Digital Greatness: The Key to Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience

What is Digital Greatness, and how can it benefit your organisation? AND Digital's Hans Smans breaks down how this new way of operating can increase agility, minimise risk and allow for rapid strategic change.

We’ve all heard it, a recurring buzzword in the tech community – digital transformation.
Traditional digital transformation enables organisations to catch up, and keep up, with competitors and market demands. But this is no longer enough. The pace of change, turbulent economic conditions and ever changing consumer needs, means a new way of doing things is needed. One that gives companies agility, minimises risk and allows rapid strategic switches.

We call this Digital Greatness. A way of thinking, operating and adapting that gives organisations the capabilities to not only keep up, but to outperform.

Customer experience is now a leading factor when choosing to engage with a company – and more importantly, stay loyal to it. Digitally Great organisations are distinct in their approach to customer experience – they ensure optimisation of the whole customer journey is their primary focus.

Most leaders will often limit customer experience to specific physical or digital touchpoints, such as websites, apps or in-store, but this doesn’t go far enough. True customer experience should encompass how people react and feel when pursuing a purpose important to them.

Digital tools and processes provide a cost-effective way to provide personalised experiences. However, meeting customers’ expectations is as much art as it is science. The balance can be difficult to do, but organisations that manage it well benefit from the creative tension and the positive outcomes it generates.

Data connects the dots

Better customer experiences can be fueled by the data you collect about your customers at each touchpoint. Without a holistic customer view, efforts to innovate and improve your products and solutions will either fail, or only be successful in a silo.

In some cases, efforts to optimise in just one area could create a poor customer experience elsewhere, due to the disconnected nature of the experience presented to end users.

Qualitative data is equally as impactful – to grow and innovate successfully, it is important to continually listen to your customers when developing products and solutions to ensure that you understand the customer needs and expectations.

Balance your approach

The process, if taken too far in either direction, creates a unique set of challenges:

  • Listen to the customer too much, and you end up with unwieldy and bloated products, highly customised for every client or customer, leaving you with a portfolio of projects which are expensive and difficult to maintain and replicate
  • Focus on the sales and data too much and you risk developing solutions that are good for your short term targets and KPIs, but don’t necessarily satisfy real customer needs.

Focus areas to drive solutions

In order to be successful, you should strike the right balance in the following fields:

  • Data Fluency: your organisation is not just being data driven and using data, but has employees who actively seek to understand and use data in their roles, offer up the data they obtain from your customers, and use the synthesised data to make decisions, daily.
  • Product Capability: your organisation has the necessary knowledge and skills to discover, define and launch value-adding products and services to your customers. 
  • Innovation/Experimentation Culture: everyone in your organisation sees the value in testing, learning and iterating in order to create innovative solutions to customer opportunities and problems that ultimately improve your product and your bottom line.

Combine focus areas to create lasting improvements

Various functional elements combined and aligned to each other, will drive long-lasting improvements to your organisation. 

Data and Product working together will result in more successful product discovery (this being the result of improved understanding of measurements of success, writing hypothesis, customer data strategy and data driven product decision making).

When Product Capability and Innovation Culture come together, the organisation will be better able to:

  • Pivot products – including starting up, scaling up and sunsetting when no longer useful.
  • Apply varied growth strategies, product-led growth, sales-led growth, marketing-led growth.
  • Respond to Customer and Market trends.

Data and a strong Innovation Culture will facilitate new data products, data monetisation (like AI or Machine Learning), data research and statistics.

Love of the Customer

Sitting at the centre of the Digital Greatness confluence are the companies that are customer obsessed.

Customer Obsession requires coordinated action on several fronts. Leaders need to communicate its importance and show employees how their actions affect the customer, for good or for bad. We need data, product and innovation teams to work together to help us achieve that.

All teams also need to know they can, and should, take proactive steps to address any customer issues – and in response, businesses need to reward this customer-obsessed behaviour. Communication channels need to be open and clear so that valuable customer intelligence is disseminated to all those with the power to act on it.

Only by achieving this fine balancing act can companies ensure they sit confidently in the middle of these three fields, achieving Digital Greatness through Customer Obsession.

Want to know more? Download the guide

AND Digital has created a handy guide to talk you through each element of Digital Greatness and how you could translate these to work for your organisation. It’s no longer enough to transform your organisation – to survive and thrive, companies need to become, and remain, Digitally Great.

View and download the guide below.

About AND Digital

AND Digital is on a mission to close the world’s digital skills gap. The go-to digital enablement partner for organisations including SKY, Gousto, Department of Education and British Airways, AND Digital empowers businesses with the ability to build digital products AND grow their internal capability along the way. To achieve this, the company blends technical craft and digital product expertise with an award-winning learning and development ethos.

AND Digital operates an innovative ‘Club’ model, represented in Yorkshire through its 3 clubs in Leeds (Murray, Adams and Cloud Hawkins) and 1 club in Halifax (Sparck). Each Club offers a flexible and highly responsive service to its clients, as well as the commitment to the local community in which it is based.

For more information, please visit AND Digital’s website.

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