The rise of the tech-savvy customer as ICT in Nigeria continues to grow calls for humanised digital customer engagement
By Olatayo Ladipo-Ajai
The emergence of a more digitally-savvy consumer in Nigeria over the past two years means that for companies to remain competitive and grow their bottom line, they will increasingly have to scramble to attract customers who are in transition to the digital space in addition to maintaining their existing customer base.
This will require developing a strong focus on digital customer engagement, enhancing Customer Experience (CX) and providing smart payment systems, as well as the humanisation of digital engagement to provide a truly personalised and customer-centric experience.
With the need for humanisation, there is now, more than ever, a requirement for organisations to affirm that they really understand their customers. With customers’ focus increasingly on digitisation and almost everything becoming automated, organisations face the risk of losing sight of customers’ problems along their journey, which can result in a lack of personal touch in the support offered to customers.
The key to developing a humanised digital CX in the current technology ecosystem is for organisations to pay attention to everything along a customer’s journey. As much as the modern customer journey is enhanced through an omnichannel approach to reach customers across multiple channels and platforms, businesses must also leverage their omnichannel engagement platforms to listen to the customer along all steps of the customer journey.
Customer-centric approach
Listening to their customers allows brands to become customer-centric and plan their business strategies with customers on the frontline, enabling them to pivot in step with emerging trends and quickly respond to rapidly changing customer demands. This means leveraging platforms that can orchestrate change faster and that are highly scalable and customisable.
Creating a truly humanised digital CX thus hinges on understanding the customer journey across all touchpoints and providing unified support. While this must be coupled with a highly personalised customer journey, via the customer’s channels of choice, customer empathy also plays a big role in getting this right.
In short, customer empathy is a company’s ability to see things from the customer’s perspective. It comes down to understanding the underlying needs and feelings of customers, beyond just recognising and addressing their tactical requirements.
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Additionally, while automation is key to enhancing the CX process by allowing brands to have a deeper understanding of individual customers, not everything can or should be automated. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be harnessed to work better with people, overusing this technology could drive customers away.
The overuse of AI typically results in a failure to understand complex queries and provide the right resolution to customers in real time. It may also lead to a lack of understanding of customer queries, resulting in delayed and inaccurate responses that affect customer retention. Ultimately, an over-reliance on AI could result in the inability to deliver real time solutions and a failure to meet customer satisfaction levels.
Reaching the unbanked
In Nigeria’s current ICT landscape, Payment Service Banks (PSBs) have a major role to play in driving financial inclusion. The adoption of omnichannel customer engagement solutions can simplify the communication complexity of their target audiences, especially in PSBs’ mandate to bridge the current financial exclusion gap in the country.
In terms of carrying out this mandate, these financial institutions need to build partnerships, enhance their customer touchpoints and create digital customer journeys. Meaningful financial inclusion can only be brought about by digitising access to banking services as much as possible for the unbanked.
To reach the unbanked, PSBs would traditionally need to establish a presence everywhere across the country, hence an omnichannel strategy is the best way for them to reach this potential client base and fulfil their mandate. However, to successfully engage with this target market, PSBs need to pay attention to these customers’ businesses and lifestyles and get more involved in their trade to develop tailored products and ecosystems that cater for their needs and demands.
In the post-COVID-19 digital landscape, organisations must start to look at tapping into the bigger picture and start planning to work with a partner that can help them secure new customers and retain their current ones. Onboarding the right partner will be key to creating more connections between businesses and their customers, while also providing a unified connection experience for all stakeholders.
- Olatayo Ladipo-Ajai is the Country Manager at Infobip Nigeria