This is the first in a two-part series on digital customer experience (CX) best practices. In this first installment, we’ll discuss four ways to optimize your digital customer experience strategy. In the second part, we focus on the digital customer experience tools you need to successfully implement your CX strategy.
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In today’s digital-first customer environment, just about every organization agrees that customer experience (CX) is important, and most have a digital CX strategy already in place.
Despite the pressing need to deliver on their digital CX ambitions, many companies are struggling to see results. Is it time to rethink your strategy? Maybe not.
The problem could be in the execution.
In this blog, we’ll explore 4 ways to optimize your current digital customer experience strategy. We’ll also dive into how a high-performance, low-code platform can provide high-quality experiences across touchpoints and accelerate the speed of development without compromising on quality, security, or scalability.
4 Pillars of a Superior Digital Customer Experience Strategy
A sound digital CX strategy demands that you can create unique brand-specific experiences as well as rapidly and cost-effectively make changes or add functionality at the speed of customer demand — today and into the future.
What makes for a great digital customer experience?
More than just a mobile app or customer portal, it’s a holistic approach that includes speed, convenience, consistency, and ease of access to products and services across an entire digital journey.
Here are four things to consider for a better digital customer experience strategy:
- Incorporate customer feedback immediately. A good digital CX execution means responding to customer demand quickly. You need to be able to launch new products fast and pivot even faster — but that speed is hard to achieve with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions, which are not meant to be fully customized. For digital CX to work as a competitive advantage, it’s best to avoid solutions that look like everyone else. To achieve this, your company’s digital customer experience strategy should allow you to engage with customers in innovative ways and respond to changing customer demands with ease and speed.
- Build high-quality experiences for any touchpoint. Organizations need to be able to build high-quality experiences for any touchpoint and interaction type. But that's costly and takes too long with traditional development — which requires multiple dev teams with different specializations and expertise — and it’s impossible with COTS solutions. Whether it's mobile, web, chat, voice, or AR/VR, it is important to deliver consistent, frictionless, and connected customer journeys across channels. But this requires creating pixel-perfect interfaces that reflect your unique brand identity, as well as the right architecture to enable fluid animation and fast loading times.
- Automate customer service processes and connect front and back-end systems. Today’s consumer expects fast, easy, and convenient onboarding and self-service tools. Organizations can boost efficiencies, cut costs, and improve the quality of customer services by reducing manual and repetitive work. In order to do this, it should be easy to connect to any existing systems of record or third-party services — like SAP, Salesforce, or Paypal. It’s also important to leverage visual process modeling and automation that integrates with existing systems.
- Build scalable, future-proof apps. Digital CX-focused leaders need to be able to scale with confidence and reduce their reliance on highly skilled developers, outsourced services, or COTS solutions with limited functionality and scalability. A modular, standards-based architecture can help organizations build future-proof apps capable of scaling to handle millions of simultaneous users without missing a beat.
A high-performance, low-code platform can help solve the speed, cost, and talent shortage challenges IT teams face when trying to keep pace with fast-changing customer needs and deliver consistent customer journeys.
How a Low-Code Platform Transforms Digital CX
To take advantage of new business opportunities and become more competitive, organizations need to create new digital products and services faster, provide high-quality experiences across touchpoints, and digitize operations.
With a high-performance, low-code platform like OutSystems, you can build tailor-made solutions with the resources you currently have while moving at up to 10x the speed of traditional development — without compromising on quality, security, or scalability.
Fast application development and delivery opens up new opportunities to engage with customers. This includes self-service portals and mobile apps that enable customers to experience frictionless onboarding journeys or to manage their relationship with the company in a fully digital and self-service manner.
Low-code also gives you the ability to digitize front- and back-office operations, making it easier for your internal teams to have a unified view across multiple systems and channels and to ensure a timely and consistent response to customers.
Each organization is unique, and the experience you provide to your customers should reflect that unique brand identity. Because — regardless of the industry — that’s what every customer expects: convenient, effortless, and consistent experiences.
Learn how OutSystems can help you create distinctive digital customer experiences faster — and without additional resources.
