In today’s digital age, no business can survive without a solid online presence, but just launching a website isn’t enough. 65% of users say they are influenced by the website or app experience when recommending a brand.
Forbes reported that eCommerce infiltration increased to 21.3 per cent in 2020 from 15.8 per cent in 2019, rendering it more crucial than ever to deliver a flawless digital customer experience.
These are reasons enough to indicate why it’s essential to design an attractive, easy-to-use, and compelling digital customer experience for your target audience.
What is digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience or DCX refers to every digital interaction a customer has with a brand. The activities might include conducting an online search to understand your product, looking at customer reviews on the online marketplace, requesting customer support or self-service portal assistance, or interacting with your mobile app. Ultimately, a digital experience is one in which your customers engage with your brand through the internet.
Most of these online actions take place primarily on the website or app but may also include the below online platforms:
- Social media
- Live chat
- Chatbots
- Forms
- Mobile apps
- Third-party review sites
- Online communities
Why is DCX important?
Despite being crucial, offering a great product or service is insufficient in itself. Throughout the buying process, it is essential to also provide excellent experiences.
No matter what platform or channel your customers use to contact you, it is essential to make sure they feel valued and understood throughout the whole customer journey. Each interaction with a customer must be simple, convenient, and hassle-free. Customer-centricity is an integral part of both offline and online interactions with customers.
To create a positive digital client experience, there are three essential components:
- Was the customer able to successfully finish the task and reach the desired outcome?
- Was the process smooth, simple, and straightforward to follow?
- And most important: Did the customer feel emotionally happy and content after the interaction?
It’s important to think of customers as real people, not numbers going through a funnel. Provide them with a 360-degree interactive and satisfying experience to achieve their loyalty and devotion.
Consider the below digital customer experience statistics:
Digital customer experience vs customer experience
A vital component of customer experience (CX) is the digital customer experience. It is integral to the entire customer experience, which is the impression you’ve left on your customers during their overall interaction with your brand. While CX is about demonstrating empathy, establishing trust, and creating personal connections, DCX is how these efforts are expressed online.
Digital customer experience is the online component of your company’s CX plan. Your customers interact with the brand’s people and products through digital channels. Additionally, the impression they form is based on their personal experiences.
No matter where your customers interact with you, whether it’s in person or virtually, online or offline, they expect consistency throughout the entire journey. They see your brand as one experience. Ensure that you have both people skills and technical expertise to execute digital campaigns and that you ensure a smooth transition between these overlapping worlds.
Benefits of an excellent DCX
A great digital customer experience is now a must-have. For every enterprise, it serves as a key distinction. Customers are more involved, delighted, and dedicated to brands that integrate the three vital components – outstanding products, compelling digital experiences, and unforgettable genuine personal relationships. Below are some additional benefits:
- Increased customer engagement
- Lower rates of consumer attrition or churn
- Increased customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Stronger brand equity
- Lower service costs and customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Best digital customer experience strategies
Online shoppers lose interest in your brand if they are not satisfied with their experience. That is why monitoring and optimizing your digital customer experience is essential. Some best practices that should be followed for an effective digital customer experience strategy are:
Issues with a website, such as a slow load time, can hurt user satisfaction and increase unnecessary expenses for the company. It is critical to provide an enhanced digital interface with flawless online services. Some website optimization recommendations to provide next-level digital customer experiences are below:
- Minimize redirects
- Downsize images
- Shorten and merge files
- Select a more effective web host
- Reduce the number of plugins you have on your website.
- Upgrading tools and technologies
Without a committed and well-equipped customer-facing team, it is impossible to progress in digital customer experience. Implementing the appropriate tools and technology innovations, such as customer touch-point solutions, is crucial for a flexible and well-connected work environment.
These tools facilitate improved productivity, streamlined business procedures, and seamless teamwork amongst teams. Because of this, your customer service representatives are more confident and motivated to satisfy clients with personalized engagements by making wise selections. Some tools that can help are:
- Live chat – Use any messaging platform to integrate live chat into your website. People find chat to be a straightforward way to ask for help because the interactions are asynchronous.
