Digital customer engagement is the art, science, and technologies involved in optimizing the physical and virtual interactions and transactions with prospects, customers, and other valuable stakeholders. Innovative technologies like big data analytics, chatbots, guided self-service, augmented and virtual reality, and IVR (interactive voice response) are used to elevate and enhance the digital customer engagement and overall customer experience transformation.

Let’s look at some of the best practices and concepts used by leaders in the digital space to foster digital customer engagement and delighting thru exceptional customer experience.

Components of Digital Customer Engagement:

Data Analytics:

Most companies have a treasure trove of customer data. The internal data combined with external data streams constitutes the classic big data. Thru analytics and data mining corporations and unlock the mysteries of customer needs, wants and desires and be able to glean insights into how to make the future state of customer engagement and experience better.

Customer Personas:

Understanding customers is a complex science and rather an incredible art. Data gleaned from interactions, transactions, profiles, preferences, satisfiers and dissatisfiers and analyzed thru data analytics can form the basis for generating customer personas that span a rich tapestry of human behaviors encapsulated into a few examples. It is no longer about Betsy, 35, mother of two, and an HR head, but deeper and broader analysis of the profile.

Customer Journeys:

Customer journeys are the process thru which various personas go thru the phases of research, the preliminary choice set, decision making, actual purchase, post-purchase, and usage. The customer journeys capture the nuances of these interactions in resplendent detail and vivid color.

Personalization:

Personalization is the art of making each client feel unique and crafting content, communications and commerce interactions in a way that makes it personal and extraordinary.

Relationships:

Touch point Optimization was the holy grail in the past. However, today, while touch point communication improvement is necessary, but it cannot be at the cost of overall relationship optimization. It is the classic case of global optimization even at the expense of some local sub-optimization.

Iterative Refinement of End-to-End Experience:

Defining the experience and enabling it thru a series of technologies is a start, not the end of the digital customer engagement and experience transformation. Data analytics should provide the basis to tweak, change and iteratively refine these experiences – both in the virtual and digital realm.

Remember, digital customer engagement needs to be driven as a new paradigm, not just automating of the physical processes into digital ones. Uber did not become what it is because it just digitized the physical pattern of calling a cab. Rethink! Reimagine! Re-Architect!

To achieve this, you will need a digital customer experience strategy and a transformation roadmap.

To learn more about digital customer engagement, please review the opinions of McKinsey and Deloitte.