lag behind in their CX transformation only fuels the adoption of better engagement and experience strategies that’s where omnichannel experience comes into the picture, amidst more strategies, of course. But in the pursuit of excelling at it, businesses often get it wrong. Where exactly? To begin with, by assuming that omnichannel strategy is all about having multiple customer touchpoints with consistent branding elements.

What exactly is an omnichannel strategy?

Integration, not just consistency. An omnichannel strategy is a cross-channel strategy that gives a continuous and integrated experience to users across multiple channels. Simply put, if a user leaves off from one channel and switches to another, he should be able to pick up right from where he left off.

Most enterprises treat omnichannel the same as a multichannel strategy. It is important to understand the key differences between them before strategizing to get either or both of them right. Omnichannel businesses streamline all customer touchpoints under a single platform. That means from planning and purchasing to marketing and managing customer relationships, all your online and offline channels get updated together and are on the same page. Whereas, in a multichannel approach, each channel is managed individually with a unique strategy of its own.

Another interesting thing to note here is that omnichannel marketing is different from omnichannel customer experience. Omnichannel marketing is about consistency in messaging and branding is consistent across channels. The strategy side of it addresses the customers includes merging different channels together and offering seamless and uninterrupted experiences.

Why is an omnichannel customer strategy important?

Did you know? Your customers aren’t just open to embracing the omnichannel experiences by thinking of them as an additional value. They expect it as a necessity. Here are a few of innumerable reasons why an omnichannel strategy is important for every business:

• Delighted and engaged customers

  From a customer journey point of view, an omnichannel experience helps them interact with your brand smoothly, without the need for retaining or repeating information about the experience at the last touchpoint. This makes their interaction with your business smooth and intuitive.

• Resource optimization

  The number of times you need to interact with your customers through a dedicated resource comes down. Simply because you’ve already made their experience hassle-free. This significantly reduces the time and cost you would have incurred otherwise.

• Friction-free customer journey

  An omnichannel strategy helps you identify the various customer journey touchpoints clearly and understand what are the major points of friction that may cause customers to drop off. You can understand where they are able to navigate easily, where they face difficulty and how you can improve by tracking various touchpoints and using the insights to improve their journey.

• Brand reputation

  Your omnichannel strategy can serve as a long-term investment in building brand value. Happy customers are more likely to develop brand loyalty and recommend your brand to others as well. A better, stronger brand also means repeated purchase and competitive advantage- bringing you immediate monetary returns, too.

• Unprecedented CX

  Omnichannel strategy contributes to your overall CX. It helps keep your customers engaged and happy. At the same time, it benefits your internal operations too as it empowers your employees to work within a system that’s intelligent, flexible and effective, thereby saving them time and efforts in dealing with mundane queries and tasks.

How can you get your omnichannel strategy right?

We talked about omnichannel strategy and how it can benefit your business. The question that remains now is HOW to get it right. While there’s no definite single strategy that works for all businesses, we have listed the top and most common steps that apply to all businesses.

• Conduct thorough research on buyer personas: If your omnichannel strategy isn’t based on customer insights, it’s likely to take a hit sooner or later. It is important to understand your customer persona- their demographics, behaviors, and more. This will help you identify different segments and target your audience well. You can not only improve your value proposition with the needs of your customers but also go for more targeted offerings and ultimately, accelerated conversions.
• Improve customer touchpoints: It is important to understand customer sentiments at each stage of their buying journey. Once you get insights into how your customers are feeling at each touchpoint across different channels, you will be in a better position to offer better experiences by improving the preferred touchpoints and eliminating the points of friction.
• Map your customer’s journey: Even if it gets complex due to multiple channels involved, plot your customer journey map. Identify their first point of interaction with your brand and map the consecutive interactions and overall engagement up to final sales and beyond. You can leverage analytics tools to understand customer interactions better and bridge the gap between channels for a unified omnichannel experience.
• Choose the right tools for each channel: Augment your channel capabilities by using the right technology stack. Place chatbot where you receive routine queries, implement live chat support where you receive sales inquiries, provide smart engagement tools to guide customers where they are more likely to get stuck, etc.
• Collect customer feedback: Collect customer feedback and use it to develop an in-depth understanding of their preferences and behavior. Analyze it regularly to resolve friction and solve your customer’s specific challenges.

