So what really is a digital customer experience?

So what really is a digital customer experience? And how does that differ from the real-world experience of a customer walking into your shop, or phoning your call center? Often, this is described as “having a common and consistent brand experience,” which is all very well but is really quite hard to define.

To help make this more tangible, let me describe a real-life example.  One of your customers is sitting at home on a Thursday, browsing your website for a party dress for the Saturday evening.  Having reviewed other customer reviews and seen your “next-day” delivery promise, she buys the dress online.

By midday on Friday, the dress hasn’t arrived, so she phones your call center who, after a short while, locate the order (for which they need lots of detail from the customer) and are only able to confirm that the order exists and that it has been marked as despatched. They are unable to give any assurance that it will arrive today.

Later that afternoon, she goes into her local shopping center, to your store, where, to her delight, the dress is in stock. With her order confirmation on email on her mobile phone, she takes the dress, walks to the counter and says “I’ve already paid for this dress, I need it today, your call center can’t confirm my delivery, so I’ll have this one…”

The question is, how equipped is your in-store staff to respond to this? Do they have access to the ecommerce order? Can they replace the ecommerce order with this physical purchase? Ultimately, are they empowered to delight the customer, enabled by your systems? Do you deliver an “all channel experience” that seamlessly links the online and physical worlds?

After all, your customer doesn’t see the difference between the online dress and the in-store one, or the difference between their expenditure of their own cash through one channel or another. They don’t see “channels,” they see “service.”

This challenge isn’t just about IT systems, it reaches into your organization’s complete operating model. The way your staff react depends on processes, how they are trained and empowered, as well as the reward mechanisms in place for them.

If you’d like to know more about our approach to Digital Customer Experience and our unique insight into the All Channel Experience, with Oracle CX Solutions please click here…
http://www.capgemini.com/resources/ocommerce-an-all-channel-experience-solution-for-todays-digital-shopping

or the video:
http://www.capgemini.com/resources/video/experience-ocommerce-in-action