How can businesses increase their reach and thrive in this digital world?

As an online business, it is evident that you are using various tools for tracking different KPIs. These tools allow you to track conversion rates, place bids for ads, gather leads, and nurture them into long-time customers. So, the threat of contracting Covid-19 is kept at bay as you have adapted to social distancing, self-isolation, and even quarantine.

Workplaces strictly carry out work-from-home policies, education institutes have moved to online learning; restaurants allow only take-away and online deliveries. In simple terms, every industry has seen a rapid transformation.

But what about the businesses that have still not left their legacy systems or functional architecture behind and moved on to discover new, fresher avenues. The people-centric business models have seen the most losses due to this pandemic. Brands adapting to digital transformation will provide the quality customer experience required to stay afloat in this challenging financial time and beyond it.

Common challenges in responding to digital disruption

“The value of digital channels, products, and operations is immediately obvious to companies everywhere right now,” says Sandy Shen, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner”

Businesses across the globe are still struggling to cope with digital transformation. As per research conducted by Jabil on companies that have 100 to 5000 employees, the top five challenges the companies faced were:

• Employee pushback
• Lack of expertise in taking digitization initiatives
• Organizational structure
• Lack of a digitization Strategy
• Budget limitation

Building a digital strategy

Here are some tips that businesses can consider while developing their digital strategy.

Identifying the target audience

Start by clearly identifying your target audience and creating a buyer persona. Ask yourself who your target audience is, what they do, and what websites they frequently like to visit.

When you find answers to these questions, it will help you create your business message, making it easier for you to create your digital strategy.

Laying down the key channels

Try finding the channels that help you reach your target audience. For this, businesses must research and find such platforms. These platforms will enable enterprises to reach their audience and develop an authentic and lasting connection.

Setting realistic goals

Businesses must define and set realistic goals. These goals must also be achieved in time and measurable not to falter while applying the digital strategy. Give clear and proper timelines and set timely goals to create accountability and create a better benchmark for their future progress.

Steps to creating memorable brand experiences

Businesses must not stay out of the go-digital movement significantly when the customer fronts are getting cut down for health and safety measurements.

Manage digital experience for customers

We encourage our customers to focus on three critical digital outcomes that will foster a sustainable and differentiating experience:

1. Emotion — How your customers feel while interacting with you?

Brands often face a challenge in capturing and conveying emotion via websites or apps. If they find the right balance, it can create an environment where businesses can maintain a lasting relationship with their customer base.

With customers’ health safety being a priority in today’s Covid-19 world, businesses need to focus on empathy. These are times of unprecedented uncertainty, with the chances of the unknown occurring at an all-time high.

Brands must take this scenario to build trust and confidence. Doing so will help customers know that these brands understand what’s at stake.

• Keep your expectations limited
• Listen to your customers
• Understand their concerns
• Deliver quality service

Everything must be done with empathy as the focal point across customer touchpoints.

2. Effort — How are customers achieving their goals?

The effort is the second crucial element in managing the digital experience for customers. What is the level of difficulty or ease your customers experience while completing their tasks?

The general expectation of users worldwide is that the digital environment allows them to accomplish their tasks seamlessly. Even if the decision-making process is a bit challenging, the tasks can be carried out smoothly.

In the current situation where self-safety is taking center stage, users still want their needs met. Digital channels can assist in achieving this goal. Businesses need to focus on digital disruptions to facilitate seamless interaction and transactions between them and their customers.

Such an event is necessary for brands serving essential goods and services. It is also a crucial need for the entertainment industry too. Clear and concise communication from brands is what their customers currently want.

This pandemic has taught one crucial lesson; every vertical of the industry is susceptible to loss. The coronavirus outbreak has forced the hands of business owners to adopt digital transformation at a faster pace.

3. Success — Did the customer achieve their goal?

Now, this is a grey area. Not because there is no specific answer to it but because it depends on how challenging the task was for the customers. When it comes to knowing the success of task completion using your website or app, either it was a success, or it wasn’t.

It becomes crucial for you to know your brand’s strength to be highlighted in front of the stakeholders. How are you planning to improve these strengths and tune them with a human-centric approach for making your digital experience successful?

Carrying out the digital experience management

Let us take an instance here to give you a more practical understanding.

Let’s say that you are a business that provides financial services to its clients. So, the challenge you are facing is the mismanagement of calls made to your contact center. With a simple embedding of the survey link in the website intake form, you can divert your resources. You can plan follow-ups via emails, text messages, and calls. The outcome? You can create a better digital experience for your customers without draining a particular resource.

Another example can be of a retailer.

It is not a hidden fact that logistics significantly hit many retailers and customers during the Covid-19 lockdown. To avoid unnecessary inconvenience to the customers, you, as a retailer, can utilize real-time messaging to alert customers regarding the updates for their ordered items. In a much-simplified statement, you can let them know when their favorite product will be

• Back in stock
• Will be available for purchase
• Ready to be shipped

Such a service can be taken one step further by including location-based inventory updates to the customers, allowing businesses and brands to quickly adapt to their customers’ needs.

We hope these instances demonstrated the importance of digital transformation. For achieving such a feat, you will require a digital transformation partner that can guide you in the steps to develop a scalable, user-friendly, and accommodating digital solution.

Rapidops has been helping brands establish meaningful and memorable experiences for their customers with the help of digital disruptions. And perhaps in this trying situation where the world is looking forward to digital solutions, we can be more helpful with our web and mobile solution development expertise.

The current state of the world demands that businesses take every data set in their legacy architecture and move towards digital transformation for making faster decisions. We help companies understand the opportunity to create impactful experiences for their customers with context, compassion, and empathy.

As a digital product development company, we have helped businesses transcend their legacy business model to digital. We know that technology plays a significant role in serving humanity and making extraordinary things happen.

Conclusion: Your brand can easily survive and thrive in this digital era

Digital transformation is happening everywhere. Consequently, companies must completely embrace digital transformation. It is crucial to succeed in a competitive environment and help customers get the digital experience to get their tasks done.

There is an impressive range of new technologies impacting business models, value chains, and customer behavior, making this market tumultuous.

Providing a world-class customer experience to your customers will play the ultimate differentiator for your success. When you start investing in your business’s digital experience, you will help avoid any unwanted struggle. Planning a meaningful digital experience for your business and brand will help you thrive in a post-Covid-19 world.

Partner with us to drive your business into a digital era with web and mobile development. You can reach us if you want to know more about digital product design and the use of data analytics and machine learning for gaining better insights into your business.