RESOURCE CENTER

Transform the Customer Experience

Create a seamless customer experience by breaking down silos and unifying your data.

Time to Read: 5.5 minutes

Forecasting for your business is nearly impossible. Continued lockdowns, uncertain economic conditions, and moving work and even school to your kitchen table make long-term planning difficult for today’s business leaders. But companies that put the customer at the center of everything they do will find success despite the pace of constant change.

B2C companies of all kinds need to create new and meaningful interactions, driven by personalized buying experiences and contextual service at every step of the customer journey. For most companies, this also calls for a renewed focus on relevance, safety, and accessibility for customers. It’s time to fundamentally transform customer experiences, and that can only happen by fundamentally transforming your business, too.

This step-by-step playbook is a companion piece to our Transform the Consumer Experience Customer 360 Guide, which gives you all the tools you’ll need to unite commerce, marketing, experience, and service silos for better customer experiences. As you read, you’ll learn how a unified view of your customers will help you transform experiences in response to their changing needs.

Three steps to transformation

Chapter 1: How to create commerce experiences that drive growth
Chapter 2: How to make a difference with your marketing now
Chapter 3: How to solve issues fast with intelligent service

Chapter 1: How to create commerce experiences that drive growth

Consumers have fundamentally shifted the way they shop. If deliveries are arriving at your doorstep every day, you’re not alone. The consumer response to COVID-19 lockdowns was to take their dollars online — digital commerce grew 71% in Q2 of 2020. And what started as a reaction to store closures has become our new normal.

Companies are experiencing unprecedented demand online, even greater than a typical holiday surge, with new traffic, conversion, and spending records.

In fact, 68% of U.S. shoppers expect to keep buying essential goods online even after restrictions from COVID-19 have faded away. That means it’s now business critical to improve digital commerce experiences as quickly as possible.

Empower your customers to shop from anywhere

Today, shoppers use an average of 7.6 different touchpoints to engage with brands. As shopping becomes increasingly distributed, it’s critical for retailers to stay aligned behind the scenes. Tactically speaking, that means ensuring products, pricing, inventory, and content are in sync across all platforms. Our new realities also demand seamless curbside pickup and safe in-store experiences. We’ve heard from consumers loud and clear: The new mandate is to make shopping easy and safe, wherever and whenever they want.

“After closing our retail outlets, we took all those resources and dollars and made an effort to make our digital experience even more amazing — connecting the consumer journey across every single touchpoint, harnessing consumer data and learning what our consumers wanted, informing our messaging and product strategies, and personalizing each experience.”

Ekta Chopra
Vice President of Digital, e.l.f. Cosmetics

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Give employees the tools they need to succeed

Empowerment and engagement don’t stop with your customers. You should also remember to empower your employees, from the warehouse to the storefront to the home-delivery drive. It’s crucial to ensure safe procedures and seamless connectivity for all workers from anywhere. By giving employees the tools to succeed anytime and anywhere, they can ensure seamless experiences for your customers.

Connect commerce across your business

Internal silos are the Achilles’ heel of customer-centric transformation. To build end-to-end solutions that meet the needs of your customers throughout the entire purchase process, you need to create connections across your teams and technology stacks.

First, develop reference architecture to communicate the vision and strategy of your solution to business executives and stakeholders. Then, you can unify your customer data — with a single identity for each customer — across your consumer touchpoints and digital communities, for truly unified customer experiences.

Chapters

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