By John Katsoulis, Senior Principal, CX Product Marketing

Consider a typical visit to a brick-and-mortar retail store. As you browse through the shelves and racks deciding what to buy, what kind of salesperson do you hope to find when you need help? Do you prefer someone aggressive and continuously asking if you’re ready to make a purchase? Or, can you even find someone when you have a question, no matter how hard you look?

Most customers would say the perfect salesperson is ready to help and follows your cue. Thanks to years of shopping in stores, consumers know exactly what they want from a brick-and-mortar experience.  Savvy retailers train their salespeople to get this right. But what about a different shopping or service situation?

What attracts or repels customers online? What should Digital retailers and service providers do to compel customers to buy and remain loyal?  When customers call your service department to complain, are your service teams empowered to deliver seamless customer experiences that demonstrate you understand your customers and their needs?

Modern consumers are fickle and they have choices, so they don’t need to put up with lousy digital experiences. They know exactly what they want. This has created a tipping point for B2C marketers. With so many new ways to engage customers, they need to find the perfect mix and get their Digital Handshake right.

Build the Digital Handshake Around the Customer

Establishing a great digital customer experience starts with the organization itself. Most companies are structured in silos, with teams put in place piece to support different stages of the customer journey, whether related to digital or mobile advertising, email Marketing, service, commerce or the next big thing.

This approach has proven detrimental. When fragmented teams work against each other instead of towards integrated consumer goals, customers get inconsistent messaging and interactions that are disorganized, and often frustrating.

Managing the final customer experience means coordinating those teams around the audience itself. Service and marketing teams can better control the information they send out, so that consumers are neither inundated nor ignored. But that’s just the beginning. To get the digital handshake right, it's important to examine processes even further.  Developing and honing to precision these six practical habits will help put contending brands ahead.

1. Prioritize the Mobile Experience – Just as Marketing teams make mobile a key component in each step of their content strategy, Service teams should deliver the same level of interaction and engagement while demonstrating an understanding of current service issues.  Customers won’t differentiate between your mobile site and website, so make sure they work together as part of a consistent experience. 
2. Find the Right “Service and Engagement” Balance – Successful CX involves lines of business working together from a common strategy where whenever the customer chooses to engage, the brand is prepared to serve the right information at that particular touch point. 
3. Understand Short-Term Goals Versus Long-Term Brand Equity – To create lasting brand equity, the new digital handshake involved teams collaborating on a long-term plan where short-term goals contribute to its success. 
4. Create the Right Design Experience – What constitutes good design is constantly changing with evolving habits and new trends. The trick for B2C marketing and service teams is to find the mix of capabilities needed to support engagement where the customer experience is enhanced at each step.
5. Regularly Test Engagement and Big Business Questions – The most successful organizations test robustly across customer touch-points, leveraging data to successfully deliver personalized experiences that are intelligently crafted at every touch point.
6. Go Beyond Personalization – Personalization around marketing messages across channels and service interactions, supplemented by modern marketing capabilities, can improve the whole shopping experience. These details need to be continuously monitored and improved to stand up against the competition.

Oracle Knows Data

Brands that successfully transform their digital operations have linked their systems, tools, and teams to achieve a single view of the customer. The Oracle CX platform powers digital transformation for greater agility, efficiency, and visibility. Oracle is the number one analyst-rated Digital Experience Platform and is unique in its ability to power B2C eCommerce experiences for any organization. Our modern architecture makes it simple to leverage any Oracle, third-party, or homegrown system to grow in any direction the market and your customers take you. Oracle customers can select from a wide variety of applications and services as their needs grow and evolve.

Click here to Learn How to Growth Hack Your Business with Oracle CX