Digital Customer Experience

I'm at the Gartner CIO Leadership forum for a couple of days, trapped in a hotel at Heathrow Terminal 5. Still, should be some good sessions. Blogging might be in note form. Depends how I feel :-)

First session is entitled Customer Engagement in a Digital World.

Are we taking digital customer experience seriously enough? Most of us have been affected by an online experience. Digital services are affecting traditional services. Many companies selling an experience rather than a product via their websites. Companies with the best customer experience may not have the best user experience. Do we listen to our customers enough? Extremely loyal customers will tattoo themselves with your brand!!




Customers care more about their experience than in the past. And they are more likely to complain about bad experiences, tell people, and move away.
Customer experience is a great differentiator.
Loyal customers are created primarily by reducing customer effort in dealing with you. So, process simplification very important.
A customer experience face to face has 6 times the impact of a phone call, which has 6 times that of online interaction.

Seven types of project to deliver improved customer experience
Listen to customer
Redesigning processes
Organisation acting as one, single view of customer
Make organisation more accessible
Personalisation
Changing attitudes, empowering employees
Designing better

Opening up, being transparent important. Be inclusive and enable the community, improve social networking, allow reviews, recommendations and feedback. Use collaboration to codesign, Eg threadless.com, Lego.

Personalisation important eg website recognition, tailoring of content

Disney are experts at designing customer experiences! They plan and design the whole experience, especially car parking.

Some innovative projects in digital customer experience:
Outsource app development to customers, give out APIs, publish what development tools can be used, make sure secure.
Ski company, RFID tags in skis, take photos of customers on slopes, transmitted to Facebook for free, pay for high def version.
Look for digital innovation in gambling, betting and vice. Anything sinful. Far ahead in most technologies.
Walls. Smile activated ice cream vending machines. If you smile, get a free ice cream, and then they take a picture of you smiling and send it to Facebook.

Recommendations
Find out what's being done in your organisation, IT directors often unaware of what's happening.
Map all customer touch points and processes, find out what customers care most about and fix them
Don't think the customer experience is something soft, trivial, measurable or will go away if you ignore it.
Don't rely just on an annual customer satisfaction survey as the only voice of the customer.


Very interesting session, aimed mainly at business sector but some lessons we can learn, and somethings we're already doing. I'm thinking of all of the creative media we did around degree ceremonies this year, posting handshake videos to Facebook, tagging hi-def pictures etc.



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