Digital customer experience (DCX) is a hot topic these days. As a digital team leader at Cisco, I was recently asked to speak about it at an industry conference. You should know that when I\u2019m put in f\u2026 Read more on Cisco Blogs<\/a><\/p>\n

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Digital customer experience (DCX) is a hot topic these days. As a digital team leader at Cisco, I was recently asked to speak about it at an industry conference. You should know that when I\u2019m put in front of an audience, I often lean on hyperbole as a verbal crutch to help sell a point. I opened that speech with a bold overstatement, hoping to elicit a few laughs:<\/p>\n

\u201cDigital customer experience is the most important function in your entire company, and will be for the next decade.\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Surprisingly, no one in the crowd seemed amused. Instead, almost everyone nodded their head in agreement. Some appeared to be writing it down.\u00a0 I think one guy even tweeted it. And I thought to myself, \u201cwhoa, maybe it\u2019s actually true!\u201d Maybe it\u2019s the truest thing ever uttered in the history of the world.<\/p>\n

In all seriousness, digital customer experience is one of the most important differentiators for your business. Why? Because your customers prefer it. They would rather engage with you online through self-serve channels than talk to you\u2014at least as a primary option. This is true in B2B, it\u2019s true across every stage of the pre- and post-sales lifecycle, and it\u2019s true of most customers, regardless of size or industry.<\/p>\n

The fundamental reason behind this digital preference is a desire for simplicity. Customers want things to be easy. They want to get value from your product or service as quickly and with as little effort as possible. This is crucial because, in an increasingly subscription-oriented world, if you\u2019re too complicated they\u2019ll just cancel you and find another provider with a better, easier, more digital experience.<\/p>\n

So how do you build a great DCX, one that meets your customers\u2019 needs and builds a sustained competitive advantage for your company over the next ten years? Here\u2019s what we\u2019ve done at Cisco, where our DCX team was recently awarded four medals in the International Customer Experience Awards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Digital Transformation Starts with your People and Culture<\/h2>\n

You can have the best vision, strategy, and tech stack in the world, but ultimately success depends on your people.<\/p>\n

Building a high performing DCX organization includes staffing skilled experience mapping and digital content strategists, data and insights experts, and automation and orchestration platform specialists. Cisco has also established DCX go-to-market teams\u2014folks who embed digital programs into the business and execute through internal teams and partners. It\u2019s been one of the keys to our success.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, build a strong culture where people can thrive. Nothing else matters if you don\u2019t have people with shared values who have each other\u2019s backs.<\/p>\n

Build Journeys that Guide Customers to Value<\/h2>\n

At its core, DCX is about the customer journey\u2014a guided path for your customers to help them adopt a solution and achieve their business outcomes. To create an effective journey, it\u2019s imperative to start with the customer. Talk to them. Listen as they describe their experience at every step\u2014their perceptions, feelings, and needs. Map out the experience along the stages of the lifecycle, identifying the exact points in the process where you need to make things easier. Layer in your product adoption framework, which prescribes healthy usage patterns along the way. Then develop helpful, contextual digital content aligned to each of those points on the experience map. Finally, build your data pipelines and business rules to power the automation of the experience. The result is a digital journey that will gracefully guide your customer to value and success.<\/p>\n

Once the journey is operational, consistently monitor performance. Recognize where customers slow down or need extra help, and quickly make the necessary adjustments to remove friction and optimize their experience.<\/p>\n

Engage Customers in the Channels they Use<\/h2>\n

The modern customer experience is omni-channel. While most B2B customers may still prefer email, the reality is they are interacting with you across a variety of channels. More than two-thirds of your customers start their experience with online search. They look for information on your website, community forums, social media, and, increasingly, messaging apps like Cisco Webex. Your analytics team should be able to predict how customers engage, enabling you to personalize how you deliver content to them through their preferred channels\u2014which of course should all be connected and synchronized so the experience feels cohesive as the customer moves between touch points.<\/p>\n

Omni-channel includes coordinating with people, too. For example, if the customer is stalled and needs human intervention, the system should trigger an alert to the appropriate sales or customer success person and prescribe the action they should take with the customer. It\u2019s what we refer to at Cisco as a digital-led, human-augmented experience<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Orchestrate the Experience Using Insights and Automated Decisions<\/h2>\n

DCX is often defined as delivering the \u201cright experience at the right time in the right channel\u201d\u2014which emphasizes what we call intelligent orchestration, and it\u2019s indispensable in a contemporary digital strategy.<\/p>\n

Building an orchestration engine powered by data science and AI takes everything you know about a customer\u2014who they are, what they have, how they behave, what they should do next\u2014and feeds those insights into an AI infrastructure that makes decisions, automatically, on what content to deliver to what customer in what way.<\/p>\n

Your orchestration platform is the brain of the Digital Customer Experience that determines and delivers the type of anticipatory, individualized experience your customers expect. And because it\u2019s fully automated, it delivers that customized experience in real time at tremendous scale.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t be afraid to \u201cfail forward<\/a>\u201d in your orchestration strategy. Be imaginative, experiment, and try new things. It may not always work, but you\u2019ll learn from it and continually improve.<\/p>\n

Optimize and Scale through Partners<\/h2>\n

Cisco is a channel-led company, and we have found that delivering customer experience works a whole lot better when we combine efforts with our partners. This \u201cgreater together\u201d philosophy applies to our DCX strategy as well, which is why we created our flagship Lifecycle Advantage<\/a> program for partners.<\/p>\n

Lifecycle Advantage empowers partners to leverage and co-brand Cisco\u2019s digital journeys to guide our mutual customers through the lifecycle. It\u2019s a powerful program used by more than 7,000 partners globally, and two of the most popular program tracks are Customer Success and Renewals.
\nIn Lifecycle Advantage Customer Success, partners put their customers on a digital adoption journey. They can also monitor and guide their customers\u2019 progress leveraging deep insights such as telemetry data, usage patterns, and stage progression rates, as well as prescriptive alerts. Check out this video to see Lifecycle Advantage<\/a> in action:<\/p>\n