Author
Dominique De Cooman
If you want to increase the value of your digital investments, think in terms of improving the digital customer experience. Yet there’s still confusion around what these terms are or even what outcomes you could expect. In this post, I’ve outlined three motivating forces behind investing in digital customer experience.
What do we mean by investing in digital customer experience?
When we talk with our customers and partners about digital customer experience, they are confused by the jargon. Investing in something vague sounds questionable, at best. But when we talk with them about the problems they’re facing, and how to solve them, they understand the value instantly.
The idea of looking at a business from the holistic perspective of improving customer experience online has radically changed how companies plan, design, and deliver their products and services. This integrated perspective cuts across boundaries like the user experience, the content users are consuming, the quality of hosting, and so forth.
As CEO of a growing digital services company, I’m seeing this change daily with our clients. One of the things we do first is a strategic analysis. In the same way that you’d conduct a technical site audit to see where your website could be performing better, we look at how the customer journey can be optimised.
The quality of customer experience is affected by everything users interact with: from the design or responsiveness of a website; to the ease-of-use of on-site search; to the seamless delivery in multilingual content; to how fast your website loads.
We also introduce the concept of a Digital Journey Roadmap with our customers. I find it’s helpful to frame a picture of where they are operationally and create a vision of where they want to be. Yes, companies can build really slick looking websites. But, can they respond quickly to market needs and roll-out changes soon after they get customer feedback? They often think this level of preparedness is out of reach financially and operationally. But it’s much easier now with tools like our Dropsolid Platform.
When everything is working well together, it creates a cohesive experience for site visitors. And this reflects on how they perceive your brand: as fast, responsive, speaking their language, and listening to customers.
The benefits of this approach are shown to directly affect your bottom line. Here are the three reasons to invest in digital customer experience:
1) Customer lifetime value will increase
Putting the customer at the heart of your experience is the best way to increase engagement and customer lifetime value or CLV.
My definition of customers is quite broad: it covers a wide range of stakeholders to include anyone to whom your organisation provides some kind of service. This could range from clients, members and suppliers to patients, civilians, employees, etc. All of these stakeholders deserve a digital experience that makes it easier to interact with your organisation. According to research by Gartner, 93% of all Customer Experience (CX) projects yield significant results.
The list of most successful ROI-generating measures is headed by increasing customer satisfaction, bringing in more revenue and increasing customer lifetime value. All three boil down to the same thing: an increase in the time spent interacting with your organization by the customer or stakeholder.
Putting customers first in today’s day and age implies they should be able to interact with your organization through any channel, in any context. Designing such an experience is no easy task, but it is well worth the effort. In fact, it might just give you an edge over the competition in times where products and services are at risk of being perceived as commodities.
Setting up a digital customer experience will help you connect with your customers in ways your competitors are unable to do so. It also will provide you with valuable market data on how they interact. This will help you predict and anticipate market needs.
Download our whitepaper about Customer Lifetime Value for more insiths.
Generating customer lifetime value and competitive advantage.
2) Customer acquisition costs will decrease
Attracting customers can be a challenge. Competition keeps increasing and perceived differences are often small. Traditional marketing methods and lead channels yield fewer and fewer qualified leads.
Did you know that customers who are promoters of your company (with NPS scores of 8 or higher) result in 40% more marketing qualified leads (MQLs)?
Delivering on your customer expectations every single time is the best way to make your buyers become brand advocates and ensuring they refer you to their peers through word of mouth.
A digital experience platform will help you deliver the same service time and time again without having to overspend to delight your ever-demanding customer.
Customer delight in itself doesn't pay. Overdelivering only makes your customers more needy and demanding - and not necessarily more loyal. According to recent research, extra effort results in increased loyalty only 16% of the time. Up to twenty per cent of your margins are eaten away by trying to exceed expectations.
The fastest and most cost-efficient way to customer loyalty instead? Make sure they can connect with you effortlessly.
Disloyalty can be countered by reducing your customer’s effort to connect. A digital experience that is available at all times, through every channel and in every context lowers this effort threshold and creates loyal customers.
Download our whitepaper about digital customer experiences for more insights.
Learn how to build an integrated digital platform to connect with your customers.
3) Marginal costs will decrease
The cost to produce an extra unit (i.e. your marginal cost) will decrease, because it doesn’t matter if you have one single user or a million people using your digital experience platform. The cost of an additional customer on your platform does not increase linearly. Let’s consider the following examples:
- If a particular machine has a production capacity of 100 units and you need to produce 101 units, you will have to invest in two machines.
- If an account manager can serve a maximum of 20 customers and you currently have 25 customers, you need to have two account managers on your payroll.
- If a digital platform has one user, you essentially pay the same as if there were a million users. If your platform costs 1 million, the extra cost of user number 1.000.001 will be 99 cents.
Cost-wise, it doesn’t matter if your digital experience platform is serving a single user or a million people.
Decreasing marginal costs is the exact same mechanism that made the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon grow to become some of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. As marginal costs decrease when more customers are added, you will have more and more revenue available to anticipate the needs of your customer. This mechanism will help you develop your own market.
Platform approach: the easiest way to start investing
As earlier projects with our existing customers have demonstrated, a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is the best way forward to allow gradual roll-outs of different digital experiences, which in turn are designed to provide your customers with a more effective and engaging service.
Dropsolid offers a DXP for organisations who want to invest in digital customer experience. We help customers deploy digital experiences fast with excellent total cost of ownership (TCO). We do this by leveraging open source Drupal technology at the core of our Dropsolid Platform.
The platform allows organizations to roll out new experiences based on Drupal and manage multiple experiences over multiple channels. On a platform level, we provide hosting, development tools and a fast-to-market install profile. On an experience level, we provide insights and machine learning (ML)-based search and customer profiling for Drupal and the corresponding marketing automation platform. This allows for personalized experiences.
Managing and improving multiple channels and websites has never been easier, thanks to the platform. Knowing what to serve to which customer becomes easy.
Dropsolid has built hundreds of Drupal-based digital experiences and we have incorporated all our know-how into the platform. All the best practices of year and years working with only Drupal is packaged in this platform.
Looking to increase customer lifetime value and interested to find out more?