What do you need to deliver world-class digital experiences?
While the shift to digital does offer numerous benefits to organizations – reduced contact center costs, improved agent productivity, streamlined processes, etc. – it also presents them with a unique customer experience challenge.
Customers judge their experiences with a company along 3 dimensions.
Were they able to achieve their goals?
How easy or difficult was it to achieve those goals?
How did the interaction make them feel?
Although all 3 of these dimensions are important, it’s been shown the emotion component has the biggest impact on customer loyalty behaviors, including their likelihood to rebuy from, recommend, or trust the company (XM Institute Report, ROI of CX, 2018).
The outsized impact of emotions on customer experience is particularly problematic in digital. First, digital channels are inherently cold. People are naturally social, and interacting with other people is more emotionally stimulating than interacting with a digital interface (XM Institute, Humanizing Digital Interactions).
Second, most organizations design digital experiences to communicate information as quickly and efficiently as possible, appealing to customers’ rational thinking rather than to their emotions. And while delivering “effortless” experiences can be good to an extent, as digital channels increasingly become the only method by which customers interact with an organization, overemphasizing ‘effortlessness’ is likely to leave customers without any emotional attachments to the company.