How to Better Engage with Customers in the Evolving Digital Landscape
By Smart Communications
As we continue to examine the seismic shifts in consumer and business interactions, it’s critical to address the factors that are influencing these changes. In large part, the transformation is being shaped by the ebb and flow of generational preferences which demand a recalibration of traditional communication strategies.
For your company to truly excel in providing an exceptional customer communications experience, you’ll not only need to adapt, but proactively position yourself on the very channels and platforms your customers use.
In this article, you'll find insights from our latest report, ‘5 Trends Shaping Customer Conversations in 2024’, which is rich with expert guidance from top thought leaders across the financial services, healthcare, and insurance industries.
Unlocking Customer Engagement in the Evolving Digital Landscape: A Deep Dive into Modern Strategies
In ‘5 Trends Shaping Customer Conversations in 2024’, Marci Maddox, Research Vice President for Digital Experience Strategies at IDC, says companies must understand and adapt to changing generational interactions, particularly among Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials, adding, “I anticipate the impact of social apps on consumer behavior will create a significant disruption in communication formats — particularly with the rise of video content — which shifts how content is delivered and formatted beyond traditional text based content and interactions.”
This shift goes beyond traditional text-based content and interactions. Many businesses are expanding their customer engagement strategies to include new social media and messaging platforms. The adoption of communication solutions facilitates seamless expansion to new channels without starting from scratch, according to Aspire Founder and CEO, Kaspar Roos. Utilizing AI to repurpose content for different channels enhances the likelihood of achieving the desired action.
Meet Your Customers’ Preferences When It Comes to Data Collection, Customer Communications
Your consumers are increasingly choosing new channels to submit their personal data and seek out answers or support. For instance, our recent Benchmark study indicates that 43% of healthcare customers prefer direct online submission for personal data to healthcare companies. That same report found that while 73% of businesses think their customer communications are improving, only 29% of consumers agreed with this sentiment. Optimistically speaking, 33% of the same consumers polled shared that they do feel like their options for interacting with those companies are improving.
Sameer Hajarnis, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Digital Agreements at OneSpan, highlights the importance of immediate gratification in critical data collection processes such as loan disbursement or account access. Social media and messaging platforms, like WhatsApp, paired with AI, provide the instant gratification factor, a key differentiator in modern customer interactions.
When expanding across diverse channels, remember to remain consistent. With cloud technology powering your customer communications and data collection strategies, this becomes less of a feat than attempting to do so with legacy technology. Cloud-based CCM solutions offer a centralized, scalable infrastructure that allows you to enable seamless engagement across multiple channels. This consistency is essential for building and maintaining customer trust, especially when dealing with sensitive data such as personal health or financial information.
The scalability of cloud solutions will allow your business to adapt to changing customer preferences without the limitations associated with on-premise systems. This adaptability ensures that updates or changes to communications and digital forms processes can be implemented uniformly across all channels, preventing discrepancies or disruptions in the customer experience.
According to Ernie Crawford, President and CEO at Crawford Technologies, businesses must implement robust and adaptable communication strategies to ensure a consistent customer experience across all channels.
Modernize Your Ecosystem for Richer Customer Experience
It's important to recognize the shifting power dynamics between industries and consumers, emphasizing the greater need to adopt customer-centric innovation and modern cloud-based solutions. Outdated, disparate, and siloed systems impede your organization’s ability to meet modern demands, particularly when you’re expanding to new channels.
According to the IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Customer Experience 2024 predictions, by 2026, organizations like yours will shift 35% of their customer communications to support dynamic updates to meet expectations and provide context continuity.
Naren Sivakumar, Vice President of ValueMomentum, emphasizes that organizations may face obstacles due to limitations of legacy technologies when implementing digital capabilities. These limitations include:
- Outdated functionality
- Limited scalability and flexibility
- Integration challenges
- Security vulnerabilities
- Slow performance
- Duplicated efforts and operational inefficiency
- High maintenance costs
- Incompatibility with modern tools
Where innovation is concerned, moving too slowly means your organization risks losing business to emerging competitors. What’s more is that using outdated systems and inefficient processes will reduce cost savings and productivity, both in the long and short term.
Conclusion
Digital leaders in the retail, ecommerce, and technology sectors have set high standards for customer expectations. If your company can’t, or won’t, meet these expectations, it may lead customers to switch to more trusted brands that are. To capitalize on this opportunity, you need adaptable and robust customer engagement strategies powered by a modern technology ecosystem.