Why Going Digital Isn’t Enough to Meet the New Customer Experience (CX) Imperative

Why Going Digital Isn’t Enough to Meet the New Customer Experience (CX) Imperative

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Why Going Digital Isn’t Enough to Meet the New Customer Experience (CX) Imperative

By Brian Solis

The year 2020 unleashed customer superpowers of discovery and choice. From cultivating virtual relationships to relying on apps, customers now firmly perceive interactions through a digital-first lens, with higher expectations for intuitive, integrated, and personalized engagement.

According to McKinsey, three-quarters of U.S. consumers changed something significant about the way they shop, such as trying out new brands, retailers, or shopping methods. Brand loyalty is increasingly elusive as more than 80% of consumers intend to continue this experimentation.

This is why simply digitizing existing business processes isn’t enough to compete in a post-pandemic economy. In fact, a majority of business customers and consumers (69%) want companies to offer new digital ways to get existing products and services, use digital platforms to expand customer engagement methods (54%), and offer new types of products and services (54%), according to the 2020 Salesforce “State of the Connected Customer” report.

With brand loyalty fluid and customer expectations going beyond just digital touchpoints, it’s clear companies must reimagine customer experience (CX) operations by uniting the functions, processes, and systems that create the positive interactions they want their customers to remember.

Customer-Centered Companies Prioritize CX in Digital and Operational Transformation

Customers today demand personalization beyond great products and services, experiences over transactions, and innovation and new value creation rather than basic digitization. But how do companies deliver?

Of the nearly 1,100 executives responding to a recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services (HBRAS) survey, only 15% say they have both a single (360-degree) view of customer data and the organizational structure to make use of those insights. Similarly, only 17% say their organizations are excellent in insight, engagement, or both. What’s the missing link?

Operational models must adapt to place customers in the center of everything. Customer-centered companies build great CX upon a 360-degree view of their customers, identify actionable insights in real time, and consistently deliver relevant engagement at each touchpoint.

But few companies are organized to operate at this level: 53% of respondents to the HBRAS survey said organizational silos are a top-five barrier to improving CX.

Businesses cannot continue CX as usual without connecting the dots internally and externally. Customers expect nothing less.

Connect Silos and Organize Around the Customer

In a novel economy defined by artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled personalization and anytime, anywhere commerce, CX and digital transformation now carry a new mission and purpose. To become customer centered is to see the world through your customers’ eyes and deliver empathetic, relevant, and personalized experiences at every step.

An authentically customer-centric company serves customers by knowing them. Each discipline within the organization is no longer functioning in isolation, but more like a relay racer passing a baton: sharing the data, insights, and opportunities for personalization and enchantment. It’s an embrace of 360-degree data, insights, processes, systems, and organizational models to center on the customer.

So who owns this initiative?

Traditional silos are directed by functional leaders—service, marketing, commerce—but customers expect a unified approach to CX. Building a customer-centered organization requires operational innovation, and existing models don’t scale. CDOs, CMOs, CIOs, and CxOs—supported by CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and board members—must build an alliance: a working group or steering committee that is responsible and accountable for centralized, unified, and collaborative customer understanding and engagement.

Ultimately, a customer-centered organization needs a leader who is probably not the chief executive officer but a chief experience officer: an orchestrator with day-to-day leadership, accountability, and tireless focus on the personal touch in a reimagined analog, digital, and hybrid customer journey.

It takes day-to-day leadership, accountability, and tireless focus. Companies leading in CX are more than twice as likely to have a chief experience officer than those that have made less progress.

Whether you create a shared or dedicated CXO role, your customers deserve to have a leader in your organization who lives and breathes customer centricity, supported by a practice that brings that promise to life. Someone must become the orchestrator for coalesced, relevant, and personal touches in a reimagined analog, digital, and hybrid customer journey.

Novel times call for invention to solve yesterday’s challenges while seizing tomorrow’s opportunities.


Read The Transformation Playbook to learn how to change company mindsets, connect silos, and center on your customer.


Brian Solis is Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. He’s also a world-renowned digital anthropologist, keynote speaker, and eight-time best-selling author.

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