Customer experience strategy isn’t built overnight- it develops from consistent efforts and multi-faceted strategic aspects

A successful customer experience strategy isn’t a one-time thing. Nor is it something that can be built in one shot. It’s made from multiple aspects, each influencing your customer’s experience in a different way. An omnichannel strategy is one of them. You need to continuously evaluate your strategy, considering the dynamically changing customer preferences and ensure that your CX strategy is attuned to deliver the best experience. We have worked with clients all over the world and helped them improve customer retention, obtain faster conversions, lower the cost of customer acquisition, enhance brand perception and much more by simply working on their CX strategy. If you’re looking for help with anything CX, get in touch.

The post Transforming CX: Understanding Omnichannel Strategy and Getting It Right appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Table of contents

• Customer Journey Map
• Customer Journey Mapping
• How to Create a Customer Journey Map
• Best Practices
• [x]cube LABS Free Customer Journey Map Template

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s paths via various touchpoints to achieve a goal with your company. The map breaks down the entire customer journey into phases. It aligns with a goal, action, and touchpoints to improve the quality of your customer experience, ensuring consistency and seamless experience across all touchpoints and channels. There are five types of customer journey maps, depending on the purpose you have:

• Current state: This map is best used for improving customer experience. These maps assist you to visualize the actions, thoughts, and experiences while interacting with your company.  
• Future state: This map represents the ideal journey you’d like customers to have as they experience your products or services. This map allows you to conceptualize and visualize new experiences for the customers. Future state mapping can only exist once the current state map is understood. 
• Day in a life: Day in the life mapping represents all of the day-to-day activities your ideal customer takes in their daily life, not just those where they use your product or service. This is a helpful map for understanding the broader context of your persona and identifying new places to provide value.
• Service blueprint: This map is best used for determining the current customer journeys with steps needed to attain desired customer journeys
• Competitor’s journey: Competitor’s journey is a benchmark journey map. It helps you to determine and visualize how you should compare to other competitors in your field.

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey map (CJM) analyzes how customers experience your product or service throughout the journey. It involves identifying and visualizing the experience across all the touchpoints and channels. Customer journey maps are built on empathy and research. Mapping customer journeys allow you to understand your business to improve customer experience and enable you to: 

• Improved customer retention
• Allow the business to drive a customer experience strategy
• Reveals gaps between desired customer experience and the actual customer journey
• Recognize development opportunities

How to Create a Customer Journey Map?

Step 1: Define your persona and goals

Before you can dive into creating your map, you need to define your goals and target persona. Persona is a fictitious customer with all their demographics, goals, and motivations of an average customer. The persona should be defined in real-time collaboration with your teammates and should include all customer data such as demographics, skills, touchpoints, goals, motivations, and pain points.

Click here to download.

Step 2: Define stages in the journey map

Based on the persona, define how, when, and where customers discover your company, research your products or services, choose you over competitors, purchase from you, and maintain a relationship with you. Stages are the backbone of the customer journey. You can define steps by understanding customer goals. 

Let’s take a customer journey in a retail store. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think of all the possible touchpoints and channels that are likely to go through in the store. Having a list of touchpoints and channels, you can quickly come up with the names for the customer journey stages.

Touchpoints and channels are essential elements when it comes to mapping the journey. A touchpoint is a moment in time when an interaction happens between a customer and your business such as product demonstrations, signing up for a newsletter, booking a flight, etc. while channels are the medium of communication between the company and the customers such as phone calls, social networks, website, live chat, etc.

Step 3: Conduct market research and stakeholder interviews 

Data can be collected via interviews with users and customers, online surveys, team discussions, and observations. Typically, a customer journey map is created using data from primary research, such as personal interviews, focus group sessions, brainstorming and shadowing, and secondary research such as gathering and collaborating over information from databases within the organization, websites, social media, and so on. Techniques used are brainstorming, usability testing, business model canvas, experience mapping, mind mapping. The important thing here to consider is to reach out to the actual customer with the right questions to ask. Some of the questions can be:

• How did you hear about our company?
• On a scale of 1-10, how easy is it to navigate around the store?
• Did you ever require customer support? If so, how was your experience?
• How long do you typically spend in our store?
• Have you ever interacted with our website? If so. Did you purchase it on a website?

Step 4: Look for Moments of truth

Moment of truth (MoTs) is an essential element of the customer journey map. MoTs represent points in a customer journey when an event occurs, and that shapes the opinion about your company. These can be touchpoints where your customer either forms a positive or negative perspective about the company. These moments define whether the customer will retain or not.

