It’s simple – a great customer experience (CX) and service support turns into customer loyalty, repeat business, and revenue growth.

In fact, 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

Businesses that underinvest in these two areas pay the price in higher levels of customer churn and negative reviews, plus they’re forced to overspend to attract new customers at a higher price point than retaining loyal customers.

Nothing surprising there – we’re all scrambling to get the right data, technology, and strategies in place to improve our customer experience, but is it working?

When it comes to technology and customer experience, we could do better.

A 2023 study revealed:

• Only 4% of consumers feel experiences have improved over the past year
• AND 57% feel they have gotten worse!

“It’s safe to say that in today’s marketplace, a successful customer experience is one that delivers on customer expectations, but also the promises of emerging technologies and trends,” explains Whereoware’s Chief Strategy Office Joe Mallek. “Depending on the nature of a given business or industry, the level of customers’ expectations for ease-of-access, personalization, real-time data, responsivity, and so many other factors, is heightened.”

Let’s dig deeper into how customers’ expectations have changed, and why companies are investing in digital transformation and CX technology to consistently uplevel their digital experience.

Table of Contents

1. How has the customer experience changed as a result of technology?
2. How does digital transformation affect consumer behavior?
3. How does technology improve the shopping experience for customers?
4. How to improve customer experience through digital transformation?
5. What is the customer experience strategy?
6. What is the role of technology in customer service?
7. How a business can use technology to improve its service to customers?
8. What are the challenges of digital transformation for customers and businesses?

How has the Customer Experience Changed as a Result of Technology?

It’s a chicken or the egg conundrum – is technology fueling changing customer experience expectations, or has tech rapidly advanced in response to these new expectations?

We propose it’s a little of both.

Every time a brand improves their experience – through better technology, processes, or innovation – it sets the bar for customer expectations.

Customers judge each experience against their last best brand interaction. That’s a mouthful, but when customers receive a hyper personalized and fast checkout experience, a package arrives within 24 hours, or a customer service issue is resolved in the first rep interaction, they question why every experience isn’t so personal, fast, and efficient.

Those expectations then fuel technological advances, in many ways making it more accessible for businesses to choose from a variety of vendor solutions and price points.

We may live in this chicken or egg spiral forever – technology and customer experience are deeply interwoven. But, one thing is for certain – technology is at the heart of a changing customer experience.

Businesses looking to grow market share, reduce churn, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and differentiate themselves from a sea of alternatives are making CX a priority and investing wisely in technology to get it right.

Mallek continues, “From Whereoware’s perspective, we take care to understand where our clients are in reality and help them map out a strategy to improve to the greatest degree possible. Everyone appreciates the importance of better CX, but everyone is at a different level of maturity – it’s not a one-size fits all recipe. There’s always room for improvement.”

Let’s look at ways to improve it.

How Does Digital Transformation Affect Consumer Behavior?

Digital transformation delivers key features customers are looking for: data-driven personalization, immediate gratification, seamless ecommerce, endless convenience, and more.

Let’s look at obvious examples of evolving B2B and consumer behavior, and the impact of digital transformation on customer experience:

• You find an amazing pair of shoes at a retail store. While in the aisle, you check what those same shoes cost on Amazon and other ecommerce sites or you look up the store’s digital coupons to make sure you get the best deal.
• You check in at the airport and scan your boarding pass from your phone. You’re irritated if you need to resolve an issue via the customer service line.
• You check out a possible vendor based on a recommendation from a peer on LinkedIn. You browse their website and check out their content to get a feel for their offering and value – you get to know the business or product really well, long before you reach out to their sales rep for a demo.

These everyday examples touch the surface of how increased advancements and adoption of smarter, more connected technology has changed how we behave, live, travel, work, connect, and buy.

Let’s look at key areas where better tech is transforming customers’ shopping experiences and expectations.

How Does Technology Improve the Shopping Experience for Customers?

Leading businesses are using technology to create a better customer experience and make shopping more accessible, personal, secure, and satisfying for customers.

Let’s take a look at each one:

Technology makes the shopping experience more accessible:

E-commerce platforms and websites empower customers to research, browse, and buy from the comfort of their homes or mobile devices.

Customers can easily pay their bills, book appointments, order groceries – you name it. Plus, they gain access to endless product variations that are impossible to stock in a physical store.

Customer experiences become more personal with smart technology:

Today’s customer experiences are highly data-driven, enabling hyper relevant and targeted digital experiences.

From remembering customers’ shipping and logistic preferences, to personalizing product recommendations, to offering hyper-relevant offers based on customers’ recent buys or activity, customers expect this level of personalization across their customer journey.

Of course, it’s easier said than done and many consumers feel a disconnect – 71% of retailers think they excel in personalization in marketing, BUT only 34% of consumers agree.

Technology enables the full personalization experience – everything from capturing and storing customer data and preferences, to staying compliant with privacy regulations, to acting on that data by delivering personalized marketing and customer experiences is facilitated by smarter, more integrated technology.

