The impact of Digital Customer Experience (CX), and of technologies to improve it, on the competitiveness of companies is now universally recognized. Among the many researches that witness this, we can mention Gartner’s one according to which 81% of CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) and other figures in the company dealing with customer experience, believe that in the near future the competition among brands will be played on the customer's experience. Nevertheless only 22% of the sample is convinced that they have developed an experience that exceeds customer expectations.
Thanks to the CX pyramid developed by Gartner, it is possible to identify the 5 steps of costumer experience with the relative technological tools, so that companies and marketing managers can use the most appropriate ones.
Let's see below.
The basis of Gartner's model presupposes that organizations have as much information and insights as possible about customer, to obtain them they must necessarily use a Data Management Platform (DMP) that is able to collect and systematize all data of customer-brand interaction. In other words, before optimizing the digital customer experience, it is necessary to know the preferences and trends of its interlocutors, something that can only be done if you have a data-driven platform able to learn from transactional, analytical and behavioral data. The storage, processing and analysis of big data is the “sine qua non” for defining any CX strategy.
The second level of the pyramid requires companies to solve problems quickly and efficiently. To do this, it is essential that all the touchpoints through which customers connect to the brand are integrated in an omnichannel key. If for example, a request coming from a social page is not managed because the company has staked everything on the webchat channel of its own website or on the telephone channel, the reply via social network will never arrive or will be late. Therefore, it is necessary a technology that links all the contact channels putting the same user at the center.
The third step of customer experience framework assumes that companies understand and meet the specific needs of customers. It is the crucial step towards a customization that today finds valid allies in the chatbots for the different phases of the customer journey: from pre and post sales to help desks and customer care. The reduction in response times that takes place thanks to the use of virtual assistants, is one of the reasons for their increasing use by companies, together with the simplification that they introduce in some moments of the relationship between the customer and the brand.
Anticipate needs even before they occur. This is the penultimate step of the CX pyramid. A result achievable by virtue of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that enable us to constantly learn from the same data orchestrated by DMP. In this way, the digital customer experience can take a further jump in quality, as it transforms the amount of information coming from customer's relationship with the brand into a lever of knowledge for predictive analysis as well as for proactive and targeted automatic actions.
According to Gartner scheme, at the height of customer experience path, customers should feel "better, safer or more powerful". One of the technologies that can contribute to this goal is the Internet of Things (IoT) with which to continue the customer journey anywhere, and not just online. The presence, for example, in IoT sensor stores that recognize the customer is one of the ways to give the digital customer experience the characteristics of a unique and unrepeatable immersive experience that can always be used, regardless of where you are.