Author: lsbrian

Today I joined a panel of other customer experience professionals for a discussion about the digital customer experience. When available, I’ll link to the full discussion, but until then, here are the questions and some of my responses.

Intro: Brian has been designing customer experiences online & offline for 12 years, 7 at a church & 5 running a small business. Most recently, Brian is the founder/CEO of tech startup @WeDo, a collaboration platform for wedding planning, launching this summer.

1. How do you utilize digital channels to engage and re-engage connected customers?

   1. Digital is like beer. It is the cause and cure for most of a company’s customer experience problems. #cxo

   2. The beauty and curse of digital is its omnipresence in the lives of our customers.

   3. We use SoMe more to maintain relationships than building new ones. We use email primarily to drive new and repeat business.

   4. At @WeDo we’re building a platform that will take business/customer engagement to the next level, collaboration.

2. Can digital channels be used to deepen customer relationships?

   1. The beauty of SoMe is the ability to present, with permission, in between F2F business. Deepens relationships, drives referrals.

   2. Be careful. The difference between listening and eavesdropping is presence and permission. Listen, but don’t eaves drop.

3. How can you ensure digital customer feedback is collected in real time and utilized across all touch points?

   1. There’s an assumption in this question that you need/want to. That’s a business decision. Having said that …

   2. If by feedback we mean user inputs, we can use real-time inputs such as location and history to inform dynamic outputs.

   3. Real-time user feedback data can be used for creating dynamic experiences.

4. What must businesses do to ensure relevant content, offerings and solutions for digital channels?

   1. Know the culture and user approach to every channel utilized.

5. How can businesses seamlessly integrate digital with other channels to enhance customer experience?

   1. Seamlessly integrating digital is a way of thinking. Digital channels answer “where & how” not “why.”

   2. We need to stop thinking in channels. Our customers don’t, so why should we? Customers are channel agnostic.

6. Where does big data fit in the digital customer experience equation?

   1. (1/2) If experiences are created by intentionally manipulating an environment to achieve a desired outcome…

   2. (2/2) #BigData gives us personalized insight that allows for individualized environments to drive specific outcomes.

7. What is the role of IT in digital customer experience strategies?

   1. The role of IT is to build platforms that let the technology get out of the way of the desired experience.

8. Which organizations are succeeding with digital experiences and what can we learn from them?

   1. There’s a restaurant here in #MKE, @ajbombers, that has done a fantastic job using Twitter to make fans instead of patrons.

   2. They use it for interacting with fans who are both in the restaurant or just conversing with or mentioning with them.

9. With the proliferation of digital channels, what does the customer experience of 2020 look like?

   1. By 2020, seamless mobile experiences should be the baseline from which personalized experiences are built.

   2. By 2024, that baseline should be shifting to predictive experiences.

Experience is the currency of loyalty. Your business “earns” loyalty credits when you provide good, great, and remarkable experiences for your customers. The more you do that, the more loyalty you get. You “spend” loyalty credits with bad experiences, whether your fault or not.

This concept turns the entire idea of loyalty programs on its head. In reality, customers aren’t the ones earning points. You are.