Customer experience has evolved from a nice-to-have to a necessity in many industries. Winners use standout experiences to attract and retain business while reducing servicing costs and complaints. The rewards can be substantial, but execution is complex, requiring a complete reinvention of customer journeys and supporting processes.

Only when a business has defined what that experience should be can it figure out how to build the processes and technologies needed to support it. By digitising these processes, the business can reduce costs, improve customer experience, capture value, and move to a next-generation operating model.

Designing a customer-centered solution

To make this reinvention leap, leading companies employ a user-experience designer who can orchestrate the process, keep it focused on customer needs, inspire people, and ensure that the organisation doesn’t allow its new vision to be limited by the way it does things today.

Mobilizing a cross-functional team

To gain multiple perspectives, best-practice companies take specialists from every function, bring them together in one place, and charge them with testing re-imagined journeys and processes from every angle.

Developing the new solution

Once a new customer experience has been designed, tested, and refined, the next step is to develop the technology infrastructure to support it. To prevent unnecessary complexity, the new build should be as architecturally flexible as possible—incorporating reusable components and services or deploying the same functionality across multiple channels—while taking care not to jeopardise the performance of existing systems.

Driving customer adoption

However good a digitised solution may be, it means nothing if customers don’t use it. The trick is to minimise the effort needed to move to the new model and launch digital-adoption campaigns to make customers aware.

Successful digital-adoption campaigns start by understanding customer's’ pain points and exploring the barriers that prevent digital adoption. While these pillars provide a firm foundation for any customer-adoption campaign, specific tactics will vary by company and context. But regardless of category, the best way to secure a shift in behavior is to minimise the effort customers have to make to move to the new digital solution.