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Improve Customer Experience: Download The DCX 7-Steps Checklist

Posted on 26 March 2015 by Neosperience Team

DCX_7-Steps_Checklist

How can I create compelling experiences for my customers? How can I guide them through the purchase process, from awareness to consideration to conversion? How can my brand evolve to embrace the mobile mind shift? Ever thought of building a checklist? The DCX 7-Steps Checklist will help you find the right answer, with requirements and insights to shape an amazing digital customer experience. A guide you can download for free.

As 2015 goes on, the key value of customer experience in the digital transformation in now undeniable: one of the latest report by Gartner predicts that "50 percent of consumer product investments will be redirected to customer experience innovations by 2017". As a result, the improvement of customer journey becomes top priority on the desk of entrepreneurs and marketing professionals.

In our world defined by disruptive mobile technology, before even starting their marketing planning companies need to recognize the two forces in action to disrupt how you build marketing strategies:

The empowered customer is the core of strategy, the main purpose of business (the Age of the Customer).
The smartphone is the primary tool to search for information and interact with brands (the Mobile-Mind Shift).

A mobile first approach, then, become critical to deliver optimal digital experiences, to connect with clients, improve engagement and meet expectations with personal, simple and compelling content and services.

WHY A CHECKLIST?

Where does the idea of a checklist come from? Some of the most respected professionals in the world, in any field, rely on the humble checklist to keep them organized and out of trouble. Advances in scientific knowledge now overwhelm event the most trained practitioners in many fields – to the point that they make regular but frequently avoidable mistakes.

Boston-based surgeon Atul Gawande’s research into the aviation, construction and investment industries helped shape the World Health Organization’s production of a two-minute, 19-point surgical checklist that has saved countless lives worldwide.

Gawande’s book – The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right, provides sample checklists, instructive examples and plenty of food for thought about how to create and fine-tune checklists that fit your job and your organization’s mission.

Good checklists focus on the “killer items” – the ones that are “most dangerous to overlook” and that people are most likely to skip. Boeing in example uses two types of checklists: “DO-CONFIRM” to verify that pilots carry out critical actions and “READ-DO” for specifying the steps pilots take while doing a specific action.

Get the DCX 7-Steps Checklist

WHY A DCX CHECKLIST?

Working everyday with customers and prospects in key economic sectors - retail, fashion and luxury, automotive, financial services to name a few - at Neosperience we have recognized the importance of a non-static method to gain a strategic advantage. The idea of using checklists in critical areas is simple, yet powerful.

It got us thinking about what a digital customer experience (DCX) checklist might look like. So we crafted the first DCX 7-Steps Checklist with requirements for all projects that touch or impact organizations involved in the digital transformation and the creation of a customer-facing app.

Here is a brief description of the building blocks of a digital customer experience checklist:

There is a clear definition of your target customers, with properly designed storytelling, content marketing strategy and buyer personas. The needs of target customers are well understood and you are aiming at helping and making them active participants in the experience, delivering them relevant content, with right-time personalization and engagement.
A cross-functional team, with the right people from different functions has been put in place to work together (and never forget about employee engagement).
You have a clear understanding of the constant stream of new technology to enhance user experiences at every touch point. What’s key for you is to understand how your specific customers can use technology, in particular Android and iOS smartphone and tablet innovation, to improve their experience with your brand.
A customer journey mapping activity has been performed and there is a clear understanding of the various touch points where a digital transformation adds value in the customer’s perspective. Understanding and optimizing digitally the journey map to purchase lets you offer necessary education and a seamless experience to make it simple for people to do business with you.
An agile and iterative methodology and process is in place, from the conception stage, with resources and time properly allotted, to allow working on rapid-cycle test and learn.
The digital customer experience is shaped for every stage of the customer journey, from initial roll-out to ongoing support.
You have defined clear objectives, associated metrics and a measurement system for how the project will impact target customers.

One of the first things you have to recognize is that digital isn’t just this added thing. It's not just one more channel. It's different and it’s about changing the way you’re operating, because it is about using data, faster cycle times, more interactivity with more empowered customers.

Much of this is – and will remain – outside our control, as the volume and complexity of the data we collect with mobiles, combined with the complexity of our customer’s minds, have exceeded our ability to take into account all the details. Digital customer experience knowledge is both saving us and burdening us.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in October 2014 and has been revamped and updated for accuracy with the latest trends and advancements of digital customer experience.

Before downloading, a final practical advise: just ticking boxes on our 7 steps digital customer experience checklist is not the ultimate recipe. Choosing the right technology platform and partner, avoiding pitfalls and embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is.

Get the DCX 7-Steps Checklist

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retaildcx

“The future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed.” This quote by the cyberspace guru writer William Gibson introduced one of the most intriguing panels of the 2015 SXSW - South by Southwest - schedule.

‘10 inventions that will revolutionize retail’ - behind this title lies the question so many entrepreneurs are afraid to ask: What does the future of retail hold? Technology disruption changes the rules of production and distribution, and brands need to evolve accordingly, if they want to survive the retail revolution.

