Oct 07, 2020 | stephen.brown@veeva.com

Often the achievement of digital excellence can be mistakenly focused solely on engaging with customers through more digital channels. In reality, there are many more components to balance and prioritise throughout a digital transformation process, including whether or not the chosen digital channels serve a meaningful purpose to your customers – a purpose they can trust.

The importance of customer trust today

It is no secret that customer trust has declined over recent years, especially as it relates to digital. According to the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, consumers around the world are questioning their trust in institutions with more than half (55%) of the global population stating they do not trust businesses overall. And while technology was viewed as the most trusted individual sector (75%), it also reported the greatest year-on-year decline of 4 percentage points.

This is a wake-up call for businesses and technology to embrace a new way of effectively building and maintaining trust by balancing digital competence with ethical behavior.1

1 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer Report, https://www.edelman.com/trustbarometer

What does digital excellence mean?

Digital excellence means just this – to use technology in a way that creates this balance of competent content (content that delivers on the promises of your organisation) with ethical digital engagement (doing the right thing for your customers). This includes finding the right frequency and the right mix of channels to not just keep a customer’s attention, but to also keep their trust.

Three tips to find the balance while maintaining customer trust

1) Look at digital engagement from the customer’s point of view.

While this may sound like an obvious concept, it is frequently overlooked or misunderstood – especially in today’s world of limited interactions and constant change. The use of digital channels for engagement shouldn’t be increased or used more just for the sake of it. If you consider digital engagement from the customer perspective and implement according to their specific needs, you are showing your competence and understanding of the drivers for your chosen engagement channels. In other words, if the form of engagement makes sense to the customer, they are more likely to trust and respond accordingly.

2) Use technology for enablement, not replacement.

Any technology you choose for customer engagement should aim to enable, not replace. COVID has forced many industries to accelerate their digital engagement strategies, and therefore forced the majority of their customer relationships to become virtual. However, there is still clear ethical value in prioritising in-person interactions given that many of these relationships were built on the foundation of face-to-face relationships.

3) Use digital for strategic use, not overuse.

This is where your organisation’s balance between frequency of digital channels is most important, with a prime example being emails as a main form of communication to your customers.

Veeva CRM Approved Email was designed to enable a single source of compliant materials by ensuring that only approved content can be sent to Healthcare Professionals (HCPs), providing them with a sense of trust and reliability. But digital excellence does not mean digital overuse. If this form of approved content and trusted engagement started to be used for mass email distribution – which Veeva Pulse data has shown can contribute to a reduction in share-of-voice for that therapeutic area – that trust could quickly be diminished as it would indicate lack of thought about how best to use that channel.

Balancing competent content with ethical digital engagement

To achieve digital excellence across your organisation, ensure you are building a strategy around trusted content that follows through on the promises of your business while being delivered through digital channels that make sense to your customers.

Striving for digital excellence: A discussion with life sciences leaders across the APAC region

To learn more about the important balance between digital competence and ethical digital behaviour, please contact Stephen Brown

Register today.

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