How Data Can Help Create Amazing Digital Experiences

Amazing digital experiences are essential when attracting and retaining customers. Without it, you’ll fail to keep up with today’s reality and slow your customer growth. To keep up with the ever-changing tide, businesses need to look inwardly at something they all have - data.

So, what’s next?

We cannot discuss excellent digital experiences without first touching on omnichannel. This integrated approach plays a key part in delivering seamless user experiences across all available channels. With omnichannel, customers can purchase via different channels – online or offline – while enjoying consistent experiences and interactions.

Understanding Your Customer

To successfully use your data to your advantage, you need to look at the specifics. The data you have creates an image of what each of your customers are like, and also provides a better idea of how and where they shop. By using this data effectively, you are taking advantage of a gold mine of valuable resources available to help you create a better digital experience for your customers.

This means shifting the way your business works from being focused on the product to becoming customer-centric. Understanding who your customer is and what their buyer journey looks like are the first steps toward becoming customer-centric. 

To do this, you need to ask certain questions. These could include:

• How do customers access your products or services? Do they combine online, over-the-phone, and in-store avenues to do so?
• Which channel do your customers tend to use first?
• Which channel seems to convert more?
• How frequently do your customers access each channel?

How to Bring Your Data Together

Looking at consolidated data can help you answer all of the aforementioned questions and create an improved digital experience for your customers.

Integrating systems can allow your business to unite millions of data points across different systems, equipment, and processes. In turn, you’ll be able to derive actionable insights across the entire value chain. This will lead to an improved customer experience and increased revenue.

Technology is Your Friend

Building an omnichannel experience is not necessarily straightforward. In order to deliver a seamless digital experience, all of your data sources need to be integrated to create a single view. That is, if a customer begins on one channel and continues on another, your agents are able to track the conversation from start to finish without missing a beat.

Integrating multiple channels into a single, unified experience will require the IT team to be heavily involved in its implementation. They’ll need to integrate back-end systems in order to present personalised information across all channels. Delivering advanced analytics capabilities to core teams is also crucial.

The Importance of Personalisation

One of the simplest ways to create an unforgettable digital experience is through using customer data to create personalised experiences. Did you know that 80% of customers are more likely to buy from brands that provide them with such experiences?

While it’s clear that a large majority of customers look for and value personalisation, we need to understand what’s required. A unified platform is crucial to create these experiences for the following reasons:

• Acts as an integration framework which connects all channels, speeds up information exchange, and streamlines operations
• Enables you to create a cohesive, consistent, and personalised user experience to a targeted audience across all channels
• Allows your business to make digital content dynamic, completely based on your customer profiles, including features such as suggesting what “customers like you” have bought

How to Create a Personalised Experience with Data

We know the reasons why integration is useful but how can we bring all of this information together? A personalised experience based on collected and analysed customer data is the best way to augment your digital experience for your customers, and here’s how to implement it.

Here are our recommended strategies for personalisation.

• Place your focus on a single unifying platform - To better control your user experience and provide context for engagement based on customer data, merging the marketing presence and operational teams of your business will be beneficial.
• Figure out how your customers want to engage - Getting ahead of your customers is key. Don’t wait to react to expectations. By understanding how your customers prefer to interact with your business (whether that be through mobile, kiosks, or other technologies), you’ll be a step closer to meeting your customers’ wants and needs. Bringing customer data together across various systems allows your teams to analyse it and then use it to be exactly where your customers want to engage. All of your channels need to be optimised. Yes, all. This means that even if a customer loves their digital experience but not their offline experience, they may look elsewhere.

Once these strategies have been implemented, your organisation will begin to see their benefits. For example, personalisation will help to increase sales efficiency. Using the data you have to better understand your customers’ experiences across all of your channels can lead to increased efficiency. Combining a holistic view of the customer with targeted messaging to increase personalisation often leads to better margins. Targeted messaging entails sending customers the right message to the right place at the right time to effectively guide them through the purchase journey.

Creating Unforgettable Customer Experiences Using Data

With the continued rise of technology, it’s no surprise that customers want their purchasing journeys to reflect these changes. Using data to implement a seamless digital purchasing experience will have your customers coming back for more and allow you to reap the benefits.