Rapid Pivot to Digital CX

When businesses are forced to complete years of digital transformation in a matter of weeks, as many were during the pandemic, they are more likely to ignore crucial components of the customer experience.

To really comprehend the client experience, you must examine the entire customer journey across all touchpoints. Many companies are still unable to connect the connections between their customer service, sales, and marketing departments, giving them just a partial picture of how their consumers interact with them.

We've all seen examples. Take the restaurant industry, for example, where online delivery services are helping some businesses in surviving. According to a Morgan Stanley research, online food delivery is projected to hit $45 billion in sales in 2021 when it was only supposed to reach $41 billion—in 2021. Due to the introduction of delivery services like Grubhub and DoorDash, which customers embraced as social distancing choices, consumer expenditure on internet meal delivery has surged three years ahead of plan.

Even sophisticated brands were stumbling in terms of customer experience as a result of this acceleration (CX). When sit-down restaurants had to close or reduce dine-ins, they increased their curbside takeaway service. However, many businesses did not upgrade their interactive voice response (IVR) system to improve curbside performance.

Customers would pull up to the restaurant and call the number to let them know they'd arrived, but they'd be on hold for 15 minutes or longer. Customers would then exit their vehicles and enter the restaurant to check on their orders, resulting in not just unsafe conditions due to indoor crowding, but also extremely poor customer service.

BLIND SPOTS IN RAPID TRANSFORMATION

We've seen chains eventually resolve this curbside issue by adding more efficient IVRs or alerting systems, but it's an example of what we call rapid transformation blind spots. When firms attempted to pivot during COVID, these were ignored CX factors that resulted in unintended repercussions.

Online-offline synchronization is one of the most significant CX blind spots.

The blending of digital and in-person experiences is referred to as online-offline synchronization. (It's true that "offline" is an unusual term for referring to the physical world, but it's a convenient shorthand here.) The click-and-collect model, in which clients purchase a product online and then pick it up in a physical place, is an example of this.

However, many businesses who were forced to quickly develop new online-offline experiences for their clients created roadblocks for them. Let's take a look at three main risks that businesses faced during the pandemic as a result of ignoring online-offline sync.

 

UNINTENDED BARRIERS

During the pandemic, mobile operators, like many other businesses in the United States, had to close their physical locations. When the shutdown orders were lifted, however, one of the country's largest mobile carriers opted to keep a substantial chunk of its retail shops closed indefinitely.

What did this entail for customers who wanted to trade in their old phone for a new one at a store? They had to wait several days for the new device to come in the mail, as they could no longer walk out with a phone and service in an hour. After that, they had to package and submit their old phone to the operator in order to obtain trade-in credit, which may take up to two weeks to appear in their bank account.

 

The takeaway here is that if you remove a process that many of your consumers find useful, you must replace it with something similar. For example, are you allowing customers who purchase online to pick up their items in-store to save the wait and cost of direct shipping? If so, are you doing so in a timely and safe manner? (For this aim, retailers are putting in self-service pick-up lockers.) Otherwise, you risk sending customers straight to your competition at a point of pain.

 

OFFLINE SCALE FAILURE

Grocery delivery services companies which were working digitally driven business models, thrived in pandemic conditions. Yet their rapid growth became an obstacle, as many of those companies were unprepared for their demand to spike by several thousand percent within a week as lockdown orders were imposed and grocery delivery became an essential service. Their turnaround time for deliveries expanded from days to weeks.

When it comes to physical resources and manpower, can you scale your technological infrastructure to match skyrocketing demand? Many of us have been in this position when you ordered curbside grocery pickup online. You arrived at the store at the time they said it would be ready, and you called the store’s curbside line. It took you few minutes to reach someone and they told your order wouldn’t be ready until the next day.

Proactive communication that the order was delayed would have saved me the trip—and resulted in a more positive emotional reaction. But,this type of experience, however, emphasizes the importance of walking through each touchpoint of your customer journey, both online and offline, to ensure your customers aren't encountering these barriers you may have overlooked. It is unlikely that the technology you had prior to the pandemic was properly configured to handle this combination of offline and online models.

 

INFLEXIBLE BUSINESS MODELS

Online-offline sync relies heavily on adaptive business structures. In the past few years, we've seen organizations in every industry demonstrate incredible agility. A convergence of online ordering, alerts, and contactless payments has taken hold during the past few years. Getting food delivered to your door has become the new norm. A number of companies have upgraded their online purchasing systems, so they know what vehicle you're driving and when you're going to arrive, among other things.

These are the companies that are going to survive and even prosper. Other businesses, such as buffet restaurants, whose business models are incompatible with COVID circumstances, are forced to close permanently due to a lack of quick pivots that would allow them to adapt. CX platforms and strategies that are forward-looking will be necessary to ensure corporate agility.

Rapid transformation is still taking place, and it's still causing friction for customers to deal with the effects of it. As a result of listening and responding to customer and employee experiences, the Conneqt’s Experiences Practice can help you identify any CX blind spots in your organization. Next, we can assist you uncover emerging pain areas and chances to engage and grow loyalty. Contact us today for more information! We offer a variety of consulting services that can help you improve the customer experience.