The day-to-day operations for organizations across industries will be vastly different from what it used to be before the pandemic. COVID–19 brought about a significant change to the way people socialize, shop, work, go to school, and more—essentially, their lives and livelihoods. Of course, many customers started digital, remote, and/or contactless methods long before the pandemic, but many people are embracing it for the first time. Since no one knows when this pandemic will end, one might wonder how organizations will adapt post-COVID-19. 

There is no denying that the pandemic caused shifts in business models and structures for many firms worldwide, including financial services, professional services, restaurants, retail, travel, and more. Despite this, many organizations have been able to remain stable and resilient, attempting to re-imagine their business operations. The lengthy period of disruption, uncertainty, and volatility resulted in extraordinary changes to consumers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors. 

Virtually everyone these days knows about the various travel, personal, and health risks, which is why they look for solutions to help them steer clear of these issues. It is a significant reason behind the rise of digital services and administrations.

Market changes like these require organizations to develop efficient and simple digital models that keep physical interactions to a minimum. While these considerations are not new, the coronavirus crisis continues to impact the United States and may require transformative investments in analytical and digital initiatives.

Heightened Customer Experience Translates into More Transparency

If you look at firms that flourished during the lockdown, you will notice many resorted to scalable digital solutions. Providing users with seamless and smooth user experiences led to improved revenues and customer loyalty. What’s more, organizations that value digitization, keeping customers central to their operations, results in better revenue in the long and short run. Some organizations trying to provide value to investors and customers need to make rapid changes to their processes, models and upgrade their technology solutions, providing audiences with a user-friendly digital experience.

The Need of the Hour: A Personalized Experience

Renowned tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, are famous for providing people with customized user experiences that are easy to use and navigate. For organizations that aren’t behemoths, though, can take inspiration from this and provide their people with tailored options to facilitate their particular needs. Doing this can help organizations gain the upper hand over their competition and improve customer engagement tenfold.

One key is to understand personalization and how it works in your specific industry. For example, personalization allows financial institutions and banks to leverage much of the data they already have – including the massive repositories of customer touchpoints, data, and digital platform usage – helping them deliver powerful and meaningful personalized experiences. In banking and other industries, personalization is not necessarily about selling. Instead, it is about offering value, information, and services consistently. Media consumption across mobile devices, gaming, social media, streaming, and tv have skyrocketed. Providing answers in real-time to customer questions and offering content tailored to the specific customer need significantly improves a customer’s overall customer experience, which is crucial during this pandemic.

More Disruptive Changes, More Flexible Measures

Organizations across the world are changing how they operate to ensure there is no disruption in services for their customers and their employees while still providing the personalization and customized experience their customers look for. There are several tools and strategies businesses can use to improve the digital experience of their customers.

Few tools in your arsenal are more powerful than a well-used CRM. These typically cloud-based tools provide a wealth of information about products and services the customer is either using or expressed interest in for use in follow-up in marketing campaigns or by members of your sales team. Ensuring good data collection processes and requirements are in place will keep the data accurate, ensuring that it can be used for future outreach. 

Businesses can use this personalization type to obtain information about their website visitors with DNS records and IP addresses. It takes advantage of geolocation tracking, which helps companies provide customers with excellent customized experiences based on the customer’s physical location, putting new meaning to “right place, right time.” Imagine delivering your customer a special offer when they’re near a competitor and being able to redirect them to your business. Behavior-based personalization also gauges the visitor’s interests by studying their actions. This could include things like referrers’ websites, content viewed, search phrases, functions, visit count, etc. All of this activity can help a business understand what a customer wants and needs from their products and services to when they might be ready to make their next purchase. 

Focus on Building a Customer-Centric Model

Digital channels help an organization’s providers form meaningful relationships with customers by utilizing data to optimize their experience. For example, banking personnel may sometimes help customers make financial decisions like when to buy a house, when to buy or sell vehicles, funding major purchases, and paying for higher education. The more information bank employees have about their customer’s interests and needs, the better the bank can support the customer. This applies to organizations across industries: being able to digitize recommendations to your customer takes the relationship one step further. Consider how often you’ve purchased something additional after seeing a “frequently bought together” prompt. By personalizing the digital relationship and offering human interaction when it’s needed and helpful, businesses begin to truly shift to a customer-centric model instead of a transactional, product-based focus. 

Of course, digital experiences are essential for organizations, especially during this period, but the human touch will never go out of fashion. More importantly, every customer appreciates it. Therefore, businesses should consider providing customers with a perfect combination of digital experiences and trusted advisory. They can achieve this by shifting their focus to a customer-centric model instead of a transactional, product-based focus.

How Organizations Could Emerge Successfully Post Pandemic

High-quality customer experience and services are among the main reasons customers prefer a particular business over other options. However, the pandemic brought about tons of CX challenges. Most organizations are facing issues in terms of how they operate. With so much uncertainty looming around, companies must be proactive and make sure they have a well-thought-out plan to execute for the long run. Customer experience will have to undergo massive changes as most companies experience tension supporting older customers and engaging new ones. Fortunately, companies can address customer experience issues through seamless digital experiences. 

Continue reading to "Part 2: Harnessing Digital Adoption for Customers" >>

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