3 Core Constructs for Digital Solutions To Help Grow Your Business

Before investing in new digital solutions, your organization must adopt several core constructs to make customer experiences thrive.

Since the introduction of modern digital technologies such as IoT, customer service chatbots and more, customers are more empowered than ever. Your business no longer controls your customer’s dialogue, experience or outcomes as it did before.

But this is no time to give up. Instead, it is time to begin cultivating and using your customers’ empowerment to create even better interactions. New purposeful and innovative digital solutions provide the tools you need to do so.

However, before investing in new digital solutions, your organization must adopt several core constructs to better facilitate the new-age interactions that makes your customer experience thrive. These constructs represent shifts in how businesses have long thought about customer engagement, but they are critical to your success.

Designing the Digital Engagement Model: Three Core Constructs

Modern companies must understand and use their influence to help customers rather than yielding all their influence to customers — or attempting to pull it back from them.

Below are three new constructs that will help you shift from forceful customer experiences to proper digital dialogues that recognize the mutual benefit between people’s needs and your company’s ability to satisfy them:

Design experiences to ensure you achieve the right outcome, rather than disrupting the customer journey simply to make something happen or happen more quickly.

Design experiences that help people improve their thinking and decision-making processes while managing all aspects of customer choice to better build relationships.

Orchestrate and contextualize decision-making environments so people feel confident in their experiences and the choices they are making.

Now, Near, Next: A Timeline for Digital Solution Maturity

Few organizations have fully mastered these constructs. As you continue to communicate them within your organization and invest in the technology to enable them, consider where you are along a continuum of Now, Near and Next:

• Now: You must evaluate the customer’s current needs, how they are met, and what influences drive their decisions.
• Near: You must understand that your organization can’t be all things to all people, but it can prevail among the needs it can meet.
• Next: You must stay informed of how the world is changing, how that affects your customer, and how it affects your organization.

Capturing Choice through Digital Solutions

In our new world, organizations that foster choice will also foster good relationships. When captured, understood and internalized, all the trust, time, money and energy customers invest in your solutions simplify decision making — and make it more likely they will choose you.

After all, with every interaction, customers are giving you important data. They communicate what they value in your organization, how unique they find you, and where your product or service fits into their lives.

Digital solutions allow you to harvest that data and use it to continuously meet their evolving needs by improving:

• Interfaces and Interactions: Determine digital dialogue across all devices and solutions.
• Concepts and Prototypes: Create testable artifacts that stimulate feedback and input.
• Design Systems: Make it easy to repeat experiences and interactions that work across your organization.
• Software Development: Deliver fully functioning products and services that drive your business.

Conclusion

It can be unsettling to think about how much control your customers now have over your business, but you can level the playing field by using their control to your benefit. Start by rethinking how you interact with your customer.

Then, explore digital solutions that turn those interactions, and the data they produce, into products and services that help everyone.