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Are your digital customer journeys keeping pace with changing customer demands?
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, agility was the Holy Grail for marketers and customer experience professionals. In the 21st​ century, understanding and responding rapidly to customers’ changing wants and needs was already essential for successful customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction. But COVID-19 has put additional pressure on marketers to create seamless digital customer journeys. With in-person channels either blocked or greatly limited, these journeys and their supporting processes had to shift online overnight.
What’s more, the transformation wrought by COVID-19 is just beginning. With no end in sight to the pandemic and a still uncertain impact on customer preferences over the next months and years, McKinsey notes, companies must learn to adapt. But how can marketers hope to keep pace as customer behavior, particularly in the digital channels that have become their preferred interaction method, changes more rapidly than ever before? How can you ensure you can quickly launch new applications across an ever-increasing number of touchpoints, then rapidly adapt and iterate on them, when it takes IT eight months to a year to launch an app or rebrand a website?
Building an agile digital CX backbone, supported by a modern experience development platform that allows marketing, CX, and IT to collaborate, is the answer. But what does that actually mean?
The New Face of CX
Customer acquisition and retention look different now than they did six months ago.
Serving and retaining existing customers: Relying on call centers to handle all of the customer service tasks formerly done face-to-face is unsustainable. Requests as simple as changing a home address on an electricity bill add up to overwhelmed call centers delivering underwhelming service. Reps are left frustrated, with little time for higher-value activities such as upselling. And simply creating a customer self-service website or mobile app is not enough: customers demand the ability to interact with companies on their terms, via the digital channel, device, or interaction modality most convenient for them. Without a seamless and effortless experience across desktop, mobile device, wearable device, voice assistant, or chatbot, you risk losing customers to more agile competitors.
Attracting and onboarding new customers: Here again, relying on call center reps to replace face-to-face interactions is not sustainable. Customer acquisition efforts must now be undertaken using primarily online channels and automated digital processes. But continuously making changes to optimize digital onboarding journeys requires constant monitoring and adjusting them to increase conversions. After all, prospects will have even less tolerance for a faulty website or slow mobile app than your existing customers will.
Customer support chatbots: The exponentially increased pressure on service staff has led to a spike in demand for customer service chatbots. IBM, for example, has seen a 40% increase in traffic to its Watson Assistant from February to April this year. As companies scramble to automate answers to common questions in an attempt to ease the burden on call center reps, more and more organizations are willing to leverage emerging technologies. Unfortunately, not all boast the highly skilled resources or time it takes to do so.
Why The Old Ways Don’t Work Anymore
Now more than ever, marketers and customer experience professionals must launch new digital products, services, and experiences quickly in order to adapt to changing customer preferences and needs. They must also be able to adjust these digital experiences and applications quickly to remove friction and serve customers efficiently. Traditional application development methods often stand in the way of delivering on this CX nirvana.
Custom-tailored applications take months to create. The time-consuming traditional development process uses multiple development teams, each with its own skill set, working side by side on different technologies to build applications for various CX channels and touchpoints. Teams must build the same functionality over and over again for each channel or application. Creating a consistent experience across various touchpoints can seem like a miracle.
To move faster, IT teams often turn to prepackaged software. This lets marketers launch new apps quickly, but it doesn’t differentiate your brand, can still take months to iterate, and lacks the flexibility to cater to your unique customer needs.
What’s a marketer to do?
A New Approach to App Development
This new world requires a new approach to app development—one that combines the benefits of prepackaged software with the freedom of traditional development. A high-speed, modern, enterprise-grade app development platform that simplifies development allows business and IT to collaborate easily and move up to 10X faster to launch new digital products and services.
Using customizable, pre-built building blocks that cover 70% to 80% of common needs while retaining the flexibility to fully customize them or create additional branded components from scratch, teams can create apps for all digital customer touchpoints in a single platform and technology. Code and functionality are reusable across all applications and touchpoints, eliminating repetitive coding. Updates and changes can be done once and replicated on multiple channels, so you can scale at speed while reducing costs and ensuring consistency. For example, using the OutSystems Live Style Guide, a repository of reusable digital branding elements, one of our customers was able to update brand guidelines across all his organization’s digital channels in less than a week—a task that previously took a year or more.
This is more than a faster app development platform; it’s a whole new approach to development. Instead of focusing on channels, such as mobile or web, a modern application development platform focuses on designing an optimal customer experience across channels. Customers enjoy a unified digital experience on whichever device they find more convenient to engage with your organization. Marketers benefit from the ability to keep up with changing customer demands in real-time and enjoy seamless integration with their existing martech investments.
COVID-19 will mean permanent changes in the way customers engage with brands. Successfully adapting to those changes requires fundamentally rethinking the way your team delivers new applications.
A modern app development platform can give marketing teams the agile CX backbone needed to rapidly develop and iterate new digital products and services. By using emerging technologies to surprise and delight customers, reach them through new channels and deliver innovative functionality, marketers can boost customer loyalty, retention, and satisfaction—no matter what challenges the future holds. To learn more, download Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development PlatformsOpens a new window , where we were honored to be recognized as a leader in the field.