The missing piece of puzzle in Digital Transformation: Integrity

The story of e-commerce, online shopping, "digital" (or I'd prefer "virtual") customers is obviously not something new, however, the practice reached up to its best and highest during this unlucky period of #CoVID-19 pandemic.

For a decade now, we have been talking about changing the focus from the "products" offered into "customers" and being customer-centric. That led to implementing several solutions to put the customer at such focus point and "get to know" them better. Thus, when they would show up at your stores (either in very person at a brick & mortar outlet, or in front of a screen browsing online), they'd be recognized by means of several parameters (demographics, purchasing habits, interests, average basket size, and similar) so that it'd give the store a better chance to take more money out of the pockets, however, doing that nicely and making customers feel happy about that.

That started with putting CRM in place, integrating it with POS systems, enhancing it with customer retention & loyalty solutions, and reached to an even better point with introducing event-driven marketing solutions, predictive analytics, and smart solutions for better stock management, better pricing, or even let the store catch the customers and bring them on even before they feel like coming back to you.

It helped quite much on the online channels as the cost of having a customer visiting your stores "remotely" gave the chance to digitally keep track of every move they made, and gave a chance to showcase all relevant offers, products linked to what they have been doing on your online store, leading to an up-sell and cross-sell even.

Now, up until now, the pandemic, and the "lock down", it seemed to work really well, and sort of flawless. However, it came to surface that they had been missing a very important piece in this puzzle, once "lock downs" introduced, and customers literally "lost" the chance to show up at the stores, but their only chance became to buy online, and have their items delivered.

Briefly having a look at the rings of the chain, we have the following:

• stocks of goods, range of products to offer
• the online channels (web, mobile applications) for customer access
• payment channels (mobile wallets, credit card/debit cards, Apple/Samsung/Google Pay, cash on delivery, PayPal, and so on)
• Delivery
• Customer Support / After-sales Support

Those main titles would of course have many sub-items, systems, parameters, however, I'd like to keep it simple for now.

The journey begins

With very little and negligible glitches, until the delivery part, it's mostly okay and manageable. And yet, the issues about out of the blue refreshing pages causing your cart to be destroyed, not being able to click "add to basket" for something that you had been looking for long time, low-resolution / deceptive images of products, or anything that would lead the customers pull out their hair is not subject to this article, and will leave them aside.

What quite unacceptable and unbearable is, the missing link between the shopping, the delivery, and the customer support. And I'm not only talking about little local web-stores, unknown brands! I am talking about big guys, such as A**zon, I**A, Ca**our!

Customer purchases and pays. Sets the delivery address, and starts waiting. Delivery fails, or doesn't happen on the expected date, which is very likely especially in the days of a pandemic, where businesses came almost to a suspend, staff reduced, stocks negatively affected of not being refilled at the expected time.

The nightmare beings

As a very natural act, customers start reaching to the stores either by clicking on "contact us" forms, or phone, or e-mails. And that's where the most troublesome moments begin. The simple question that the customer asks is "Where is my product?" seeking the answer for "When will it be delivered". Simple.

Referring back to the implemented digital solutions and the couple of ten (or may be hundreds) thousands of dollars already spent, and considering that such budgets have been spent for a very particular reason, everything should be under control, and there shall not be an issue.

But no! There is! Because you have all the parts to build the engine, but they are sitting in different places, and they are not connected! So it doesn't run, and the car doesn't move. The CRM lets the store to recognize who is on the line, the retail systems give the details of items purchased, POS/ERP shows up about the payments... but all of these systems are accessed via their own channels and the data is almost uncorrelated!

The customer support agent, in such case, is a very poor person because he'd have 5 screens in front of him, and he need to try to build the whole story with pieces and bites of information that he could get from the customer to its best availability. He needs to do all the tricks he would know just to be able to identify who the customer is, what he purchased, what the delivery terms were, how the delivery went / or why it didn't happen yet, and finally what the possible solution would be. And I can tell, based on personal experience, that they FAIL! and they fail BIG!

The broken link

If, at a given time, you are not able to identify which step are you in for the overall process, and you have no clue about what is happening to that specific order for the time being, it means that you did not "invest" but you "wasted" your money yet.

What typically happens is, the agent will tell you that your product will be delivered soon. However, he can't provide with details, date, time. He can't provide with you the details about whereabouts of the products. He can't tell you if you may cancel the order and ask for a refund as he definitely needs to check several other systems, and may be do some phone calls / send some e-mails. Mostly the delivery service is contracted to some 3rd party which has no link between the store and their service at all, so once the product is handed over to the delivery company, it's a dark tunnel that there is no visible light at the end.

And even before, if it's not yet handed over to delivery, agent mostly fails to give information about why, or when it is expected to be because the warehouse, logistics, and the relevant systems either does not exist or are not integrated to each other. There is no digital and automated work flow, leading that the information is not complete and accessible in detail at a given time.

Customer is not given a proper reason, he is not offered a particular delivery date/time, and he cannot be redirected to the delivery company (if already handed over) for you to talk to them and check. Instead, you are repeated a pre-scripted statement something like "We are trying to do our best and your product hopefully will be delivered without issues".

Customer Satisfaction, Customer Experience

If you are a customer, purchased something that you are expecting on a timely manner, you want it delivered on the promised time. That's number one, and it is the duty of the store to make sure if it's possible or not, unless something quite unnatural or disastrous (a fire in the warehouse, a government ban of delivery services) happens. There might be delays, but in this case the store is supposed to set a new date and tell about the latest updates on demand, if not proactively. Customer has already done his part. He came to your store, purchased and paid, set the date, put the address in place. Now it's the stores' turn to do the delivery and be aware of every single of the life cycle of that item until delivered to the customer.

This is only possible with putting the relevant systems in place and INTEGRATING them to each other on a smart automatic work-flow.

That's how you may provide with precise and accurate information to customers, help them to solve their issues, and make sure that they will finally be getting their products, or finding a solution to their complaints, without getting frustrated.

If you are making the customer call you every single day over and over for the course of 7-8 days, and yet not able to provide him a particular date to deliver, and asking him to cancel his order instead of comforting him, you are on the wrong grounds. In the simplest way, it will lead to a catastrophe and the customer experience to its worst. Consequences will be bad on the brand image, thanks to the power of social media, and to Gen-X perfectly using it for any means.

Don't (only) go Digital. Transform Digital.

There are number of systems and sources of data that the business requires, collects, and needs throughout all steps of business. Companies need to make sure that the data is unique, systems are integrated, work flows are smartly designed and automated, and at any stage all required data would be available, accurate, and easily accessible.

Digital Transformation is not all about spending money and having the top-most quality solutions in place individually. That defines going digital. But if you want to "transform" digital, you need to make sure that the integrity and cross-communication among all those systems will be there.

This way, not only you'd have full control in every step of your processes and overall business, it will also offer great help to achieve the customer satisfaction to the best levels.