Abstract
Digital transformation is leading companies to change their business and adjust the strategies to the new market reality – an era of constant customer connectivity focus on transforming the customer value and the use of digital technologies for greater customer interaction and collaboration. This is putting the customer first in many organizations' strategies to leverage the customer journey and experience with brands. Digital transformation is the combined effect of the main digital innovations responsible for changing structures, practices, and values within companies. In terms of customer, it means changing the way business interaction occur during the customer journey. The digital era faces a tremendous growth of customer empowerment, so companies need to structure news ways to be innovative in terms of customer support, anytime, anywhere, and with the proper device – text, video, instant messages, and unexpected ways. The authors strongly recommend any company or organization to bring the customer experience to the early stages of the implementation of a new tool.
TopIntroduction
This chapter presents a broad perspective of how new tools are emerging from digital transformation aiming to better reinforce the interaction with customers. This means new ways to follow customer preferences in terms of customer support and building emotional boundaries with target groups. Nowadays, customers in digital era are more demanding, expecting a real time response and innovative approaches. Digital transformation is highly in progress and it provides new ways to interact with customers in a digital way. The market is growing fast in digital era and companies are forced to move faster and update the communication among customers and stakeholders. It has transformed the way customers buy and the experience exchange. Today, customers are driving the buying process among websites, blogs, and social platforms According to this real time changes, this chapter describe some of the main concepts of digital transformation, trends and tools to develop close relations with customers, and also considered benefits to companies. The chapter is structured in a simply way, with a literature review in the section one, presenting some of the main concepts - digital transformation, customer relationship and customer experience. Section two and third present some of the trends and tools that support the relation between companies and customers in the growth of digital era. Final section is concerned with the challenges and issues faced by companies when embracing digital transformation in their process of relationship with customers, aiming to differentiate customer service and innovate the customer journey. The author’s motivation is based on their experience with mapping customer experience journey in some fields of work and industries in digital era. Our contribution is to present an organized approach and list of the main trends and tools that can support companies to leverage the digital transformation among customer service departments able to face the fast growing industries.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Online Advertising: Use of internet as an advertising medium where promotional messages appear on a computer screen. Since the communication software (browser) reveals sufficient information about the site's visitors, online advertising can be custom-tailored to match user preferences.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Refers to the process of improving traffic to a given website by increasing the site's visibility in search engine results. Websites improve SEO by improving content, making sure that the pages are able to be indexed correctly, and ensuring that the content is unique.
ChatBot: Is a computer program that attempts to simulate the conversation or “chatter” of a human being via text or voice. A user can ask a chatbot any question or make a command, and the chatbot responds or performs the requested action.
Transformation: In an organizational context, a process of profound and radical change that orients an organization in a new direction and takes it to an entirely different level of effectiveness. Unlike 'turnaround' transformation implies a basic change of character and little or no resemblance with the past configuration or structure.
E-Commerce: Is the process of buying and selling products, services and even information over the internet, between business-to-consumer, business-to-business, consumer-to-consumer, or consumer-to-business.
Customer Focus: The orientation of an organization toward serving its clients' needs. Having a customer focus is usually a strong contributor to the overall success of a business and involves ensuring that all aspects of the company put its customers' satisfaction first. Having a customer focus usually includes maintaining an effective customer relations and service program.