Step 5: Visualize and draft the journey

Once you have all the information required, visualize, and add the information on the map. You now have an inventory of resources and highlight the points you’ll need to add in the customer journey. Combining all the data into the map, you will have your first draft of the customer journey. Your map should be constant work in progress. Review it on and make necessary changes. This will help you identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement. Using a customer journey map can allow you to predict how these touchpoints impact your business and derive value.

Best Practices

There is a lot to consider when you are creating a customer journey map, but the best way to map the customer journey is to take a walk in their shoes. Some of the tips to consider while mapping is: 

• Customer journey mapping works best when done as a group workshop.
• Build a map on a wall or whiteboard that is easily visible to all the stakeholders during the interview.
• Be aware of your bias that could influence your customer’s feedback.
• While brainstorming goals in customer persona, ask why the persona needs it; this will assist you to go deeper and find real high-level goals.
• Motivations in persona generation should not include product features, but what drives your persona to start or explore your product or service.
• Validate your journey map with customers, if possible.
• After identifying the gap areas, communicate it with your teams, and drive the strategy to provide a delightful experience.
• Make more than one customer journey map.

[x]cube LABS Free Customer Journey Map Template

With our expertise in providing customer experience services and creating customer journey maps for our clientele, we have put together a clean and easy to use template for you. 

To get started, click here to download a free template.

The post Creating the Right Customer Journey Map-A Guide and Free Template appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Table of contents

• Transforming the world of eCommerce
• 10 eCommerce Trends to Watch out in 2020
  • Consumer awareness of the environmental and ethical footprint
  • Progressive web apps
  • Transactional social media
  • In-car e-commerce
  • Efficient omni-channel approach
  • Content repurposing
  • Drone delivery
  • Headless eCommerce
  • Facial recognition linked with data
  • Interactive emails
• Conclusion

Transforming world of e-Commerce

In 1995, the first item ever was ordered online on Amazon – a book. 25 years later, the eCommerce industry achieved sales worth $3.53 trillion worldwide. When it began, eCommerce was limited in its capabilities, but not anymore. It has transformed retail over time, continuously evolving to meet the changing needs of people and to make the online shopping experience easier for today’s dynamic customer.

Whether it’s hyper-personalization, convenient return policies, or enhanced integration, all of these changes among a multitude of others have taken the eCommerce landscape by storm. But if you think that eCommerce has reached its pinnacle and there isn’t room for more, think again.

We believe that 2020 is here to further transform the world of eCommerce. We have listed the top 10 trends that bear testimony to the fact that eCommerce is still advancing at a rapid pace and there’s new frontiers to be conquered. You too can benefit from these advancements by ensuring that your business is in sync with the development tide.

10 e-Commerce Trends to Watch out in 2020

1. Consumer awareness of the environmental and ethical footprint

Modern-day consumers have become more aware of the environmental and ethical footprint of their shopping preferences, including digital ones. They are concerned about the hidden impacts and cost of consumerism in general, which also impacts their decisions while using eCommerce. Merchants who resonate with the value system of the customers are likely to receive more advantages over the ones who don’t.

According to a survey, 48% of U.S. buyers would “probably” or “definitely” alter their buying habits in order to reduce environmental impact. Considering the fact that societal and environmental impact is exerting a strong influence on consumer choices, brands must leverage eCommerce to create the visibility and the transparency that customers seek.

2. Progressive web apps

The changing consumer needs require providing them content on-the-go without compromising with consumer experience. That’s why we are seeing many prominent brands focusing on enhancing user experiences with progressive web applications. Implementing PWA ensures the optimal usability of a website across all mobile devices, irrespective of the underlying platform. AliExpress, an Alibaba site, has pioneered the use of progressive web applications in commerce and claimed that building great mobile experiences through the PWA platform enabled them to grow three times faster than an eCommerce site.

As the focus of web delivery shifts to improving things like site speed, navigability, and functionality, PWAs in eCommerce will become an essential part of customer experience in 2020 and beyond.

3. Transactional social media

As of 2019, there were 3.2 billion social media users worldwide, and this number is growing. Undoubtedly, the step of integrating eCommerce with social media networks is a reasonable step. We saw more brands recognizing the potential of social media channels as powerful advertising platforms with a large pool of potential customers and made use of it last year.

