Implementing a Digital Customer Success Strategy, learn how.

In today’s digital age, implementing a robust and effective digital customer success strategy is essential for businesses of all sizes. But what is a digital customer success strategy, and why is it so important? However, let us learn about the definition of digital customer strategy and engagement to enable us to scale and seize the lost ground in the digital space.

A digital customer strategy is a comprehensive guide that defines the goals for your digital initiatives and outlines effective pathways to achieve them. It encompasses your target audience, competitive landscape, objectives, key performance indicators, and user journey. Businesses can improve their online presence by leveraging technology, enhancing customer experiences, and driving better results. Digital customer engagement, on the other hand, focuses on how customers will interact with your brand via technology, including email, social media, and your website.

A Digital Customer Strategy is a crucial necessity for several reasons; some of the companies that excelled are:

• Customer Expectations: Customers expect service providers or product companies to understand the needs and expectations in the digital age. They want to be treated as individuals, expecting companies to know their preferences and purchase history.
• Competitive Advantage: In today’s digitally connected world, an excellent digital customer experience strategy can give you more control over how customers perceive your company. It can help you discover what your audience enjoys and dislikes about their experiences so you can improve.
• Brand Reputation and Revenue: Brands investing in a digital customer experience strategy benefit from strengthening customer engagement, bolstering brand reputation, and increasing revenue.
• Customer Loyalty: Nearly half of customers say they will likely switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. Better digital customer engagement leads to enhanced customer data, which can help improve customer experiences, leading to higher profits.

As for Digital Engagement Models, they refer to how your company plans to interact with potential and current customers across digital channels. Each customer interaction with your company’s social media, email, and website creates a unique digital engagement experience. Here are examples of digital engagement with customers:

• Customers interact with each other via a community forum.
• Customers ask questions to an interactive chatbot on your help pages, website, or social media pages.
• Customers call your customer support team to get help.
• Customers are completing a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey.
• Customers watch a training program and tutorial via your help centre.
• Customers click on email content.

A Digital Customer Strategy is necessary because it allows businesses to provide a personalised, efficient, and effective customer experience at scale. It’s a shift towards a more digital-led model, which aims to facilitate better customer experiences at scale. It creates new challenges as sources of data and information increase multiple times, thus challenging organisations to know what to believe and how to respond.

It’s increasingly challenging for companies to survive and scale without implementing a digital engagement or digital strategy. Here’s why:

- Customer Expectations: Customers now expect personalised, seamless experiences across all touchpoints. They want companies to understand their unique needs and preferences.

- Operational Efficiency: Digital transformation often involves implementing a digital strategy, which can lead to increased efficiency and business agility. It can also unlock new value for employees, customers, and shareholders. It is keeping in mind GenerativeAI for creative processes, Integrating Devices to collect more data and Automating repeated tasks for agility.

- Adaptability: The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption, widening the gap between leaders and laggards. Companies with a digital strategy may need help to adapt to such rapid changes.

As for digital engagement, it’s now a priority for retaining users and customers. Better digital customer engagement leads to enhanced customer data, better customer experiences, and higher profits.

In summary, while it might be possible for some companies to survive without digital engagement or digital strategy, scaling and thriving in the current business environment would be highly challenging. Companies need to embrace digital transformation and prioritise digital engagement to stay competitive and relevant in the digital age.

Let’s define a digital customer success strategy and dive into the steps you need to build one. We’ll also explore the key benefits of implementing such a strategy in your business. We’ll also address common challenges blocking you from pursuing a digital customer success roadmap and share my recommendations.

What is a Digital Customer Success Strategy?

A digital customer success strategy is a comprehensive plan that leverages digital tools and technologies to enhance overall customer engagement and experience and drive long-term growth. It involves utilising data-driven insights, automation, and digital touchpoints to proactively engage customers throughout their journey with your product or service.

The relevance of a Digital Customer Success Strategy for B2B businesses, especially with a sharp focus on key accounts, is significant for several reasons:

• Adapting to Changing Customer Behavior: Digital disruption is changing customer behaviour. B2B businesses need to rethink their customer engagement model to leverage disruptive technologies. It is crucial for critical accounts, which often have complex needs and high expectations.
• Enhancing Customer Experience: A digital customer success strategy can improve the customer experience at each touch point, fostering better internal communication and contributing to customer delight. It is crucial for maintaining strong relationships with key accounts.
• Increasing Sales: The Gartner report on Future of Sales 2025 predicts that by 2025, for B2B sales interaction, 80% of sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. A digital customer success strategy can help B2B businesses adapt to this shift and increase sales.
• Improving Efficiency: Digital tools can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of customer success teams, allowing them to serve critical accounts better. For instance, some systems alert a rep when a key customer raises a query using self-serve tools.
• Driving Growth: Digital leaders in B2B see almost double the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of total returns to shareholders compared to other firms. A digital customer success strategy can help B2B businesses become digital leaders and drive growth.

A Digital Customer Success Strategy is necessary for B2B businesses to adapt to changing customer behaviours and manage competition, especially when dealing with key accounts.

Examples of a few companies that have successfully implemented digital engagement strategies and have moved to customer success strategies:

- Microsoft: Microsoft has successfully transformed its business model from a traditional software vendor to a cloud-based service provider. They’ve used digital engagement strategies like online communities, social media, and AI-powered chatbots to improve customer engagement.

- Adobe: Adobe has transitioned from selling packaged software to providing cloud-based services. They’ve used digital engagement strategies like personalised marketing, user-friendly design interfaces, and comprehensive online support to enhance customer engagement.

