3 Great Sins in Digital Customer Experience

In 2017, United Airlines had a brand crisis, ended with $1.4 billion in value wipe out overnight when a passenger’s experience went viral on social media. Can you imagine losing billions of dolars just in one night? Bad news is that’s exactly what could happen after just one bad customer experience with your product or brand. But the good news is you can nip this in the bud.

In this article, I will share with you three common mistakes that companies do in their digital customer experience design. By staying away from these three sins, you can cover a distance to a memorable customer experience.

Sin 1: Not seeing customer in 360 degrees

Do you love baseball? It is a very predictable game. Batters can only run one direction, and they only have three bases to stop at. Well, it might be good if you love baseball in your personal life and don’t bring it to your business life especially while you design your customer journeys because your customers are unpredictable quite to contrary to baseball. They are unlikely to follow the prescribed path, they like bringing complex and unpredictable cases, every time they interact with you, they choose different communication channel. While you are not able to control your customers’ behavior, are you able to deliver a remarkable, connected experience across all channels and departments? It may seem impossible however, collecting all interactions and data in one place is the key factor for this. Person currently interacting with the customer must see the customer in 360 degrees because customers don’t care which department they talk to when they need a help or have a question. A company may have different teams just in one single department, but the customer doesn’t care this. For them there is only one single big team. Bring customer’s personal data, interests, purchase history, requests and interactions on one single customer cards. This will let your teams work together and help them to give a personalized customer experience.

Sin 2: Siloed interactions

If you want to win the “CX designer of the year award”, it is highly suggested to stay away from siloed interactions. The main point you must remember is that your customers are not “same” just because they all choose your product or brand. It is highly likely that your customer portfolio contains people with different jobs, from different industries, with different ages. They have different pains and look for different gains. Maybe they are in different stages within the customer journey. While some of them are freshly entered in awareness step and have no idea about your products, some of them are loyal to you since years. Siloed interactions will not offer your customers a memorable customer experience because what they need to hear from you is different. It may seem like creating this memorable customer experience is more complicated than ever. Actually, that’s true. However, you can design a remarkable experience for your customers by selecting right technology, putting customer in the middle and focusing on managing a single customer journey instead of siloed interaction. And before doing this, must importantly, try to understand your customers’ needs/wishes. Do it TRULY! And then focus on the experience.

Sin 3: Replacing humans with machines

We all know the business world’s trendy word in 21. century: “digital”. If you understand replacing humans with machines and making everything autonomous from the word digital, then sorry, but you are in the wrong path. Even the technology improves, and automation tools get more popular, Future of CX report by PwC shows us that still 75% of people would like to interact with a real person more as technology improves. You might think enabling up-to-date systems will make your customers happy and you might see them as a cure for a good customer experience. However, the reality is that your customers do not care your automation tools and technology. They just want to have an efficient, friendly and knowledgeable service. Good! But how will we give them their dream service? Are we not going to use automations and fancy systems in our organization? Surely, we will. But instead of flashing our technology at customers, we will equip our employees with technology! Technology should allow your employees to be more engaged with your customers, give consistent information and help them to provide better service. It should not replace them. Because we, human beings, are still in need of the human touch even if we are fascinated by technology, and this will unlikely change.