Major social media players such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube support product pages and eCommerce platforms integration solutions. We’ll see more companies creating accounts on popular social media channels in order to increase sales in 2020.

4. In-car e-commerce

Car commute is soon to emerge as another focus for brands. The increasing number of commuters using ride-sharing apps have a bandwidth to consume media and make purchases while travelling as they don’t have to focus on the road. Apps like Uber and Google maps have already started to place ads directly within their products. The fact that they can be geo-located, allowing for targeted advertising, makes them highly lucrative.

Podcasting apps and streaming music services also provide opportunities for interaction, personalized advertising, and dynamic call-to-action buttons. Automobile manufacturers like GM, via their Marketplace offering, are finding ways to partner with brands to offer commerce-enabled experiences within their vehicles. 2020 will see the commerce channels paired with effortless commuting, leading to a whole new path of growth for brands.

5. Efficient omni-channel approach

The right omni-channel strategy requires knowing a customer’s preferred channel to communicate, with the right message, at their convenience. Being judicious in sending appropriate messages via relevant channels is a must. For instance, if you wish to send out a long form or an information newsletter, then email is your channel, but if you wish to send out a short, quick-hitting information, then a push notification or SMS would be the way to go. 2020 will be all about achieving omnichannel effectiveness and crafting platform-specific messages for the right place at the right time.

6. Content repurposing

Content repurposing is fast catching up in a response to audience demand to receive information in a format of their choice. When customers receive information in a format that works best for them, they are more likely to engage with your posts.
Companies are using one piece of content as a framework to create another, but in a different format. For example, an influencer video that demonstrates the use of a product could be recreated in the form of a blogpost that lists step-by-step instructions for how to use the product or even fashion an infographic out of it.

We’ve started to see content repurposing on various websites such as Amazon, where instead of just displaying products with their specifications in the form of pictures and videos, they have also started to feature how-to guides for selecting the right product.

7. Drone delivery

The FAA predicts that there will be 7 million drones in the air by 2020 and that commercial drone sales will reach $2.7 million. We’ve already seen companies such as Amazon, UPS and Dominos experimenting with drone technology. As real-world use of drones for delivery purposes is in its infancy, we can anticipate seeing more and more companies adopt it for smaller and local deliveries.

Drone technology, that has been an underlying conversation for the past decade, is likely to finally become mainstream reality in 2020.

8. Headless eCommerce

Headless commerce is the future of eCommerce for all the obvious reasons. Using a headless platform allows organisations to seamlessly offer an omnichannel experience as it eliminates the front end dependency. Besides, the content can be repurposed with relative ease. Simply put, a headless commerce platform enables you to deploy rapid updates without impacting your back-end system. And you can easily make any changes to your front-end to coincide with the speed of consumer technology. Brands around the world have already started switching to headless ecommerce. Here are the 15 best examples from 2019.

Migrating to this platform is a promising way to future-proof your brand and get 2020 started on the right note.

9. Facial recognition linked with data

Data collection is no longer limited to online channels. Physical retailers are also catching up by collecting personal data via facial recognition, tracking beacons, point-of-sale data and other traditional digital measurement and analytics. WiFi, sensors, RFID beacons are gaining popularity at brick-and-mortar stores.

Offline data, thus collected, is helpful in identifying high-traffic areas in the store, overlooked products, dwell time and more. Amazon Go stores are using computer vision to recognize faces and products in order to provide a truly frictionless purchasing experience that doesn’t require check-out. 2020 will combine web, mobile and social data with in-person data collection and analytics, bringing retailers much closer to a truly 360-degree hyper-enhanced customer experience.

10. Interactive emails

We have seen email inboxes becoming dynamic and browsable, which is a significant shift from mere gifs and images. From choosing products, opening menus, leaving ratings and reviews, consumers and buyers have done everything without ever leaving their inbox, the email or mail app.

We will now see more brands and merchants making emails significantly more interactive and actionable, including integration with media-rich formats like video.
Additionally, interactive emails will make it possible to dynamically update emails, thereby removing outdated information contained within an old email.

Conclusion

Technology breakthroughs are often considered eureka moments. While that holds true to an extent, leveraging advanced technology to create new opportunities is more about programmatic and disciplined effort carried out over time rather than impulsive inspiration. One key takeaway from the above-mentioned trends for organizations, is to consider how they can establish processes that can identify the best fit technologies, evaluate them for effectiveness, and incubate them to transform their enterprises before they themselves are disrupted.

The post 10 eCommerce Trends to Watch out in 2020 appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Most enterprises, we’ve observed, find launching digital initiatives and undertaking digital transformation in general to be a relatively easy and low-risk undertaking, at least from a cost perspective. Where enterprises typically spend in 7 digits for legacy technology initiatives, digital initiatives typically only require a 6 digit spend. At least from a budgeting and expenses perspective enterprises rarely hit a major roadblock when it comes to digital transformation.

If it’s not spend that holds enterprises back in delivering successful digital initiatives, then what other factors are at play? After all, time is running out! As detailed and analysed in this Forbes article, the majority of enterprises admit they have only a couple of years to transform or risk falling behind.

There are many reasons, of course, including experience and skills of the teams undertaking these initiatives, the organizational culture and the pace of adaptation to digital, and more. Another critical factor, and the one that’s the focus of this writeup, is: data. Where digital transformation initiatives falter, typically, pertains to the specifics: what precise initiative is planned, how the details are worked out, how the idea is validated, and more. Just as importantly, innovation efforts rarely see success immediately on launch, and need a patient and iterative approach before clear success can be seen.

Here’s Where Data Comes into Play

Enterprises need to leverage data carefully at the planning stage as well as at the execution and support stage. At the planning level, stage, data needs to guide what assumptions are made, what level of customer understanding drives the initiatives, and so on. And once the initiatives make contact with the real world, and are in the hands of real customers, enterprises need to take a patient, iterative approach that carefully leverages data to ensure that they see success over time.

While leveraging data effectively sounds simple enough in theory, it is actually far harder to manage in practice.

Case in Point

A prominent brick-and-mortar services organization that we worked with, was eager to undertake digital transformation, but they seemed to approach it as a checklist of initiatives, rather than as a business transformation effort where each technology initiative is tied into clear business metrics and CX transformation goals. When we recommended a comprehensive mobile strategy for them, their response was that they already had a mobile app. When we chose to dig deep into the mobile app however, we quickly discovered problems. The app lacked a certain amount of empathy, and failed to prioritise the way customers would want to use the app and the workflow they would prefer, and seemed to have too many friction points that customers found frustrating.

How could this have been avoided? The key of course, is to achieve a shift in perspective: enterprises need to switch from prioritising their own problems and seeking their own benefits, to prioritizing customer needs and customer perspective. This is of course very hard to do, which is why leveraging available data to deliver critical insights that help you plan your overall digital strategy as well as execute specific digital initiatives is critical.

That’s just what we did with this organization, and tossed in key terms like ‘Customer Experience’ and ‘Customer Centricity’ for good measure. Eventually, with the data we gathered from actual customers who provided extensive feedback, along with the insights we gleaned from the usage of their currently faltering mobile channel, the organisation came around and we worked with them to create a solution that has helped them achieve immense customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The Perils of Presumption:

You could be spending endless hours testing your product, passing it around the organisation and beginning to think you have the hang of it, but reality could present itself as something else entirely. Out there in the world, it will be used by people from a wide range of geographical locations, cultures, professions and experiences with digital products. That kind of variety simply cannot be matched by the small sample within which you’d be testing before release. According to recent research by eTouchPoint, while 80% of companies believe they are providing great CX, only 8% of their customers agree.

And why should you be listening to your customers? Well:

• CX is projected to become the top brand differentiator by 2020, surpassing price and product
• Back in 2016, only 36% of the enterprises were competing on CX, the percentage today is 89 and the competition is primarily based on CX
• When it comes to choosing a brand, 88% of customers prefer one with a great customer service track record than one which flaunts innovative products
• 86% of US adults surveyed expressed their willingness to pay more for better customer experience

Therefore, what’s crucial is to figure out for whom the solution is. Is it for you? A specific target audience? Your distributors? Anyone and everyone? Once you’ve got that figured, how do you go about it? Simply put, the answer is build, learn and iterate till you perfect it. The learning being key as it helps you recognise pain points, eliminate them, release and learn more. The more data you collect and analyse, the more you know what is to be done to craft something your audience will really love. Also, the inferences will go a long way in helping you design the product to minimise bottlenecks and smoothen the customer journey.

