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A digital customer experience refers to the total of all online communications customers have with a brand or a virtual interaction between a partner and an organization supported by digital technologies. Digital interaction may start with your brand website or mobile apps, chatbots, and other channels where customers can meet your products or services.
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What is a good digital customer experience?
A great digital customer experience has to provide a fast experience for users as they switch channels or websites to become potential customers. Sometimes, companies with great Digital customer experience provide an organized online experience that delights their partners.
A digital user wants a brand to provide him or her personalized service experience. He/she would like a brand to consider individual preferences while delivering a product or service.
Tips for a great digital customer experience
There are 5 tips for a great digital customer experience for any brand to have good digital customers.
Deliver excellent digital customer communication across all channels.
Provide a consistent customer experience across channels.
Make it convenient & easy for users
Personalized messaging and services.
Make experiences never-ending
The customer experience role is responsible for keeping and updating customer journeys, communicating with users across channels and platforms, and coordinating with all internal partners such as product design, sales, marketing, and account management to keep fine-tuning the users.
What is a good customer experience?
In digital customer experience, consistency is key. A great customer experience is modified, timely, relevant, simple, remarkable, memorable, and reliable. Consistency is an important “umbrella quality” in that all the other qualities need to describe your every experience with a brand.
When the customer experience is the aggregate of communications between a user and an organization, digital customer experience is limited to interactions a customer has through digital technology. And because every interaction a customer has, whether online or offline, shapes their impression of a brand, companies are increasingly forming dedicated digital experience teams.
How to staff a digital experience team?
Digital experience teams help define, understand, and shape a customer's experience across digital channels. Examples of digital channels include websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms.
Digital experience teams help define, understand, and shape a customer’s experience across digital channels. Examples of digital channels include websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms. In addition to building a strategy around digital experiences, digital experience teams also regularly evaluate new technologies that will advance the organization’s digital customer experience.
Whether you fill the roles on your digital customer experience team with current employees, new hires, or consultants, these are some of the responsibilities of the team:
1. Digital analyst
The digital analyst maps the customer journey through digital channels, identifying opportunities for improvement and quantifying their business impact.
2. Digital content marketer
Based on the digital buyer journey, the digital content marketer leads to creating the content at each touchpoint.
3. Digital customer experience leader
Usually reporting to the executive sponsor, the Digital Customer experience leader sets and executes the team’s strategy and leads the day-to-day activities required to execute the digital experience strategy. The team members below typically report to the digital customer experience leader.
4. Executive sponsor
Typically a c-level employee, the executive sponsor is an advocate who provides the leadership commitment necessary for a digital experience team to succeed. This includes securing adequate resources, ensuring cross-functional collaboration occurs effectively, and providing regular updates to the executive team and board of directors.
5. Marketing technologist of any digital channel
Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone, it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect;
Best Practices for Digital Customer Experience
1. Pay attention to essential experiences.
2. Adopt analytics
3. Collect customer feedback
4. Conducting customer testing
5. Create an Omni-channel customer experience
1. Pay attention to essential experiences.
It’s important to focus on mobile experiences because smartphones allow customers to compare companies while they shop. They can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors before they make a purchase. If your website or app doesn't seem to fit their needs, chances are your products won't either. If a brand is designing its digital customer experience, make sure it's mobile responsive. That means when it's displayed on a tablet or phone; the interface automatically adjusts to the smaller screen. This dramatically affects the user experience and makes it much easier to navigate through your content.
2. Adopt analytics
Every part of the business should be actively looking for new ways to improve its channel or app because it is easier to do if you have reporting tools that monitor your digital customer experience. This is the page that customers use most and helps your partners identify friction points within the channel or app. For example, you can pinpoint where leads are abandoning purchases and can work proactively to prevent churn. Or, for returning customers, you can review their favorite tools and adjust your page navigation, so they're easier to find when users revisit your site. Having this insight into how customers engage with your offers helps your team effectively optimize the customer experience.
3. Collect customer feedback
This is another way a brand can collect information by asking users for their feedback. Have them fill out a survey after using your channel or app and ask them if they would recommend it to their peers. You can use a net to promote the survey to collect qualitative and quantitative data on your digital user experience. This should give a good idea of how customers are reacting to your content.
4. Conducting customer testing
It is also another way to decide how much users enjoy using your channels or app. In this setting, a brand selects a group of customers who are asked to test its product or service, and then they provide feedback on specific aspects of the customer’s experience. This gives you chances to pull its channel or app before releasing it to the rest of your user base.
While there are a few different types of user tests, the most popular one is usability testing. Usability testing assesses how easy it is to use and pilot your product. This shows your development team how user-friendly your website or app is.
5. Create an Omni-channel customer experience
The omnichannel experience creates customer delight because they provide more interaction options to users. Many People can engage with a business on a medium that they're comfortable using and aren't forced to work on an interface that they're unfamiliar with.