Technology safeguards a more secure web experience:

Security and data privacy are the utmost priority for any website experience.

This is particularly true if your website accepts payments and credit card information, but non-ecommerce websites have a duty to protect their customers’ data too.

Increasingly, the data privacy landscape has gone centerstage, with regulations like GDPR and CANSPAM setting legal definitions around how organizations capture, store, use, and protect user data.

It’s not just legal entities and business owners taking notice, customers are increasingly concerned about how their data is secured and used – 76% say they would not buy from a company who they do not trust with their data.

Businesses must continuously update, analyze, and modernize the core technologies and third-party tools driving their customer experience.

A partner, like Whereoware, provides objective advice and recommendations to secure your site and stay compliant with privacy laws, so you can rest assured that your customers’ data is protected, while gaining and keeping their trust.

Smart tech enables a more satisfying customer experience:

When a website is fast, intuitive, content-rich, and not bogged down by popup ads or other disrupting elements, it’s easier for people to use and gives a better experience.

When they can interact with the website, zooming in on product features, or customizing product colors or swatches, they feel more comfortable and satisfied purchasing the product.

By using both proven and emerging technologies as the basis for your digital experience – and bringing in optimization experts focused on speed, security, discovery, engagement, and conversions – you’ll deliver a much more satisfying digital experience and win repeat business.  

The key takeaway here? You’re never done – you must always look for ways to improve customer experience.

How to Improve Customer Experience Through Digital Transformation?

No matter where you are in your digital maturity, you can improve your customer experience.

• You just launched a full transformation? Cool – how is it performing? Where is it lacking, and what can you do to make it better?
• Dealing with a dated, under-invested CX? Cool – you make it incrementally better.
• Somewhere in-between? Cool and common – take every opportunity to make the experience more personal, integrated, automated, and more.

We can’t reiterate this enough – CX optimization is never complete. There are always ways to reduce frictions, improve clarity, refresh technology, or get more personal.

But, you first need to understand your existing experience and performance across channels. Where are their issues and opportunities?

From there, dig deeper by talking to your customers to understand their frustrations and wish lists. Why do they choose you over a competitor, where have they gotten confused interacting with your website, what content or resources do they wish you offered?

We’re big fans of going directly to the source: customers and data.

“We always want to hear directly from the customer – to get on the ground and understand their point of view to build that better experience.” Joe Mallek continues. “BUT, with data, customers can be heard from in another way too, right? When the data is available and truly representative of customers’ perspectives, it leads to much more nuanced and intuitive experiences.

So, we do both – we want the data, but we also want to talk to customers. We want to meld those two informational streams together to inform recommendations, which we in turn will prototype, and then use those prototypes to validate that we are on the right path.”

There are dozens of kinds of tactics and technology to improve customer experience. Ultimately, you only get to the root of the opportunity by starting with data and staying customer-centric.

From there, build a blueprint of improvements, experiments, and upgrades to continuously improve the parts of your CX that need the most love first, and then expand into other areas.

What is the Customer Experience Strategy? Our Approach

At Whereoware, the digital customer experience strategy comes solely down to being more customer-centric in everything you do within your organization. So, how do you get there?

Raquel Ploetz, our Vice President of Strategic Solutions, explains, “Our strategy teams start with understanding our clients’ audience: who their customers are, what their journey looks like, what the journey flow is from a user experience perspective, and what data we have at our disposal to dig deeper into each of these areas.”

Throughout this process, we’re obsessing over the data. We’re looking in Google Analytics 4 and their CRM, and any other analytics data available to unearth gaps. We’re talking directly to customers, via interviews or surveys to better pinpoint needs.

Each question leads us further down the rabbit hole.

We’re trying to understand:

• What does the customer journey look like?
• What are the crucial points in that journey?
• What questions do customers ask at those crucial points?
• What information or services would answer their questions or enhance their experience at those crucial points?
• What format, channel, or manner should it be served up?
• And so on.

It's all about serving the right information at the right moment in a customers’ journey and offering any additional support they may need – like, Frequently Answered Questions (FAQ), chatbots, or a live customer service call.

It’s never set it and forget it.

“We are continuously optimizing the experience and running experiments to get better data to inform our choices. We continue to look at the new information and data as it comes in,” Ploetz continues. “That can be uncomfortable about the consumer-centric approach – once a solution is established, new information comes into play. Your customers’ change, technology changes, the norm in your industry or business environment changes – and you pivot or tailor your approach.”

We then approach CX strategy from a point of greatest impact. We start at the most important conversion points or the points that drives the most revenue, and then work our way down from there, optimizing each touchpoint as we go.

This is driven by business goals. Ideally, we get all stakeholders together to make sure we focus on the overarching objectives for the business. From there, we experiment, analyze, and optimize, on repeat.

“Run simple experiments at first to ensure you get a very clean result – notice, I said “result” not “winner”. There are no winners in experimentation, we’re always learning something new, something did or did not work – it’s all wins.” Ploetz says.