We’ve been helping organisations multiply their businesses and elevate customer experience for a long time and have solved problems around meeting customer expectations and anticipating their needs in the feature planning stage. The key to all of this is effective collection and analysis of data. So what is data to be exact?

It is the comprehensive corpus of information on what your customers are doing at every stage of their journey through your solution. How are they interacting with it, at what times, at which points are they confused and dropping off, how many are actively using it on a daily basis, churn rates, how are they interacting with notifications, what’s the interaction like on offers and special sale events and much more. Once you augment your solution to send you information on each of them, you can draw up a strategy to fix the problems, push out rapid updates and improve your chances of success manifold.

A Transformation Story

We enabled Mann+Hummel to improve their filtering solutions with smart capabilities which gathered information on customer experience and based on that, added features which removed a bunch of manual tasks the customer had to perform. This delivered significant additional value to their customers, which naturally reflected in their revenues and reach. Their sales increased significantly and operational costs went down by a big margin. It all came back to using data to eliminate customer pain points as far as possible. Read all about it here.

Six Crucial Ways in which Data Benefits your Organisation:

• Provides Insights on Preferences: Data helps you understand usage patterns and customer preferences for you to deliver helpful tips and recommendations. Most customers prefer a digital solution that understands their needs and adapts itself to the various ways they use it. If you are in retail or running an online content platform, data enables you to recommend the right products, shows, books and so on. You could also leverage data to find out at what times the customers are active and run additional offers and promotions. Amid growing concerns over privacy, the only way to get customers to share data is to provide an experience which they enjoy as well as benefit from.
• Helps You Realise The Effectiveness of Your Solution: Speaking of digital properties, out of millions of apps in the market, less than 1% of them account for over 70% of use. Data shows you everything you are doing wrong as you analyse NPS (Net Promoter Scores), CES (Customer Effort Scores), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Scores) and others. Look at the specific journey points where you are losing customers and deep dive into what’s damaging their experience at these points. Get a fixed version out as soon as you can and you never know, that could make all the difference.
• Enables you to Interact Better: Customers appreciate an organisation that engages them in dialogue, listens and acts on their feedback and consults them for new features and products. For one of our digital solutions, we identified a large group of users who were the most active in our social media platforms and created an advisory group with them. It resulted in a lot of positivity as they felt special and rewarded. A bunch of useful ideas were discussed and implemented, plus our viral marketing efforts received a boost as this group of highly engaged users did a lot to spread the word, resulting in the product’s continued success.
• Empowers You to Create an Informed Pipeline: When you know your customers and understand their expectations, you can get a lot of clarity on what your product pipeline should be for your target audience, how they should be designed for the best experience and what problems should you be solving on priority.
• Greater Customisation: It enables you to understand what type of products each customer is interested in so you can recommend more of such when customers open and explore your digital channel. Not having to search for specifics lends added seamlessness to the journey and customers enjoy faster, simplified checkouts
• Improved Personalisation: Knowing customer preferences, usage habits and purchase times can help you personalise the solution for each customer. Showing them special offers at times they use the digital channels the most, festival content they might be interested in, a customised landing page where they can see their potential favorites at a glance, personal offers on their special days and much more. This conveys to customers the fact that each of them are special and the company truly cares about providing them the best possible experience.

Conclusion

As product heads or transformation leaders, you might be owning the solutions and often believe you know best, but you are building them for an audience and looking for wide acceptance and recognition. You will not achieve that unless your users get an absolutely stellar experience, for which the offering must be intuitive, personal and secure. The key to getting it right is knowing all you can about your customers, and data is crucial in that regard. Embrace data, follow where it leads and your customers will be right beside you on the journey.

The post Do You Truly Know Your Customer? Leveraging Data to Drive CX Transformation appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

Taking the Field:

Connected devices providing informed choices, artificial intelligence deep diving into farming data and providing guidance and corrective measures, simulated environments to better prepare farmers for incidents they might encounter in real life-none of these are fancy conjectures but elements of a revolution brought about by technology. This is the first of a series of articles where we cover the basics, look at projections and the overall state of disruption. Subsequent articles will cover specific technologies and the many ways in which they benefit agriculture.

