Building a Five-star Digital Customer Experience - Make It Your Superpower

Imagine yourself stranded at home, forced to do something that previously was a privilege – work remotely. However, now think yourself into the movie Groundhog Day – you live the same day, after day, after day. There is only one thing to distinguish your days from each other: Lunch. You choose your meal over your phone, from a wide variety of well-described alternatives. You pay for your order through a mobile app, knowing exactly what it costs and how long the delivery will take. You have real-time visibility of your food being prepared and the delivery progressing towards your front door. You receive the order from a smiling guy, greeting you happily. – But your favorite garlic bread is missing! You notify the food delivery company through the app and get a very personal message with apologies and a free delivery for tomorrow’s lunch. Day saved. You would expect a similar digital customer experience also in your B2B relationships, but sadly, this does not happen every day.

Consumer-grade Digital Customer Experience Expectations in B2B

One effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on all of us is the tiger leap in digitalization – it has been faster and more pervasive than anybody expected. When consumer companies digitalize their business our expectations as customers of B2B services change, too. Today, we expect everything to be delivered as a service, it should be available 24/7, and it should be adapted for the mobile-first world. Our timespan to get service has lowered and we live in an instant world.

Few companies today operate as the digitally native food delivery platforms do. We can disagree about how those food delivery firms treat their partners on wheels, but the customer service they offer is a benchmark for most of us. These firms’ five-star digital customer experience is creative and agile, keeping up with our changing expectations. They aim to constantly stay one step ahead of the customer, to guide customers through their journey, and to create the best possible experience – digitally end-to-end (except for the food, of course).

In a modern business, all key areas are impacted by digital. This includes customer acquisition, post-sales activities, supply chain, production, and customer support. They all need to be re-thought in order to respond to changing customer preferences and to free employees’ time for more demanding tasks by, e.g., automating routines. From the customers’ perspective, however, digital and automated experiences need to be designed around the human factor. So how do we “humanize” the digital journey?

Agile Service Management helps organizations make their operations more agile, improve the digital experience, and save costs. As an ITSM provider, we at Efecte promise to be the Friendly European Alternative to global Goliaths. That means we want to deliver an efficient digital customer experience that is at the same time humane, personal, and caring.

The Customer 360 Journey Mapping

The Efecte team is in the process of designing a digital customer experience that extends our customers’ journey into a genuine relationship, rather than being just a transactional process. Designing a digital customer experience is something we love to do at Efecte. We are planning a range of customer experience improvements such as a digital learning subscription program and new Efecte training certifications.

On top of those enhancements, we have been working in cross-organizational teams to map the most important journeys that our customers follow after they have decided to partner with us. It was eye-opening to realize what makes up a great digital customer experience and how many touchpoints and different Efecte stakeholders the customer could face when interacting with us. Our key learnings from those workshops were:

• You need to have a vision of your customer experience, preferably one that has been created with your people. It can and should be bold, even “outrageous”, but it gives your people a north star to follow.
  
• Getting people together with a customer perspective expands everybody’s thinking on how they contribute to the big picture.
  
• Different groups bring different viewpoints to the table, but with good facilitation, it is possible to reach an invaluable consensus of where we should be heading.
  
  

One-stop-shop for All Efecte-related Topics

Based on the discoveries of this work and the insight gained from our customers, we are readying the launch of something amazing: the “Efecte Customer Experience Portal.” The CX Portal will offer a platform and a unified experience of Efecte’s onboarding, training, user community, insights, and admin tools. We plan this to be a true one-stop-shop for our customers. It will help them with all interactions with us and grant them the self-service opportunities required to become even more effective in their collaboration with us and our solutions.

We, at Efecte, are on the mission of creating a truly digital experience for our more than 300 customers, from when they first hear about us, to how they interact with us on their everyday usage of Efecte. We do this by using our own tools. Instead of “eating our own dog food”, we like to say that we “drink our own champagne”, every day. This champagne, however, does not make us tipsy nor give us a headache on the day after. This champagne gives us customer service superpowers.

If you wish to hear more about how we can help you drink our champagne and deliver your clients those digital customer experiences that they expect, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Written by

Steffan Schumacher 

and

Milla Kuosmanen