- Zomato: Zomato understands its target market well and uses humour in its digital marketing campaigns to engage with its audience.

- Vogue India: Vogue India employs one of the most effective content marketing strategies: storytelling. They created the #VogueEmpower campaign to raise awareness about women’s empowerment and violence against women.

- Blackbaud: Blackbaud has implemented a successful B2B referral program called “Blackbaud Champions” to engage customers. The idea is to enhance customer experience, increase customer loyalty, and drive business growth.

How do you build a digital customer success strategy?

Building a successful digital customer success strategy requires careful planning and implementation. Here are the key steps you need to take:

1. Customer data collection

By gathering and analysing data about your customers, you gain valuable insights into customer touchpoint behaviour, preferences, and needs. This information enables you to personalise your approach and provide targeted solutions. Data collection from various sources, like customer usage data, CRM data, support data and survey data, identify common issues or areas for improvement; it is pervasive. The focus should be firstly on CS interaction data, i.e., data from interactions with the customer success team, which can provide insights into customer needs and satisfaction levels. The second source should be transactional data, which includes customer purchases and interactions with your product or service. Thirdly, behavioural data includes data on customer behaviour on your website or app, supported with demographic data, so information about the customers’ demographics can help tailor your strategy to different customer segments.

Remember, while these data sources are essential, they are often siloed and time-consuming to retrieve. You must bring this data together through collaboration to have a 360-degree understanding of your customers. Also, it’s essential to ensure that your data collection practices are transparent and respect privacy policies. To collect customer data effectively, implement tools or software that track user interactions on your website or application. It includes monitoring page views, clicks, downloads, and other relevant metrics.

2. Customer audience segmentation

Customer audience segmentation divides your customer base into groups based on select criteria such as demographics, behaviour, or preferences. By understanding each segment’s unique needs and characteristics, you can tailor your approach and resources to meet their specific requirements.

Segmentation lets you personalise your interactions with customers, delivering targeted messaging and solutions that resonate with their interests. It enhances overall customer engagement and experience, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Post-sales customer journey mapping

Post-sales customer journey mapping is critical in building an effective digital customer success strategy. It involves visualising and understanding customers’ different touchpoints and interactions after purchasing. By mapping out this journey, businesses can identify pain points, risks for disengagement, opportunities for improvement, and areas where they can provide value-added services.

4. Customer success automation

This step involves using technology and software to streamline and automate customer success processes like onboarding, engagement tracking, and proactive support. Automation allows businesses to manage customer relationships efficiently by automating repetitive tasks and providing personalised experiences at scale.

5. Digital culture building

To build a robust digital culture, organisations should prioritise communication and transparency. It means providing regular updates on the progress of digital initiatives, sharing success stories, and encouraging open discussions about challenges and opportunities. Digital Culture is a concept that influences how technology, digital channels, and the internet are shaping the way we interact as humans. Thus, it is a way for humans to realise their vulnerabilities against computing power while acknowledging the high cost of deploying computing power for personalised human interaction, thus building a joint work-sharing arrangement. It’s how we behave, think, and communicate within the society. Digital culture is the endless persuasive technology around us and disruptive technological innovation. It applies to multiple topics but comes down to one theme: the relationship between humans and technology.

Thus, a few steps to building a digital culture would be :

Firstly, embracing change means being flexible and adaptable to new challenges. Secondly, focus on customer centricity, i.e. make decisions with the customer in mind. Thirdly, using Data-Powered Insights drives the adoption of what it takes to leverage data to inform decisions and drive strategy. Fourthly, acknowledge you are human, i.e. be open to showing vulnerability and be honest about your development areas. Finally, provide supporting structures to support employee resilience and reduce added stress as humans.

Remember, a thriving digital culture is about personalising user journeys at scale. It’s a shift towards a more digital-led model, which aims to facilitate better customer experiences at scale.

Why Build a Digital Customer Success Strategy?

Let’s now look at some of the critical benefits of this strategy:

● Standardisation: By creating a standardised framework, you can provide a seamless experience, improve efficiency, and streamline customer operations across different touchpoints.

● Data collection from digital touchpoints: A digital customer success strategy enables you to gather valuable data from various digital touchpoints such as websites, social media platforms, and mobile apps. This data provides insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and needs.

● Less investment, more rewards: Investing in a digital customer success strategy is cost-effective compared to traditional customer support methods. You can reduce manual efforts by leveraging automation tools and technologies while delivering personalised experiences at scale.

● Customer delight: A well-executed digital customer success strategy helps create moments of pleasure for your customers throughout their journey with your brand.

● Incredible scalability: With a robust digital strategy incorporating automation tools like CRM systems or marketing automation platforms — scaling becomes much more manageable without compromising the level of service provided.

What’s Blocking You From Pursuing a Digital Customer Success Roadmap?

Implementing a digital customer success strategy may seem daunting but worthwhile. However, particular challenges can hinder your progress in this journey:

● Data capabilities: One of the key challenges in building a digital customer success strategy is having the right data capabilities. It includes collecting relevant customer data, analysing it effectively, and leveraging insights to drive actionable strategy.

● Strategic vision: A roadblock could lack a clear vision for your digital customer success roadmap. Implementing an effective strategy without a well-defined plan for engaging with customers digitally after their purchase or subscription becomes difficult.

● KPIs identification: Identifying the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your digital customer success efforts. However, determining which metrics matter most can be challenging without proper guidance or expertise.

Following the steps outlined above and fostering a digital culture within your organisation, you can build a digital customer success strategy that aligns with your organisational needs. What are your thoughts on how an effective digital CS strategy pans out? Please write to me at Arvind@AM-PMAssociates.com.