What is the Role of Technology in Customer Service?

Wait – what about customer service teams? The advantages and disadvantages of technology in customer service are clear.

Remember, your customer service teams are on the frontlines of your customers’ experience. The channels are completely intermingled – the quality of a customer service experience directly correlates to a customers’ satisfaction with your business.

Technology enables customer service teams by giving them the tools, data, workflows, and automation needed to be more efficient and informed.

This is important – 71% of leaders said their agents still mostly focus on transactional issues and have no chance to pivot to more meaningful conversations.

When you arm your customer service teams with the right data and tools, they can have more personal and gratifying conversations with your customers. They can pick up the customer journey where it left off – whether that’s on your website, in-person, or on social media.

For example, service professionals save more than 2 hours per day using generative AI to respond to customers quickly.

As long as you train employees well, we see no disadvantages. Technology can automate painful workflows and help service reps be more efficient – ensuring you get full productivity out of your team members, reduce costly rep churn, and enable more meaningful dialogues with customers.

How a Business can use Technology to Improve its Service to Customers?

Many examples likely come to mind of technology products or services that have added value to you as a customer.

Let’s see in-action one of our favorites:

Our client, one of the largest global hotel chains, had multiple different platforms that call center reps needed to use, creating silos and making them less efficient. They wanted to improve the technology and user experience of their customer service platform, built on Salesforce.

We first shadowed call center agents to understand their day-to-day activities and where the nonintuitive technology was slowing them down. We then took a human-centered approach to revamping and integrating the disparate systems into a single, streamlined platform.

By improving their customer service technology to be more intuitive and easier for reps to use, the six-to-eight-week service rep training decreased 80% to one and a half weeks to train a new agent.

Just think how that time savings frees reps up to better nurture customers, while saving the business money in operational costs.

Better tools mean greater efficiency and job satisfaction. Happier customer service reps are better able to engage customers and resolve issues expediently – a win-win for the business, team, and customers.

What are the Challenges of Digital Transformation for Customers and Businesses?

Digital transformation projects are critical to stay competitive, but they come with their own set of challenges.

Customers challenges:

Like anything else, there is a natural learning curve for customers when emerging technology becomes mainstream.

As we witnessed during the pandemic, customers are quick to adapt and with each positive experience, they grow more comfortable incorporating digital technology into their personal and business lives.

The best thing we can do to help customers comfortably adopt tech is to make it as easy, intuitive, clear, and valuable as possible.

Business challenges of digital transformation:

For businesses embarking on digital transformation projects, the challenges are a bit greater.

To get digital transformation right, businesses need to combine:

• Due diligence – thorough research, analysis, assessment, and evaluation of all aspects of the project to minimize risk, maximize success, and approach this project with clear eyes and alignment.
• Goal and KPI setting – assess the current state, clearly define goals, set benchmarks, and determine KPIs. What are you trying to achieve and how will you measure success?
• Data – you need reliable, high-quality, and actionable data to inform all aspects of your digital transformation.
• Expert guidance and planning – find a trusted partner that has successfully completed projects like yours and can guide you throughout the project.
• Technology selection and execution – take care to choose the right technology to enable your digital transformation. Even more important? Get the right partner to implement it and look at all aspects of your goals to deliver a complete, holistic digital strategy.
• Change management and process – digital transformations have both a strategic and technology component, but a huge part is managing organizational change. Make sure your strategic partner is prepared to guide you through the crucial parts of change management, process-setting, and team member training.
• Reporting and continuous optimization –measure all aspects of your transformation project to determine the best ways to optimize it ongoing for better performance, adoption, and overall success.

This list is not comprehensive but skipping these steps is a surefire way to make your transformation rocky at best, a failure at worst.

CSO Joe Mallek says it best, “Too many businesses approach digital transformation by simply buying new technology – but that investment, in itself, isn’t the solution. Just putting up a platform won’t solve your challenges, if it doesn’t take account for your business reality.

The tech itself doesn’t know about your goals, teams, culture, workflows – all the things that need to come together to truly enact change within your organization. We approach digital transformation people-first, with both a strategic and design POV, to adapt and customize technologies to best fit the culture and workflows – we really invest ourselves in ensuring adoption is as successful as possible.

So, we use powerful technology in ways that isn’t disruptive, but productive, by emphasizing your goals, challenges, processes, daily workflows, and more, and then we really hammer home proactive change management.”  

Improving CX is Vital – We Can Help

Customer experience and technology are two parts to the same coin.

When your digital experience is built on modern technology, in alignment with UX and digital optimization best practices, it’s a better experience for customers, period.

The same goes for your customer service teams. Technology gives your customer service teams both the gift of time (through efficiency) and better information to have more personal and fulfilling conversations with customers and resolve issues faster.

Whereoware has two decades of experience helping clients maximize technology to improve customer experience. Reach out to talk through your unique situation and get expert guidance.