Digitally Engaged or Digitally Confused?

by Gavin Austin
original post

A lot of trends and buzzwords circle around the tech-sphere. Agile, big data, and most recently, digital engagement is in vogue. If you’re not sure what digital engagement means, you’re not alone. Ask a few of your coworkers what it means, and you’ll probably get different definitions or conflicting descriptions. You might even hear an answer that includes something called digital transformation, too.

What does this all mean? Why should you care? Because if you’re confused about digital engagement — or your organization attempts digital engagement haphazardly — your business could suffer enormous losses and missed opportunities.

First, let’s define digital transformation — It’s the precursor to digital engagement. Digital transformation is simply the conversion of ink-on-paper records to digital formats. Most businesses began this conversion years ago when teams moved data and documents off of paper and onto computers, databases, disk drives, and eventually the cloud for safe storage. Since information was no longer lost on someone’s desk, and it was easily accessible across teams, changes started happening in the workplace.

Tasks once reserved for marketing, such as communicating new products or seasonal deals, quickly made their way into the realm of customer support: “While I help you reset your password, would you like to learn about a new promotion?” Silos between teams began to blur. Traditional functions of who delivers which experiences to customers came into question.
As the era of digital transformation progressed, consumers — you and me — began to have access to new mobile devices and communication platforms. Instead of complaining verbally to friends and family about bad customer experiences, we started to post our grievances to global audiences on Facebook, Twitter, and an infinite number of online forums or review websites. Businesses that didn’t know or acknowledge these posts lost customers. Businesses who continue to ignore these posts may go out of business.

Enter digital engagement. It’s a term that describes how companies engage with customers across all digital touchpoints while providing a consistent customer experience. Typically, a customer’s journey includes marketing, selling, and servicing in a way that lets them switch between multiple channels — email, Twitter, Facebook, and more — without interrupting a positive experience.

A digital customer journey for — let’s say shoes — might look something like this:

1. A new campaign to promote shoes on the web or on multiple social media channels.
2. Leads and opportunities from the campaign are captured and every stage of each deal is tracked and analyzed until the sale of the shoes is complete.
3. After the shoes are purchased, customers receive service reminders as texts on their mobile devices, review service agreements from an online community, and reach out for support through chatbots, web chat, social media channels, and more.

Ideally, each part on the journey — no matter where the customer is at — is optimized with automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to make sure that a positive experience is delivered consistently.

You may say, “But my business isn’t related to the digital realm. None of this stuff applies to me.” Fair point, but how many of your customers visit the digital realm? Probably most. With mobile phones, web browsers, and SMS text available to nearly everyone, everywhere, customers expect to reach businesses as easily as they reach their friends and families.

Salesforce research states that 78% of customers expect an effortless and consistent experience across multiple communication channels. Additionally, “more than two-thirds (69%) of customers expect a connected experience when they engage with a company.” This means that customers expect to reach your business on the channels of their choice, whether that’s on a mobile device using their favorite messaging app, on a website using web chat, or social media channels like Twitter or Facebook.

If you’re not engaging with customers in the digital realm, you’re not only providing poor experiences that could lead people towards your competitors, but you’re also missing opportunities. For example, as a writer on Salesforce’s Content and Communications Experience team (we’re the team that creates user interface text, feature callouts, videos, graphics, online help, release notes, Trailhead, and more), our social media presence has provided us with incredible feedback from customers. Tweets have pointed out where we need to update content. Posts on the Trailblazer Community have shown us where we can provide more useful in-app communications. This engagement is leading us to partner with Salesforce MVPs to write content together that benefits all of our customers. What a win!

Digital engagement isn’t as hard as it sounds. If you’re getting started on figuring out how to bring your organization into the digital realm, Salesforce has plenty of resources and features you can use.

To learn more, and begin the journey, check out the Digital Engagement module on Trailhead.