The digital experience (DX) stack, which encompasses the entire digital experience framework, has become the cornerstone of how businesses communicate with their customers. So what is the place of customer communications management (CCM) in the DX platform market in 2021?
According to Gartner, through the rest of this year, we will see a full 85% of cost and business efforts related to any digital experience platform (DXP) product will revolve around integrating internal product capabilities with external solutions. We are also likely to continue seeing an increase in reliance on digital experience strategies: as many as 90% of organizations worldwide are estimated to rely on a system integrator (SI) agency or other partners whose responsibility will be to design, build, and implement the integrated digital experience platform.
Further, research from Forrester has found that customer communications will remain a crucial component for producing high-value customer journeys. While these trends had been on the horizon for some time initially, the global pandemic has certainly fueled the growth in this direction as worldwide lockdowns meant “digital” became the only credible option for businesses to stay afloat over the past year. Available data suggests that customers are willing to spend more money on businesses that prioritize the customer experience.
Merge your digital experience touchpoints into a seamless customer experience.
Touchpoints available to facilitate your digital experience stack range from marketing and e-commerce websites; onboarding tools; messages and notifications; and back to your customer service portals. A number of technologies could be in the mix at any given touchpoint.
The starting point for creating that seamless customer experience should begin with understanding the unique customer journey you need to facilitate your business. A number of visual aids may be useful to help your business outline this vision, including a customer journey map. Build this vision with the customer or consumer in mind first and foremost, rather than thinking about the business itself.
Be mindful of these stages in the customer journey during this exploration and development process:
- The customer’s awareness of the need for your product or service
- The customer’s consideration or search for your product or service
- The customer’s purchase of your product or service
- The customer’s post-purchase behavior
- Long-term retention and loyalty of the customer
Having a desire to create a digital experience is only the first step in the right direction. Successfully executing your digital transformation can be a completely different kettle of fish. Too often as we have seen that companies focusing only on the aspects of the customer journey that lead solely to completing the sale might end up neglecting the latter stages of the customer lifecycle. Arguably, these are the most crucial stages of the customer experience: managing them successfully won’t be easy without first listening to your customers extensively.
Despite Topdown leading the way through this digital revolution for the past five years, a number of other organizations have been slow to adopt these trends. Topdown’s CCM/DX White Paper provides strong arguments for integrating your CCM system with your CX architecture that will ultimately help to improve your customer experience dramatically.
Find out how Topdown can help you take this first step by downloading and reading the CCM/DX White Paper today.
Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash
