Maturing your digital strategy through customer centricity

Regardless of your business or its context, there’s one focus that’s never wrong: customer centricity.

According to recent global research, 73% of people say experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions and over 40% would pay more for great experiences.

Viewing all of your actions, whether proactive or reactive, through the lens of your customer is the best way to ensure you’re continually adding value for them.

But what does customer centricity really mean? It starts with empathy.

Customer journeys are holistic. They should be viewed as such. You can, however, begin implementing a customer-centric approach by starting with one moment in the journey — such as making a purchase or renewing a subscription.

Ignoring everything your company has done up to now, ask this question: “What would be the best way to complete this task?” (“Best” probably means fastest, simplest, or most intuitive.) The next question is this: “What experience should follow?”

For example, a customer was unhappy with their purchase. If lodging a complaint or getting a refund was an easy process, they might be more forgiving. But the next step is critical. It might be as simple as sending them an email to let them know you heard them and are seeking to do better next time.

Alternatively, you may want to have a representative reach out personally. Simple enough. But the right systems, workflows, and processes must be in place to ensure you don’t miss the opportunity.

Letting the customer know they’ve been seen and heard goes a long way toward building trust — or rebuilding it. When you can look at every touchpoint and can honestly say each one is the best it can be, you’ve created a better CX.

Circumstances are bound to change over time, but at least you know you’re working from a position of strength. Digital maturity is a journey, not a destination.

Content created in partnership with Sitecore.

Moving toward a customer centric digital strategy: Agile systems, processes, and content

With your North Star of making each moment of your customer journey the best experience possible, you can begin experimenting. These tests should involve not only customer-facing experiences, but also back-end processes, tools, workflows, and strategies.

To deliver the best possible customer experiences, you need to be agile. This is about more than the inevitability of change — even before the pandemic, organizations that could pivot quickly drastically increased their chances of success. In our fast-paced, digital world, agility is a differentiator at all times.

But what does agility mean in practice? Let’s break it down by considering three aspects essential for digital experiences:

1. Systems
2. Processes
3. Content

Systems

The core digital-experience technology is still a content management system (CMS). To be effective today, it needs omnichannel delivery and data collection. But this is just the beginning.

From being cloud-ready to having the ability to use AI, the modern CMS must integrate with best-of-breed solutions while offering a robust set of functionality all its own. Above all, it must enable your team to continually experiment and iterate. But technology is only one piece of the puzzle.

Processes

Every organization’s digital strategy is unique, but research reveals the most effective approach to digital transformation is a bold and tightly integrated digital strategy. Driven from the top.

Aligning your C-Suite around the vision is critical for success, but so is fostering a culture of “build-measure-learn” and breaking down silos between teams. Delivering digital experiences, understanding their impact, and iterating on them requires close alignment between Marketing and IT, as well as sales, customer success, and more.

Content

Agile content is centrally and intelligently stored, available to all, insight-driven, and modular.

Centrally stored content enables transparency, ease of location, and ease of use. It also helps teams avoid duplicating efforts. But the storage platform must be agile enough to align with your teams’ needs. From content tags to user permissions, an agile platform enables access, increases efficiency, and maintains consistency.

When content creation, delivery, and metrics are aligned, insight can drive content. Modular content — created in chunks with the goal of reuse across the various moments of your customer journeys — is agile content, empowering data-driven iteration.

Understanding where you’re at in your journey toward digital maturity is an essential first step to advancing. We’ve created a whole set of resources to help. When you’re ready to start moving toward digital experience excellence, explore our content maturity resources here.