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The last two years have seen a major digital shift in the way customers engage with brands. According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report, today’s customers are more active on digital channels than in 2020. Even as they return to in-person experiences, this digital-first customer behaviour is likely to continue.
However, while 85% of customers expect a consistent experience across channels and departments, 43% of customers still prefer non-digital channels when engaging with a brand. This makes it critical to provide customers a satisfying online and offline experience.
As businesses strive to meet evolving customer expectations, building trust is proving more crucial than ever. So, how can brands build and maintain trust? How can they create seamless, connected experiences that build long-term customer relationships?
The challenges and disruptions we face in recent years have significantly changed the needs and preferences of customers. Businesses need to gain a deep understanding of these changes to be able to craft a connected customer experience.
“The pandemic pushed customers to buy more items online that they would have previously bought offline,” said Dave Liu, Director, Business Operations, Kerry Express, a leading delivery service in Thailand. “From bulky items and mobile devices to cold chain products, including seafood, were increasingly ordered online.”
Dave also observed an increase in home deliveries compared to office deliveries while people worked remotely during the pandemic. There was also a rise in orders from locations outside the main cities. “Even now, with the easing of social restrictions, we don’t see these shifts in online customer behaviour really dropping,” said Dave.
To meet these changes in customer expectations and shifts in demand, businesses need to redesign their customer journey. By focusing on what matters to customers, brands can understand their motivations and behaviours across channels.
Kerry Express went about doing this by putting the customer at the centre of their journey mapping.
“We tried to understand the customer journey first and then used technology to build the right data architecture around the customer. This helped us build the right online tools and offline customer touch points. This allowed us to keep fine-tuning the journey and making it more efficient.”
With the shift to digital-first experiences, customers expect a personal touch when engaging with brands. 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, while 62% expect companies to anticipate their needs.
To build trust and make customers feel their needs are understood, businesses should focus on personalising the customer journey. Kerry Express did this by focusing on every touch point to make life easier for customers.
“Most of our customers are online sellers. To serve them better, we created a seamless environment across online and offline channels,” said Dave.
“We have created a variety of online tools from websites to chats along with offline channels for sellers and employees to engage customers. We also provide support to every employee to go to every customer touch point to provide support to customers.”
By offering a variety of pickup and delivery options, Kerry Express catered to the preferences of both sellers and recipients. Customers could also update their order fulfilment preferences at any time — from home delivery to pick-up at collection centres or self-collection of products.
To deliver such a highly personalised experience, a business needs to have a 360 degree view of the customer journey across channels. Cloud-based CRM provides a single, comprehensive view of customer behaviour on an integrated platform powered by AI. This helps deliver a seamless, connected experience at every stage of the customer journey.
By investing in the digitalisation of systems and business processes, a brand can improve its ability to meet customer expectations. According to Dave, this digitalisation should be implemented with a sound strategy.
“It helps to consider two perspectives when looking to digitalise your services — the customer’s and the customer service agent’s,” said Dave. “First, always consider if a service area can move online or to self-service or chat bots without creating much inconvenience to customers. This can immensely help service agents by reducing the volume of service requests. By monitoring the type of calls coming into the contact centre, we can get an idea of the types of services that can be shifted online.”
“And don’t try to move everything online at one go. Move some services online first and then monitor to see if the customer experience is impacted.”
Kerry Express empowered their agents with platforms that gave them a comprehensive view of their entire operations. This helped them better manage customer expectations by giving them visibility at every stage of the customer journey. By leveraging AI to analyse operational data, their senior executives were also able to make the right operational decisions.
“During the pandemic, we saw customer demand shifting from the city centres to the outskirts. From the data available to us, we were able to mobilise our resources to cater to this shifting demand. AI has been very useful in analysing data to make informed operational and business decisions.”
Meeting the high expectations of today’s digital first customers is critical to business growth. By leveraging data to create a connected customer journey across channels, businesses can deliver unrivalled experiences, deepen trust, and build loyalty.
Get more insights from Dave Liu of Kerry Express on how to create a seamless and connected service experience across the customer lifecycle. Watch the webinar Seamless Service for the Digital-First Connected Customer.
To learn more about creating connected customer experiences, read the State of Connected Customer report.
