The volume of data and insights now available from customer/brand interactions keeps growing exponentially. Turn insight into action to fuel future opportunities.
Transfer your digital experiences into physical spaces and reap 3 key benefits
Seventy-seven percent of customer experience (CX) professionals say that their customers’ expectations have shifted towards digital-first experiences (DX).[1] This is great news for digital challenger brands and fintech disruptors—we’ve written before about how, for example, more customers are making a digital bank their primary bank.
But if you’re a challenger brand doing most of your business in a physical location, you’re not missing out on the benefits of digital-first experiences. It’s just that yours are unique to you. Let’s take a look at three key benefits for challenger brands bringing digital experiences into physical spaces.
Benefit #1: You meet and exceed customer expectations
Today’s retail customers want brick-and-mortar spaces to emulate the best parts of their online brand experiences. According to a 2021 study from Bazaarvoice, “The State of Retail Report,” retail shoppers are looking for better in-store brand experiences, such as: 1) scanning QR codes for more information; 2) viewing virtual displays with customer photos and reviews; and 3) accessing real-time ratings based on customer feedback.[2] A third of brands—both established and challenger—indicate that they plan to introduce the technology to enable these experiences in-store.[3]
What’s telling is that these digital experiences are all based around social proof—revealing that what customers want most of all from their CX (and what challenger brands must most consistently deliver) is still human-to-human interaction in some form.
Digital experiences in physical spaces turn moments that might once have occurred in a vacuum into interactions challenger brands can use to guide the entirety of customer experiences.
Benefit #2: You build your brand capital
As a challenger brand, you rely on brand champions more than your established competitors. Creating brand champions means delivering consistently positive experiences to the same customers again and again. And if at any point they feel there’s something missing, they’ll fall back on an established brand they know can deliver. What’s missing could be an experience you offer in one channel but not another or a competitor’s service they’re also expecting from you.
Introducing familiar digital experiences (like the ones we mentioned above) to the physical space creates a more consistent CX and lets your customers know that they can count on you. By making the physical space a hub of CX and DX alike, customers can recognize your brand wherever they interact with it.
And it’s this consistency—this certainty that they can come back to the same standard of experience again and again—that turns customers into champions for challenger brands.
Benefit #3: Your CX teams deliver comprehensive support
Digital-first doesn’t mean digital-only—nor does it mean self-service for customers. Integrating DX into physical CX bridges the gap between the physical and digital brands, building consistency and delivering human experiences. But it’s also a great way to level up your CX teams, giving them the information they need to connect with customers, even if they can’t be face-to-face.
As we’ve seen, every experience is an opportunity to turn a customer into a brand champion. This extends beyond the experiences customers have independently in a physical space or online to those delivered by your customer service agents and business process outsourcing teams.
Digital experiences in physical spaces turn moments that might once have occurred in a vacuum into interactions challenger brands can use to guide the entirety of customer experiences. The volume of data and insights that are now available from customer/brand interactions keeps growing and growing. These insights can be put into use at every future opportunity—from creating content and sharing recommendations to troubleshooting problems and adapting your wider CX strategy.
The bottom line is that DX isn’t going to take the place of exceptional human-to-human CX for challenger brands. But the next-level benefits are maintaining brand consistency that resonates, meeting new customer expectations during every interaction, and generating a wider and more representative pool of insights for your CX teams.
See how human-centric DX and the data it generates can help you and your customer service teams upgrade all areas of your CX in “Commit to CX-First Outsourcing” page.
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