Now more than ever, customers have the freedom to move between competitors as they increasingly “shop around” to get the most competitive products and services. Customer loyalty is no longer just won, but earned and maintained through the quality of an organization’s customer experience strategy.

A dynamic customer experience strategy entails more than just customer service, which is isolated to how one particular episode is addressed. A quality customer experience strategy must be comprehensive and address the entire experience of interacting with an organization; from the initial discovery and research of a product, through on-boarding, to the use of the product and eventual follow up.

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As the concept of customer experience continues to gain momentum, it increasingly puts the customer at the epicenter of product development and delivery. Companies must address this industry development by re-evaluating the entirety of their customer experience strategy to ensure that it’s meeting customer expectations, every step of the way.

In tandem with this reorientation, customer service is increasingly moving towards digitization. This development is elevating the customer interaction from the rudimentary sphere of telephone, branch visits and paper documents to an enhanced digital sphere where interactions take place over apps, visual IVRs, messenger tools, websites, chat-bots etc. The inherent benefit of digitization is that it provides added value to the customer, it enables them to perform account activities at their preferred channel of choice, with the clarity of having information visually displayed and in situations that are most convenient. For organizations, digitization, provides a number of powerful, robust platforms in which to deliver their customer experience strategy.

Wherever organizations have adopted digitization, it has frequently led to automation. The ability to interact with a company digitally means that data that has been provided manually once, can be saved and automatically populated for subsequent interactions. Automation effectively diminishes human effort to complete operational process, both in terms of front-end communication with the customer and in terms of back-end communication with administrative functions.

Yet, a more advanced level of this is where digitization enables entire recurring processes to be automated, such as ensure regulation compliance (for e.g KYC), customer on-boarding, complete transactions and purchases, or even obtain approval.

The current and growing dominance of mobile adoption is key to success. The brick and mortar branch, is not going to go away, but it will transform from a center of transaction and information provision to a center of management and oversight. Organizations must be able to digitally manage a growing list of more complex processes; such as ensure account security, maintain heightened regulation requirements, provide immediate account approvals and facilitate real time transaction purchases.

To operate at maximum efficiency and remain competitive it becomes crucial to deliver these processes automatically to the digital device that is at the tip of their customer’s fingers.