Improving digital customer experience in a rapidly evolving marketplace

In an increasingly digital society, the first and often most frequent way customers engage with your brand is through digital interactions.

The digital presence of your business leaves a lasting impression on your customers, and you need to pay attention to the quality of online interactions customers engage in with your brand. The digital customer experience encompasses every online interaction a customer has with your brand.

That experience is not limited to your company website. It also includes social media, mobile apps, chatbots, and any other virtual channel in which you choose to engage customers and prospects. All of these channels help to define your brand identity, and that identity is a prime factor driving whether or not various audiences want to engage with your organization.

The functionality of your website, your back-office systems, customer service practices and everything that touches your digital endeavors — most importantly the network infrastructure that makes it all work — are all part and parcel of how you express your brand identity and the quality of the digital customer experience you offer.

Over the last two years, businesses have been forced to drastically increase investment in their digital customer experience and the underlying infrastructure. Many have invested in the infrastructure and applications needed to offer digital services or to speed up their existing digital offerings, thereby adapting to the marketplace and growing customer preference for shopping online vs. brick-and-mortar interactions.

Business has changed irrevocably. And while providing an engaging digital customer is just table stakes today, the overall potential is enormous.

Some businesses are struggling to keep up. In fact, Qualtrics reports unsatisfactory digital customer experiences cost businesses up to $4.7 trillion annually. That company’s Global CX Trends Reports found that many customers believe experiences need drastic improvement and that digital customer experience management is a game-changer.

Another Qualtrics study found that over 65 percent of customers said that their digital customer experience on a given website or app would be a very important factor in their willingness to recommend a brand. For retail operations, according to Harvard Business Review, 29 percent of customers want major improvements to all virtual interactions businesses provide, while 27 percent of retail customers want major improvements to the buying process.

Answering the call to improve digital customer experiences can make a positive impact on your organization’s balance sheet. According to The Harvard Business Review, 70 percent of customers surveyed make a point of buying from businesses that provide a great buying experience, and 66 percent say businesses that have adopted newer, advanced technologies provide a better customer experience.

How to increase bandwidth and accelerate interactions

Your customer’s digital experience with your brand can be diminished by an underperforming network. Inadequate bandwidth or improperly routed processes can slow interactions and create unacceptable periods of latency. It’s no exaggeration to say that milliseconds count and that one of your goals must be swift, clean and satisfying online engagements with customers and prospects.

Most pressing issues inherent to the digital customer experience revolve around network infrastructure performance. The needs for increased bandwidth and low latency — which are network issues — are driven by the desire to accelerate those interactions organizations have with their customers. These engagements can be upfront—such as purchasing and processing orders —or back-office functions such as billing systems and supply-chain management.

When you look at each of these exchanges individually, there are obvious fixes to patch singular applications. When they are viewed collectively, the question becomes more challenging: how do you integrate all this functionality in a way that lowers latency and delivers an improved customer experience?

The modern network must meet demanding performance and bandwidth requirements for traffic throughput, latency management, application enablement and other factors critical to the digital customer experience.

One way to deliver enhanced performance throughout the digital customer experience is to improve your network infrastructure. Despite the lower costs, improved flexibility and simpler management of a modern, location-agnostic SD-WAN, decision-makers are often reluctant to replace the entire network that currently supports their operations. The good news is that they don’t have to rip and replace. Solutions exist that integrate elements of existing networks with modernized solutions that significantly outperform legacy technology.

Relieving the burden on IT Teams

Many times network architectures connect people, but they just don't work seamlessly because the systems are disparate or the technology is old. Older networks may be vulnerable to security risks such as the ever-present risk of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or corruption of routing information. It’s possible they are slowed down by necessary measures put in place — such as security devices — that have become choke points of the network. In these cases, helping businesses respond faster to their customers often means helping their IT teams respond faster to network maintenance and security issues.

There are fully-managed, integrated solutions that remove the burden, complexities and risks of self-managed security point solutions from your IT team. With proven, built-in next-generation firewall solutions, there is no need for separate products, installation, configuration, management, or maintenance. And this level of security doesn’t come at the expense of network speeds. Thanks to an application-specific integrated circuit, Enterprise Network Edge hardware provides network protection at throughput speeds up to 100 Gbps without affecting performance.

In addition to improving security and reducing complexities, 57 percent of companies that deployed managed network solutions indicate that the top benefit they achieved was the “optimization of IT personnel.” Forty-one percent of those companies plan to continue investing in new digital interaction technologies to remain competitive and believe that underlying network performance and built-in resilience are essential to growth and brand strength.

We can help

Enterprise Network Edge delivers advanced security and SD-WAN functionality, enabling high-capacity throughput speeds and low latency, and is built on the industry-leading Fortinet, FortiGate and FortiCloud platforms. Whatever your unique business needs are, we can provide the connectivity choices you need and even manage your infrastructure – resolving issues quickly while you focus on more strategic efforts.

We offer the option of either a fully-managed or co-managed solution. These enable you to manage whichever aspects of the network you choose, then leave the rest to us. Rather than dealing with a multitude of vendors, partner with us and your client service manager will be your single point of accountability for resolving any issues. Our teams design and implement a solution that integrates hardware, management, portals and security with the right connectivity solution, nationwide.

Learn more about our modernized network solutions.