Digital Transformation in Agriculture:

Before 2013 agri innovation tended to focus on biotech sector and plant genetics. It was in late 2013 that Agritech growth witnessed a shift in momentum. Investments in Agritech grew 75 percent to reach $860 million in 2013 and subsequently increased 170 percent in 2014. This strong growth in investment continued in 2015 and beyond. This momentum shift is attributed to a confluence of four underlying driving forces that are prevailing today:

Macroeconomic trends
Changing consumer preferences
Emerging technologies
Transforming value chains

1. Macroeconomics

A multitude of global megatrends such as urbanization, demographic changes, climate change, globalized trade, have collectively tipped the demand-supply balance in agriculture. It is estimated that agriculture industry would feed an estimated global population of 9.7 billion by 2050. In 2020 alone, a 60% increase is required to feed the population. Globally, the arable land per capita is nearing capacity which suggests that the paradigm of agricultural farming will have to shift. The increasing scarcity of water as a resource poses another threat. Water shortages have become a significant concern around the globe and, as per climate change projections, will only worsen over time. It has, therefore, become imperative that we find innovative methods to increase productivity, while also enhancing the efficiency of supply chains.

2. Changing consumer preferences

Changing consumer preferences have accelerated the need for new and innovative ways to meet agricultural demands. Consumers demand personalized products and solutions. They have become more health-conscious in food consumption and want their food to be traceable to validate and authenticate food origin and ensure that it has been grown right. Some consumers even demand sustainability and consume only organically grown food to reduce ecological footprint from their end. Further, the expectation to use services and products on demand has highlighted the need for an efficient supply chain that can cater to these demands while keeping the costs low.

3. Emerging technologies

The technological advancements in agriculture were earlier limited to applications of biological technologies, tissues, and organisms. With the advent of new technologies, we had access to manufacturing innovations for 3D printing and robotic work, autonomous vehicles that can perform tasks like fumigating plants, and devices and sensors that communicate with each other. But a lot more is needed to meet the rising demand for a paradigm shift in agriculture. Worldwide, the variety of advanced technologies such as IoT, machine learning, drones, blockchain and more are being leveraged to achieve maximum productivity and output with minimum input.

4. Transforming value chains

To reduce costs along the value chain, the agriculture industry is witnessing horizontal integration of related offerings into the agricultural ecosystem and vertical integration of input suppliers in an attempt to optimize cost, and increase efficiency.

Source: Agro Value Chain

Converting Challenges into Opportunities:

Due to these drivers of disruption, the agricultural ecosystem faces new challenges, from which three significant growth opportunities for existing and prospective innovators and players can be derived:

1. Improving yield efficiency

The world population is rapidly growing, thereby creating severe urgency to increase yields.
Reports suggest that yield improvement still has a potential of 30%. Investors can capitalize on this opportunity to feed the growing population.

2. Increasing supply chain efficiency

Value chain losses account for up to 33% losses in yield. To compensate for this, reducing the average value chain loss is a considerably more powerful way of increasing effective output than upfront yield improvement. As per statistics, to compensate 33% of value chain losses, a yield increase of 50% would be necessary whereas increasing supply chain efficiency by only 5% has the same effect on the output as a 10% yield improvement.

3. Decreasing complexity along farmers’ value chain

Tomorrow’s farmers need to deal with higher complexity and a rapidly growing amount of product and service offerings from different input providers along their value chain, it is inevitable that they will strive for simple, ease-to-use, complexity-reducing products, offered as integrated end-to-end solutions. This opens up another dimension of opportunities for innovators that intend to leverage the growing agritech sector.

Conclusion

In today’s challenging agriculture ecosystem, it is a given that leveraging digital solutions is the key. Digital technologies have made it possible to collect and utilize huge amounts of data efficiently, thus making a farm’s operations more insight-driven, and subsequently more productive and efficient. They not only have the potential to improve a farm’s business performance but can also meet the food demands of the growing population. The elimination of intermediaries from the supply chain and direct-to-consumer approach has disrupted traditional business models and also reduced yield loss. The digital disruption has created strong value zones into which new and existing agricultural players can tap with smart solutions to capture value and growth potential, considering the fact that digital agriculture still has considerable untapped potential.

Innovators can already be seen offering specialized services, often fully integrated solutions, ranging from direct delivery services through satellite imagery to automated farm management. In this environment, startups, agricultural players and cross-industry innovators can capitalize on the opportunities that come with the shift from agriculture to agritech.

Over the next few posts in this series, we will be going in-depth into specific technologies and their role in transforming agriculture. Stay tuned!

