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ARTICLE
Sustainable Customer Relationships
in a Digital World
May 11, 2022
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Remmert Stipdonk
The process in which every company becomes a digital company; that is usually what Digital Transformation stands for. We can now say that this process has come a long way for most companies and that now is the time for the next step: Digital Sensemaking.
Digital Sensemaking is about finding synergy between business goals and customer needs. The starting point for this is to build a sustainable relationship between companies and customers.
This starts with finding valuable insights from qualitative and quantitative data, where those insights have meaning from both the business perspective and the customer perspective. To do this, you need to understand who your customer is and why that customer wants to do business with you and not with someone else, and you have to understand what you have to offer that customer digitally. That is why Digital Sensemaking is more than just collecting data and insights about commercial business goals such as conversion rates. But combining qualitative and quantitative data streams into a broader picture of the digital user experience so that you can digitally differentiate yourself from competitors by building a sustainable, long-term customer relationship.
Digital Sensemaking is understanding and translating these insights into concrete applications in the digital environment of your company in order to constantly measure and understand whether your customer is served better. Part of this can be done in the way that is often done at the moment: measuring all kinds of commercial metrics (conversion, bounce rates, CTRs, etc.). But by combining this with metrics that are indicators of customer satisfaction and with qualitative data, you can find out why customers drop out or don't come back.
New insights ∞ Launching new versions
You can apply these kinds of insights by implementing very measurable innovations in your digital product development in the shortest possible cycles. An optimized development and rollout process, in combination with the use of existing software, helps with this, because it allows you to realize a new version of your digital product as quickly as possible and to put it in the hands of your customers as quickly as possible and can therefore also gain new insights from its use as quickly as possible.
This speed in processing new insights and launching new versions makes Digital Sensemaking possible. If you have entered this phase as a company, and thus have continuous insight into the relationship you maintain with your customers, then you are really in the next phase in the digital evolution, that of Digital Sensemaking.