Digital Customer Experience: All You Need To Know

With customers relying heavily on digital channels to make orders or lodge complaints, companies must build efficient digital customer experience strategies. 

While customer experience has generally become more relevant to brand success and customer loyalty, digital CX has had more impact in the past year. Digital customer experience has taken on new importance. According to Salesforce, 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives due to COVID-19. 

Many businesses had progressed in the direction of digital transformation even before the pandemic limited physical interactions across the world. However, the pandemic forced more customers and businesses to resort to digital means of business interaction. 

What Is Digital Customer Experience?

Digital customer experience comprises all experiences your customers have with your business via digital channels. 

Digital CX includes interactions with your company website, social media, chatbots, mobile apps, and any other virtual channel customers use to connect with you. As more digital platforms emerge, customers expect multichannel solutions where they find businesses wherever they go.

With digital CX, customers evaluate your digital customer service quality by gauging their experience with your channels. Customers will ask themselves questions like:

• Did I find it difficult to place an order?
• Was the interface attractive, modern, and easy to understand?
• Did I get a response when I sent a Twitter/Instagram DM?
• How long did it take to get email support?
• Was I able to lodge queries on the mobile app without having to email ‘support’?
• Was the shopping experience seamless, or was the site/app buggy?
• Was the experience personalized to me (or did I feel like just another irrelevant number)?

The answers your clients come up with, whether positive or bad, will impact their subsequent patronage of your service.

Why Digital Customer Experience Is Important

The average customer has come to value service delivery over the actual service. While the quality of products and services is also important for gaining customers, 67% of customers will pay more for products that offer a memorable experience. 

Feeling a personal connection to a brand is so important to customers that 71% are likely to spend more money on purchases for it. 

One thing is for sure if you want to get customers and keep them, you must focus on delivering a premium customer experience. 

And as customers interact more actively with businesses digitally, brands must focus on digital transformation like never before. 

Remember that attention spans are much shorter in the digital world. A patient customer in your physical store, waiting for you to address a complaint, may become dissatisfied and frustrated when interacting digitally. Pay attention to delivering value via the internet to customers, and make it fast. 

Business Benefits Of Digital CX

An excellent digital customer experience is not only advisable, but it is also necessary. Business competition has moved from only product prices and quality to include customer experience. Some CX experts suggest that customer experience might evolve to become the most crucial determiner of consumer patronage. Your business can go further and do better when it implements innovative digital CX. Brands that can build human communities around their products, offer excellent services, and deliver powerful digital experiences have more loyal and engaged customers. 

These are some business benefits of digital CX:

•  Increased Customer Loyalty

When people enjoy great customer service, they tend to patronize the brand for longer. They are also more likely to recommend your brand to their network.

• Higher Customer Retention

When customers feel relevant and valued, they quickly form emotional connections to brands, finding a logical reason to keep purchasing from a specific business. Recurrent customers tell a better story of your brand efficiency than one-time or first-time customers.

• Greater Lifetime Customer Value

A remarkable digital CX brings you customers who, on average, will spend more on your products and for an extended period. It helps you deliver quality services to high-quality customers.

• Reduced Costs Of Service

Integrating automated tools and intelligent AI in your digital offerings or platforms will reduce the costs you incur and increase your efficiency.

• Greater Brand Equity

Delivering great digital CX time and time again will improve the perception customers have of your brand. 

Would you want consumers thinking of the time a simple complaint took your customer support 3 weeks to resolve? Or would you instead be tagged as the customer-centric brand?

Traditional Customer Experience vs. Digital Customer Experience

Is digital customer experience the same thing as traditional customer experience? 

The answer is No.

While they are both centered on customer touchpoints, digital customer experience and traditional customer experience are different things. 

Customer experience is a broad term covering all channels customers use to engage with brands, including traditional support channels and digital contact points.

Digital customer experience, on the other hand, focuses on providing excellent customer experience across virtual interfaces only. 

Hence, digital customer experience is just an aspect of customer experience as a whole, albeit a crucial one. 

Digital Customer Experience Management

When you realize the importance of digital experiences to customers’ perception of your brand, the next step is to use digital means to enhance these experiences.

Digital customer experience management is the process of designing, managing, and creating digital touchpoints that lead your customer through their journey with your brand. 

DCX management increases customer satisfaction, generates higher revenue, and heightens consumer loyalty through internet-based customer service solutions. 

Aligning your company’s efforts across digital channels to predict consumer interests and needs is vital to delivering a great digital experience. 

DCX management has also been affected by COVID19. Market trends have shifted as people are now more cautious with purchases. In the early months of the pandemic, buyers focused on buying household essentials, like foodstuff and toilet paper. Savings hit an all-time high as people panicked. While consumers have since relaxed such purchase rigidity, many have had a mindset shift to only buy what they consider essential.

As a business, your mission is to be an essential service or product to your target market, even if you are a luxury footwear brand, for example. By combining the efforts of all your company departments, utilizing CX data, business, and technology, you can simultaneously grow and reduce costs despite the debilitating effects of the pandemic.

Digital Customer Experience Strategy

When you’re building a DCX strategy, the primary focus should be on understanding your customers. In-depth, data-driven, and personalized understanding of customers. And then you’ll employ this data to meet your customers’ needs.

The following areas are how customers distinguish a remarkable digital experience from an ordinary one.

• Reachability

Customers should be able to find you on the internet. And when they locate you, will you have an active presence on their preferred digital channels?

• Service Convenience

Customers should easily access precise and current information about your brand. Getting quick and live support should be straightforward and efficient.

• Channel Flexibility

Seamless customer experience across multiple channels is essential. Your brand should be consistent across all channels, and you should access a customer’s history on all of them.

• Purchase Convenience

Customers should be able to conduct complete seamless transactions via your digital channels. These channels should be easy to use and proactive in recommending relevant products or services to customers.

• Simplicity

Simple, guided journeys are helpful. For example, when onboarding users on your mobile app, you should make your demo/guide clear and engaging. Websites should be easy to use and have a simple, direct interface.

• Personalization

Recognize each customer as a human with unique needs. Create packages and processes that can adapt to specific customer preferences. 

Digital Customer Experience Best Practices

These are some tips to help your business deliver a better digital customer experience.

• Optimize for mobile

More people are finding information and completing transactions via mobile than on any other device type. Have a mobile-friendly website and invest in interactive mobile apps.

• Simplify purchases

The checkout point is a very sensitive touch point as your customer carries out a transaction with you. Do not give buyers a reason to abandon carts by making checkouts cumbersome.

• Incorporate AI 

Use interactive chatbots on your website to deliver quick responses to customers’ questions or to help them kick-start their journey with your brand. 

• Deliver an omnichannel experience

Collect data from your mobile app, social media, live chat, email, and website to deliver a unified experience. Map out customer journeys to consistently meet their needs on preferred channels.

• Be proactive rather than reactive.

Analyze customer data and feedback to predict and drive your customers’ journey as they interact with your touch points.

The focus of business leaders is now on ‘going digital,’ and digital CX is at its center. Digital customer experience is transforming how companies conduct business, and it isn’t going to stop. Be ahead of the curve by executing an innovative digital customer experience plan that concentrates on your customers and their needs.