How to Spot a Fractured Digital Customer Experience within a Business
Companies communicate with customers every day. Usually, there’s the marketing department that focuses on brand identity and online presence. Marketers send well-crafted, visually appealing emails and text messages.
On the other side there’s the customer service department who put in place an automated message system years ago, and have not reviewed the content of those emails since.
This is how a company creates a fractured digital experience for customers. Some communications look and feel consistent with their experience of the brand, while others are unrecognizable.
Here are some underlying causes of a fractured digital experience, how an organization can spot them and what customers are likely to experience as a result.
Redundant Communication
The company has implemented different solutions from multiple digital communication vendors in different parts of the business.
Company Symptoms
As a result, the company suffers from a digital communication approach that is neither cohesive nor coordinated.
The signs of this include using systems with different functionality; no sharing of customer preferences between departments; and no overview of all the communication the company is sending to customers.
Customer Experience
For example, customers receive well designed emails during a promotional campaign; and conversel receive text-heavy, unbranded emails from support and operations.
Sometimes customers might receive multiple messages a day from different departments, and then nothing at all for weeks — signalling un-coordination within the company. Customers will find this fractured digital experience unsettling.
Silo-ed Communication
A company where the organizational structure incentivizes division between business units and insist that customers are separately attributed, each carrying a different communication strategy.
Company Symptoms
Through this type of structure the company loses the focus on who is its customer. Business units operate independently, developing isolated strategies and implementing digital initiatives that are not aligned. This ultimately leads to duplication of systems and effort.
Customer Experience
Customers receive communication from multiple business units but from the same company, often with misaligned offers and mixed messages.
Customers do not care about internal structures and departments. They want to be seen as a single customer with a portfolio of several products. This can cause frustration on the customer side, pushing them to look elsewhere.
Disjointed Data
In this case a company has valuable insights about customers, but it is stored all over the place, with a mix between old and newer systems.
Company Symptoms
The company has trouble to go efficiently through internal processes when working on a project and fails to provide a single view of the customer over different information systems. As a result, any project might fail to meet deadlines and stay within budgets.
Customer Experience
As a result, the company’s customers receive communication with little personalization and marketing offers based on customer profiles, rather than individual preferences.
Customers tend to ignore generic emails because the content is unlikely to be relevant to them.