The post Agriculture to Agritech: Trends, Challenges, and the Path Forward with Digital Technology and Software Solutions appeared first on [x]cube LABS.

A radical, far-reaching and customer-driven transformation in customer experience is taking place. The way customers shop and share their experiences is no longer the same. Customers are driving the buying process through various channels and by the time they become visible in the sales funnel, they are clear on what they want to buy and how much they want to pay. Once the sale is closed, customers use the same channels to appreciate or criticize your services.

The bright side of these changes is that new channels have opened up fresh opportunities that can make your company outshine the competitors. Opportunities that enable you to build an ongoing dialogue with customers, learn from them, and increase the relevance of your offerings.
The negative side of these changes is that in the pursuit to leverage digital channels for enhancing customer experience, you can go astray and make a lot of mistakes. 50% of customers have left a brand for a competitor who was able to stay more relevant and better satisfy their needs. That’s why it becomes essential to give attention to details when leveraging digital channels to enhance customer experience.

With our proven expertise in delivering solutions that keep CX at their core, we understand that an effective CX strategy ensures that all types of customers benefit from the existing mix of solutions and channels. We believe that a couple of things if taken care of, could help you remain on the right track and allow you to leverage digital channels to their full potential. Here are a few tips:

1. Have a consistent CX strategy: Have consistency across all channels and ensure that all customers benefit. Identify gaps, if any, and ensure that clear guidelines are in place for all the channels, it keeps them in sync and offers a consistent experience.

2. Follow a unique approach for each channel: Each channel that you leverage to connect with your customers has its own capabilities, best practices, and limitations. Clarity on what you expect your customers to achieve from a particular channel and the specific problem you are solving enables you to formulate the right strategy and solution for each channel.

3. Integrate seamlessly across all channels: Each solution needs to be done right, with every little detail working perfectly. The correct level of intuitive customization with transition points well designed-between and within channels, is imperative. Additionally, the social media or platform transitioning from phone to laptop or to a chatbot must be seamless.

4. Map customer journey: Map out your customer journey across web, phone, email, and social channels to gain insights into their experience with your brand so far. It will help you identify their needs and problems, allowing you to serve them better as you can align each channel with contextual outcomes.

5. Make decisions through data-driven AI: With AI and data, you can now transition from addressing customer needs and complaints effectively to anticipating and preventing them. The tremendous volumes of data available can be fed into a machine-learning system that can learn how to reproduce the algorithm. The algorithm once formed, can be used to analyze fresh data and predict future patterns.

6. Unify communication channels across various touchpoints
To support customer needs across different communication channels, you have to offer multiple communication touchpoints to them. This may require support agents to switch between different channels for addressing customers at their individual touch-points and in the process, they might lose the context of the conversation. You must unify conversations in a single communication platform where the entire conversations can be viewed by the entire support vertical, enabling you to offer a contextual and consistent experience to customers.

7. Set performance standards
Set service level benchmarks so that you and your customers can rate and measure the performance of your customer experience. For instance, set standard response time benchmark for live chat as 48 seconds while that of an email as 1 hour. Similarly, set standards for solution delivery as well, so everything can be measured and monitored.

8. Simplify interface
Make sure that reaching out to you is a convenient process that involves minimum clicks with an intuitive and clean design. The user interfaces must be easy to navigate, critical information should not be obscured in pages and the user must be offered a wide variety of services and choice of support channel.

9. Provide real-time interaction
Provide your customers with an interactive environment where they can connect to you in real-time. If a customer has already spoken to an agent once, route the call back to the same agent. This ensures that there is no repeat information flow and saves time. The also reduces efforts from customer’s end.

10. Improvise existing processes using data insights
Conduct surveys and gather feedback to understand why customers connect with you, how you can help them better and find ways to make their experience richer. Analyze the data collected to fix the existing problems. Don’t develop digital channels independently of your existing human-support channels otherwise you might fail to tap into the contact center’s value in providing multichannel customer support and customer insight.

Silver lining in digital disruption- Myriad of opportunities

The wave of digital disruption has left many organizations struggling but at the same time,
revealed a plethora of opportunities for higher-level customer engagement. The customer engagement teams can take advantage of this to level up and watch their customers come back time and again. This could be achieved only if done right with careful deliberation involving a thorough understanding of customer behavior and using the best mix of channels to reach out to them.

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