Using Creative & Digital Services to Enhance Your Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) is how clients perceive their interactions with your brand. By investing in creative and digital services, organizations can vastly improve their CX. There are a variety of prominent trends driving this need ranging from maintaining multiple, complex communication channels to reaching minimum viable product milestones, and all while keeping pace with evolving customer demands.
SalesForce’s 2018 “State of the Connected Customer” report highlights the urgency of meeting customers’ expectations for trusted, seamless, and personalized interactions.
80% of respondents indicated that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.
76% say it has never been easier to leave one brand for another if their customer experience expectations are not being met.
73% say companies do not meet their standards for an overall business-to-business experience. The good news is that creative and digital services give organizations myriad ways to quickly improve their CX.
Today’s most successful digital businesses offer pleasing and efficient experiences that establish brand authority and separate them from competitors. These principles can apply to companies of every size as they invest in creative and digital services that enhance their CX and encourage customer loyalty.
Three Key Paths to Better CX
Sila has identified three key paths where creative and digital services can assist companies in improving CX: marketing and product strategy, design, and rapid prototyping.
Marketing and Product Strategy Before companies can take their digital products to market, they must engage with their customers and stakeholders to solve real user problems. Consider a company preparing to launch a new application and needing a better understanding of the complexities of their users to ensure their needs are being met.
In this case, it is important to enact a product strategy that is backed by user experience (UX) research, persona development, and wireframing. The first step is asking questions and gathering data. What need does the application fill? What are the demonstrated day-to-day problems the application solves? What are the short and long-term goals for the initiative?
Design
Modernizing design does more than improve efficiencies; it creates delight and elevates mood. For example, overhauling a legacy portal provides an opportunity for an organization to reimagine the user interface (UI) from the ground up, pairing intuitive workflows with modern aesthetics. When legacy systems are relied upon for essential daily tasks, they often maintain widespread usage in spite of quirks, pain points, and visuals that are past their prime. Embarking on a redesign may feel daunting, but pays dividends in user satisfaction, enthusiastic adoption, and brand authority.
Engaging with a team of experts that understand the demands of human-computer interaction (HCI) and the importance of compelling visual design can simplify this process and ensure that the revamped application exceeds the needs and expectations of all stakeholders. High-fidelity designs will help define a meaningful visual identity and cohesive look and feel that is ready to inform the development process.
Rapid Prototyping
For organizations that want to explore the development of a new application, rapid prototyping can provide them with an initial proof of concept before a larger investment is made. It also offers early user testing that will help shape the future of the product.
By commissioning rapid prototyping, an enterprise can test functional subsections of a critical application, allowing for rigorous end-user testing and feedback prior to full development. The living application created in this process can be iterated upon quickly. Having a tangible product bridges the gap between how something looks and how it works to accomplish mission-critical tasks.
Next Steps
These three key complementary areas—marketing and product strategy, design, and rapid prototyping—can build on each other depending on the goals of an organization.
In this age of instant gratification and with an immense number of competing products and services, investing in creative and digital services helps organizations understand their customers’ needs, keeps them engaged, and earns their loyalty.