| “We’ve all heard that adage, ‘there’s danger in not moving your business at the speed at which it should be moving,’” said Matthew Crocker, Director of Marketing for CX software company Table, at MarTech recently. “Right now, customers are becoming digital first, and let’s be honest, they’re becoming digital everywhere.” Regardless of whether your business began as a physical store, or as an e-commerce play, many customers would like both. For instance, look at how ecommerce home and bed maker Resident moved quickly to establish itself at brick-and-mortar retail chains. Now that customers demand both, it’s the digital connection that brings experiences together, and there’s more pressure for marketers to make it seamless. Seamless doesn’t mean reducing experience to a single channel so there isn’t anything to stitch together. Yet Crocker finds this to be a common method used by marketers, at least at the early stages of transformation. The inclination might be to use a tried-and-true tool like a chatbot and simply assume that no other digital channels are necessary, he said. “A lot of companies are struggling now with the plug-and-play solutions to keep their businesses relevant,” Crocker said. “The easy solution is to follow these methods that bend customers to predictable funnels…but it sacrifices experience for efficiency. It’s a common problem that a lot of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers fall into.” He added that putting the customer first helps improve the transition from brick-and-mortar to digital channels. Read more here. | 