Digital Customer Experience Trends
1. Improvements in artificial intelligence
2. Increased number of Chatbots
3. More Focus on Predictive Analytics
4. New Augmented Reality Tools
1. Improvements in Artificial Intelligence
When a brand thinks of artificial intelligence, it often thinks of sentient robots that imitate human actions and conversations. While these are fun villains, they aren't accurate representations of how artificial intelligence is used in modern business. Many times artificial intelligence is used to automate business functions and personalize experiences for the users. For example, AI is often planned for email newsletters when companies want to send messages to their entire customer base but want the emails to seem genuine and sincere. So, they use AI to pull data from the CRM and personalize the message with the customer's information.
2. Increased Number of Chatbots
These were once an innovation that companies used to show customers that they were trendy and keeping up with the latest technology. These bots were very limited and could only perform a predetermined series of actions. This made for dull customer experiences that didn't always end with the customer getting what they wanted. Chatbots can answer more routine service questions, which significantly reduces the pressure placed on customer support teams. With bots, support agents can refocus their time and energy on more complex or time-sensitive cases that are more likely to result in customer churn.
3. More Focus on Predictive Analytics
It determines how users of a product or a customer for a brand will react to changes in your business. These reports help business leaders understand customer gratitude and its role in their customers' lives.
As artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to improve, we can expect predictive analytics to become a fundamental tool used by companies with a digital presence. These reports will be built right into the internal user interface and will update with the most recent customer data.
4. New Augmented Reality Tools
Augmented reality has generated a load of cool opportunities to improve the digital customer experience. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a technology that supplements real images with digital elements. Another popular AR trend is the "try-as-you-buy" experience. If your company operates mostly online, you can let customers test out your products using an AR version on their computers. That way, customers don't have to go through the hassle of buying your product or asking for a sample, only to return it a few weeks later.
5. Personalized Customer Experiences
With all of this customer data at your company's fingertips, it's going to be much easier to create personalized customer experiences. Not only will you have a stronger understanding of your customer base, but you'll also have the technology needed to distribute content effectively. And, you'll be able to automate this personally so you can maintain a delightful customer experience as your business grows over time.
The beginner's guide to the experience management
Successful companies don’t react to problems as they happen but rather use experience management to resolve problems before they play out. How does this work? Let’s start by defining experience management. Experience management is the process of closely monitoring every interaction a consumer has with a company to find opportunities for improvement.
Why experience management matters
The more and more businesses are conducted through digital storefronts, it should be the goal of any company to provide the best experience possible. Significant disparity. Customer experience is about more than knowing where and what your customers buy. It’s about being able to craft an experience so personal that it meets all your customers’ needs, thus driving long-lasting loyalty.
How does it work?
Experience management is data-driven. This data can be gathered in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to:
Web-based, in-person, or phone surveys
Moderated user forums and blogs
Focus groups
Direct contact in person or by phone
Analysis of specific customers or unique problems
Analyzing bounce rates, exit rates, and conversion rates on your website
Customer service vs. customer experience management
Customer service and customer experience management are related, but they’re not the same. Customer service is assisting a customer with a product or service your business provided. Customer experience runs deeper. It involves all the ways a business interacts with a customer and then managing data pulled from these interactions to create a better experience in the future. Customer service focuses on one interaction, while customer experience management focuses on every interaction.
Qualities of a good customer experience
Delivering quality customer experiences is important. It should be ingrained in the thought process of everything you do. The Five-Star Experience Management Maturity Model is a great way to measure your company’s maturity in the digital experience management space. Your digital experience should be:
Intentional. Digital experiences must be created with a purpose. What is the action you want your customers to take with each experience you create?
Consistent. A quality digital experience requires a standard brand persona that transcends individual touchpoints. When we say brand persona, we refer to how people perceive your brand every time they interact with it. Your brand persona should be, among other things, friendly and helpful.
Measurable. Your customers’ interactions with your experiences must be quantifiable. That can be the amount of revenue an experience generated or the number of web visits.
Valuable. Every digital experience you invest in must drive revenue or other outcomes important to your business (e.g., downloads or web traffic). Without value, the investments you make in your experiences aren’t worth it.
Personal. You must have an understanding of your audience that’s deep enough to deliver tailored experiences.
How to get started and get on board with it
One of the biggest shifts in recent years has been consumer demand for personalized experiences. It is so important that according to a recent Avionos study, 88% of buyers said they’d deflect from a supplier whose digital channel couldn’t keep up with their needs. A great way to combat this shift is through implementing experience management. A good first step is to dictate what you want your customer to experience when interacting with your business. From there, you can curate low-lift surveys to start monitoring how the vision you have for your company aligns with customer perception. If your business is looking for bigger results, consider partnering with a consultancy, like Avionos, to strategize a customer experience game plan.
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