How to Implement a Digital-First CX Strategy

Everything is digital these days, and the digital experience (DX) should be more effective and downright delightful than ever before. Its evolution is critical for the future of delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) strategies. This digital-first approach to CX is particularly important as new technologies emerge. One such technology is artificial intelligence (AI) — you may have heard of it. AI can be used to create world-class experiences that drive customer loyalty, employee satisfaction and engagement, and a reduction in operating costs.

In this article, you discover the essential pieces of a digital-first CX strategy and the steps you need to take to implement your own.

Implementing a digital-first strategy

The future of CX is moving away from voice channels and toward digital channels. Voice channels are still in use, of course, but your DX strategy must seamlessly integrate digital channels to remain competitive. In fact, to deliver a stellar DX program, keep in mind these four considerations:

• Self-service should be an integral part of your DX activities.
• To supercharge agent productivity and self-service experiences, use the power of knowledge.
• Customers should be at the heart of your DX program.
• Deploy proactive engagement.

For more information on these pillars, visit www.aberdeen.com/blog-posts/the-four-pillars-of-best-in-class-digital-experience-program.

While keeping these key components in mind, follow the pointers in this section to start your digital-first strategy.

Avoid focusing solely on CCaaS

Today’s recipe to develop a crystal-clear focus on the customer is complex. You need several ingredients, and while choosing the right contact center as a solution (CCaaS) product is an important step for your customers’ digital-first experiences, it’s not everything. Would you make a cake with just flour?

To ensure your DX strategy puts you ahead of the competition and delivers the delicious results you’re craving, mix together five ingredients to make up that “special sauce.”

Manage digital assets

In many companies, DX can include several teams and types of interactions, including social media, AI technologies, chat, and email. Eliminating silos means you can access a complete view of your customer history, interactions, and sentiment to provide the high-caliber service your customers deserve, no matter how they interact with your business.

Conversational AI and chatbots

Customers want self-service, but they also want to feel like they’re having conversations and communicating effectively in these self-service interactions. With AI-powered intelligent virtual agents and chatbots, your customers can have their cake and eat it, too! They can converse naturally and radically improve their automated experiences.

If you’re interested in accelerating your self-service channels, visit www.nice.com/products/conversational-ai-and-chatbots to find out more.

Promote a unified agent experience

Your agents need unified sources of organizational knowledge, product and feature updates, and customer data to easily stay up to date. Without this unified experience, they may experience constant slowdowns to complete trainings or take too long to search for the latest information. This experience empowers your workforce and creates time needed for complex tasks, and it increases confidence, accuracy, and efficiency — all adding up to greater job enjoyment.

Provide the omnichannel journey

Your customers’ typical journeys are non-linear, so you need to support them through self-service, the contact center, and any combination of channels through to resolution. Varying customer preferences underscores the need for omnichannel support. That includes seamless integration of emerging channels as they become available.

Optimize AI for self-service

Self-service capabilities powered by AI optimize digital channels by beginning with simple and repetitive use cases that generate high value. You can also use intelligent routing to enable collaboration between live agents and self-service tools.

Partner with AI

AI has been a supporting role for CX for a while now, but AI in customer interactions is now taking center stage as the main character. AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of CX across digital industries, so partnering with AI now is crucial. Through this enhanced technology, you can provide a more personalized experience and immerse your customers in AI for unparalleled convenience and satisfaction.

AI also upskills your employees and allows them to perform more advanced tasks and increase their impact and value to your organization. When agents trust the system that evaluates their performance, job satisfaction and engagement increase. To advance your company’s future, use AI to maximize employment loyalty and engagement while delivering amazing experiences for their customers.

Make experiences flow

Your organization — no matter the size or location — can create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting your business goals. If you need help along the way, look to NICE CXone, a cloud-native, customer-experience platform. NICE is a leader in AI-powered self-service and agent-assisted CX software for the contact center — and beyond. Elevate every customer interaction. Find out more at get.nice.com/digital-self-service.html.