One of my top questions that I am getting from my clients is what does an exceptional digital experience look like?

An exceptional digital experience delivers a compelling, relevant, empowering, and consistent experience across multiple touch points breaking through the silos of multi-channel interactions and drawing customer insights to ensure a company is exceeding customer expectations and aligned with rapidly changing interaction preferences of customers.

Here are the 3 ABCs that I begin my client discussions with!

Autonomy:   This attribute is both a digital and attitude focus.   Autonomy changes how employees view customers–and how customers view employees. For instance, at the Ritz Carlton for many years have given their staff  $2,000 of discretion (yes, this is per employee per guest) to be used to solve any customer challenge in the manner the employee feels is appropriate.  Digitally this means that you need to enable Autonomy.   Top performing companies spend more on empowering their workforces with mobile devices than the rest.  And since 81% of purchasers get advice from their social network, there is a requirement to participate in social networks and support audience communities.

Bold Personalization:  83% of customers say they are more likely to do business with brands that allow them to personalize and control where, when and how they interact through their preferred channel combinations. And customers are willing to spend up to 20 minutes configuring a personal profile in exchange for better experience. Personalization techniques focus on understanding the customer, context, location, and device to customize content, offers, products, and even site layout

Compelling and Consistent.  Part of being compelling today is the ability to understand customers and employees as individuals. 84% of businesses today are using web analytics.  Bringing together the right set of capabilities to reach and understand the digital user is now the new norm.  In addition, there is a requirement to deliver an immersive experience of interactive information to drive compelling offers.

Consistency must exist across the multiple channels that clients use.  When we interact through all of these different channels, we expect that the business is thinking about experience – not just in a single channel at a point in time but holistically as we interact across the channels to complete whatever it is we are trying to do. We EXPECT that a site will be relevant if we get to the site from a banner ad or search term. We EXPECT that the profile we set up online is the same profile for the mobile application. And, we get a little annoyed when we have to repeat all of our information to the customer service representative after already entering it all through the phone keypad.

These ABCs require a great combination of strategy, culture, and technology.