Written by Shankar Krishnan, founder and CEO, Hashout Technologies
To offer a winning digital experience for its customers, companies must possess three vital components:
- A highly capable digital platform
- An experience transformation roadmap
- An expert team dedicated to continuously building on the roadmap for no less than 1-2 years.
For companies to succeed in meeting the customer’s expectations and add value, they need to first build a very concise and precise digital roadmap that allows customers to plainly see the value offered in their experience with the company. Designing the ‘perfect’ digital roadmap can be complicated, but an important step to ensure the customer experience envisioned is as relevant, accessible, and enjoyable as possible.
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To deliver on the digital roadmap, you not only need a highly capable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) platform which is the essential tool to build and deliver great customer experiences, but also an expert on both technology and the domain onboard for a considerable period of time. The digital experience platforms of today have become more sophisticated than those of the early 2010s, meaning digital agencies or in-house teams responsible for building on these platforms must work to leverage various platform capabilities to continuously create a richer toolbox of new features and capabilities to help companies deliver a great customer experience. This is a completely different approach from the past where digital agencies were hired by companies to perform specific improvement tasks such as rebranding, localization, campaign pages, and others.
Beyond building features and capabilities leveraging the platform, there are few other unique values and outcomes that can be expected from a continuous engagement with a digital agency or a dedicated in-house expert team which I will outline below with some applicable examples.
Innovation
Innovation is key to any company’s long-term digital survival. It gives the organization the ability to leverage various platform capabilities and deliver memorable experiences and personalized solutions on behalf of the customer.
For example, one of our customers at Hashout Technologies used their CX platform to design and deliver personalized virtual trade show experiences to their customers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This innovative approach allowed our client to optimize their content delivery on behalf of customers. With our help, the client pivoted quickly in response to changing conditions affecting the global event industry in 2020, delivering updates and key changes to their customer experience quickly and positioning the company as an authority in their field.
Though our client’s eventual pivot was not ingrained in their digital roadmap strategy, the combination of the client’s existing digital roadmap strategy and their dedicated team allowed them to innovate the digital experience of their customers.
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Improvements
Although innovation is key to any organization’s survival, innovation simply for the sake of innovation can be detrimental to the bottom-line. Rather, innovation must be spearheaded with a vision of improving the methods, technologies, and tools organizations use in working on their digital roadmap to achieve the goal of creating a valuable, memorable, and winning experience for their customers.
When done by a dedicated team with the necessary bandwidth and capabilities, this approach allows organizations to leverage their existing digital resources and dive deeper into their customer interaction features, such as conducting various A/B experiments, collecting data on and analyzing customer interactions (with tools such as feedback and experience surveys) and other mechanisms designed to fine-tune digital customer experience features on the organization’s website and digital platform.
For example, one of Hashout’s clients is a U.S.-based company that develops software for shipping logistics. The client hired Hashout to improve upon an internationalization feature on their website, gave us their requirements for the feature, and Hashout gave the client an estimate for the feature, which took about 1 month to build. After some time, the client returned and told Hashout that the feature was “broken” because they weren’t receiving the positive interaction or feedback they expected. Because the client had not intended to construct the feature in their roadmap with the vision of adding value to their customers’ experience, the existing feature was unable to gather customer feedback, further hindering the customer’s experience on the client’s digital platform.
Many times, it will take two, three, or many more attempts to fine tune a company’s existing methods, features, and tools to a point that truly adds value to the customer. Whether the issue is in design, performance, or a different factor, when Digital Product Managers are limited by the current methods or tools at their disposal, innovation – and thus, continuous improvements – becomes stifled.
Going Beyond
The capabilities of Enterprise-grade Customer Experience Platforms from companies such as Adobe and Microsoft go beyond simply providing end-to-end digital content management systems to their customers. Instead, their digital platforms include other key capabilities such as digital asset management for delivering consistent branding experience across all customer touch points, omni-channel customer experience across all online/offline mediums, and content data platforms (CDPs) that are capable of powering real-time personalization at scale to provide a relevant and winning customer experience. The inclusion of features such as these ensures the consistent optimization and subsequent distribution of rich media content to the customer at every layer of their digital platform.
An outcome on innovation, continuous improvements, and going above the standard – combined with a strong digital roadmap – helps companies leverage their digital tools and technologies to expand their capabilities on their CX platforms.
For these reasons, we at Hashout provide clients with a skilled team of technology experts to support the continuous engagement and enhancement to our clients’ digital roadmaps. Our professionals, and others like them, are focused on continuously building and refining the customer journey. In daring to go beyond the norm, companies can use new methods, tools, technologies, and platforms to deliver a winning experience for any customer.
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