- Chatbots – Implement the AI-enabled customer assistance solution to automate responses, reduce resolution time, and boost performance.
- Self-service – As part of customer support self-service, customers are empowered to find answers by themselves without needing to contact an agent by using a knowledge base, FAQ page, solution articles, and community forums. A self-service portal enhances the digital customer experience and serves as an extension of your help desk.
- Help desk – In essence, a help desk is a type of customer care software that helps in the process and monitors client interactions. By offering customized support, swiftly addressing concerns, and being responsive and sympathetic towards consumer expectations, the encounters are meant to foster trust.
- Omnichannel support
This is why companies ought to think about making their digital customer assistance omnichannel. In this way, if a customer initiates communication with your company by posing some questions to a chatbot on your website, their inquiries can be quickly sent to a live person if they are not promptly answered. A support agent has access to customer information across all communication channels through an omnichannel solution.
- Provide high-quality content
High-quality digital content across multiple channels is critical to creating a superior online customer experience. Quality content depends on your audience and industry, but generally, it should either teach (relevant to solving a problem) or entertain your audience.
- Deploy mobile device optimization
These days and in the time to come, most of the customer interactions will happen through mobile devices. In this scenario, it is a sensible idea to optimize and make all the content ( text, images, videos, checkout process, etc.) mobile-friendly.
- Create a content hub with topic clusters
Develop a content hub if you want to provide a fantastic digital consumer experience that captivates your audience. It enables you to draw leads deeper into your sales funnel, at the very least, more deeply into your ecosystem. As a result, they stay on your website longer, which fosters trust and ultimately increases conversions.
Additionally, it increases topic relevancy and aids in improving Google ranks.
- Utilize automation
You can significantly enhance customer interactions with automation. It allows you to keep a personal connection with clients while expanding your brand for databases of expanding customers. Some tasks that can be automated are:
- Client onboarding
- Customer feedback through surveys and questionnaires
- Email check-ins to pique the attention
- Priority distribution of support requests
- Offering instructional content through email
- Assisting clients in finding information
- Following up and retargeting abandoned carts
- Integrate digital marketing channels
More integration, stronger brand!
Customers tend to switch between several digital channels as they progress through the conversion funnel. Integrating your marketing channels will ensure that clients receive the same high-quality experience throughout the whole digital customer journey.
The entire vibe and experience should be similar regardless of whether the user is speaking with a customer service agent, watching a webinar, or making a transaction.
- Evaluate customer engagement
Analyzing the consumer engagement data might reveal either a good or bad digital customer experience. It assists you in determining the efficacy of various digital touchpoints as well as the actions you can take to optimize them. Different touchpoints depict different forms of customer engagement. For example, CTR may help measure engagement through email whereas a blog post may help measure the bounce rate.
Inspirational examples of digital customer experience
The examples that follow demonstrate what a fantastic digital customer experience genuinely looks like:
Starbucks
Customers can enjoy a smooth omnichannel experience with the Starbucks app. Customers can place their order and collect it at a local shop with just a few fast clicks and swipes. To guarantee a streamlined experience for the customer, every piece of their data is maintained in real-time across a variety of channels. Additionally, customers can also use the app to add money to their accounts and then use that money to make purchases in-store.
Intercom
Intercom, the software firm, specializes in providing great digital experiences to its consumers. They feature a discussion forum, app shop, web-based learning school, in-depth video courses, automated product tours, live chat, and a tonne of webinars in addition to their highly comprehensive and deep knowledge base. Whitepapers and booklets have also been published by them.
Conclusion
Remember, customers must feel satisfied with their experiences with businesses for them to return to make a purchase. This is particularly true for companies that operate exclusively online, where clients evaluate the brand depending on criteria like accessibility, online experience, consistent communication, and multi-channel support. Hence, an excellent digital customer experience plan may help you attract new clients, gain their trust, increase sales, and cultivate enduring connections with existing ones by showcasing your business’s distinctive value.