The speech by David Roth, CEO of WPP The Store, and Jon Bird, Global Director at Y&R LabStore, is just the starting point for a wider consideration about the evolution of retail customer experience (a crucial topic that we have covered many times). If you look back at the past 50 years, what you see is that brick-and-mortars retail companies have basically followed the same rules over and over, with only slow and gradual changes.

For decades, advertising, product improvement, price and production efficiency have represented the core of all marketing strategies. Push communications and ‘powerless’ consumers were the two sides of the same business coin, and clients were called ‘target’ and clustered into generic and undefined categories. Today, the balance of forces has already changed, putting the customer on center stage and giving birth to the so-called Age of the Customer.

This trend is only destined to accelerate in the current era of rapid technological advancement, where Internet and mobile devices act as catalysts for a massive change in the retail industry. As the SXSW conference made evident, over the next 10 years there is going to be more change than in the last 50 years. Price and products are not enough to differentiate yourself from competitors in the new world that is taking shape, where objects will have the greatest impact on our shopping experience.

SXSWpicture

Shown below are the 10 tech inventions highlighted by the SXSW panel, and their main consequences on digital customer experience:

VIRTUAL AUGMENTED STORES

The idea of traditional store is meaningless in an world where physical and digital merge into a new level of experience influenced by virtual reality. The enduring success of the Oculus Rift and the launch of Microsoft HoloLens will open new possibilities for retailers: holostores, augmented reality, digital purchases. Neosperience Showroom is the perfect example of how to make your brand and products come alive in immersive 3D reality environments, to deliver powerful experiences.

SHOP & SERVE ANYWHERE

One number says it all: mobile commerce is destined to rise to $62 billion dollars in the next five years. The Internet is already the primary source of information for customers in the decision process. It is also slowly becoming the first reference for purchases. 'Store' doesn't mean just brick-and-mortars anymore. Your online presence is crucial to offer personalized shopping experiences in an omni-channel retail view (mobile first, of course).

DIGITAL SMART STORE

E-Commerce is putting traditional retail on a critical threshold: evolve or die. How can they answer back? Changing the very concept of location and updating the four concrete walls of a shop to the digital needs of empowered customers. The Internet of Things is the final frontier in connecting customers and brands, building engagement through personalization. Here's how to say goodbye to the old layout:

Smart Vending - connected and built to communicate with customers and other machines. A good case study is the Nespresso boutique in Barcelona, a big vending machine store.
Sentient Stores - the iBeacon technology is rapidly becoming the standard in traditional stores. Beacons enable you to engage customers with context-aware contents and personalized offers and notifications.
Intelligent Shelves - shelves won't be just places to display products. They will ultimately recognize the customer, connect and interact with mobile devices to understand his/her needs and wants in that exact moment.
Artificial Intelligence - the interconnection of objects, made smart by the Internet, brings the concept of 'artificial intelligence' back to attention. Futuristic designers see the advanced store as a sentient entity with a beating heart of chips, wires and bytes.

ON-DEMAND MERCHANDISE

Since the globalization became the major force in Western economies, many insisted that the world has become flat. Actually, the only things going flat are products price and quality. In the Age of the Customer, needs and desires are all but flat: now that they can have whatever they want whenever they want it, customers look for personalized contents and products. Online and offline. That's why we are facing the era of Me-Commerce (even more true when we talk about millennials).

OFF THE GRID RETAIL

If your strategy can't be just centered around the traditional 4 P's of marketing, you need something different to build a distinct brand image and remain the focus of customer's attention. Success will shine out for entrepreneurs that will take a distinctly ‘outside the box’ path to innovation. Again, there is another 'P' you should always include in your strategy: personalization. A tailored shopping experience is the real brand differentiator, when customers demand compelling experience not just useful products.

MOBILE PAYMENTS

All analysts agree that the use of Internet and mobile devices will change the way we buy things, and - even more important - the way we pay for products or services. Credit and debit cards will still be the standard in the coming years, but new technologies are at work to offer a more easy, fast and secure access to payments. The last stage of the customer journey is undergoing a fast development thanks to the NFC and the Apple Pay system, that will finally make the wearable revolution the real deal for investors.

VIBRANT DATA

Smart machines can communicate without human intervention. An ecosystem of smartphones, smartwatches, activity trackers, iBeacons, geo-fencing tools, virtual reality headsets (and so on) that creates data, gathered and ready to be used. Big data is the name of this amount of information about customers, production and sales: numbers that you must learn to scan and analyze to make better strategic decisions, improve the customer experience, reduce inefficiency and - ultimately - increase sales.

As a result of all innovation forces, the retail world is increasingly globalized, digitized, polarized and personalized. Too many retailers instinctively react to these challenges using the old easy way out to close under-performing stores, but the resolution is somewhere else: in the reinvention of the physical store and the adoption of those disruptive inventions that drive digital innovation and revolutionize retail as we know it.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Retail Marketing Strategy - 5 Steps To Renew Customer Experience

To help you ensure a strategic advantage to your organization, learn about the DCX 7-Steps Checklist crafted by Neosperience, with requirements and insights for a successful digital transformation.