We live in a digital world these days as we fulfill all our requirements with online shopping, make long-term friends or life partners via social media, and travel the globe by booking tickets from a laptop or a mobile phone. This is what makes people’s life richer and more convenient in various ways. 

When more and more users are moving online, this brings new challenges for businesses that often struggle to adapt to the latest technologies and build a strong connection with customers by delivering impeccable customer service. 

This is the point where digital customer experience plays a major role. Businesses need to develop a solid online presence when delivering digital customer experience. It has been found that 65% of consumers said that their experience on your app or website is highly important if they are willing to recommend your brand to others.

But nowadays, it’s just not enough to have an app or a website for your company as you need to go beyond and provide a good digital customer experience that is delightful, engaging, and user-friendly. Building a solid framework or a plan on how people can interact with your company online will increase your customer loyalty, and sales and grow your customer base. 

This guide will help you uncover everything you should know about digital customer experience management including the importance of digital customer experience, how to improve digital customer experience, its best practices, and many more.

What does digital experience mean?

A digital experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer using the latest digital technologies to meet the demands by providing a great digital experience. With modern technologies and an internet connection, it has now become possible for companies to go beyond the paper process. 

They can now take the advantage of latest innovations and trends for their online business website, mobile apps or online sites that can be easily accessed through smart devices and users can now interact with a company in no time. People can purchase items online, make payments online and receive updates on their mobile devices about the latest offers and discounts on products.

What does digital customer experience mean?

Digital customer experience also known as digital CX is the total number of online interactions a user gets with your company that generally takes place on an app or a website of your brand. Various channels such as live chat, social media platforms, or emails play a crucial role in how customers connect and interact with your brand online. 

Some examples of digital customer experience include: finding a location of a store through an app, checking reviews of a brand before making any purchase, or troubleshooting any technical issues on mobile phones. 

Digital consumer experience can be provided through mobile apps or a website of a company. It can also take place through a third-party app such as Google Business Profile which helps to find the location or contact details of a particular company. 

Today, the digital environment is growing rapidly and companies need to stay updated with the latest changes so that they can plan for an effective customer journey map. It’s not about how customers find your digital presence but you need to use appropriate technologies so that you can improve your customer experience by which users can interact with your business in the best possible manner. 

You need to carefully understand your digital touchpoints and the way they are affecting your brand’s loyalty and consumer perception. 

3 fundamental ingredients to deliver a great digital consumer experience are:

1. Achievement – Did the consumer achieve their goals by completing all the tasks?
2. Efforts – Was the entire process and experience smooth and easy?
3. Experience – Did they feel good by interacting with your brand?

Digital customer experience – examples

1. Apple

It provides seamless digital customer services with iCloud so that users can always access their data such as photos, emails, messages, or contact details no matter what Apple device users purchase.

2. Curlbox

It is a curly hair care product company that offers exclusive and affordable monthly subscription box services. With their interactive chatbot present on their site, customers can quickly submit their inquiries or requests such as shipping queries or subscription updates.

3. Starbucks

With the innovative Starbucks mobile app, customers get easily notified if they are nearer to their store so that they can place a customized order of their drink, pay with their app and get to know the time they can come and pick up their order. This enhances customer engagement, increases sales, and helps in the formulation of effective customer lifecycle management.

5. Amazon

Amazon lets its users buy anything from their online store by just clicking a few buttons. They can easily browse, research, and purchase a product which builds customer loyalty and reduces customer churn rate. They also help customers when something went wrong in between the purchase process.

Importance of delivering a great digital customer experience

Today, customers don’t interact with the person of your company but they go through the process of a digital customer journey. They generally browse and research for products, make a buying decision and complete their online purchase process which means their impression of a business is entirely based on digital experience. 

If you have a website, then 47% of users expect your webpage loads in 2 seconds or less time. If your site does not provide proper digital customer services, then your leads may even shift to your competitors. Here, your business might need a customer service outsourcing company to improve your site’s retention rate and your brand’s reputation.

A new standard has been developed for digital channels which are to have super-friendly websites and mobile apps to have a fruitful digital customer journey. Digital CX touchpoints such as online forms and chatbots are largely perceived by online customers as they provide a delightful online experience. 
According to the survey by Fullstory, 74% of consumers expect your company to use technologies in various ways to create a better user experience. A planned digital customer experience strategy helps you to anticipate and map out how users are moving across various online channels.

Difference between customer experience and digital customer experience

Digital experience is a broad term that covers different digital channels and is based on single interactions. On the other hand, digital customer experience is a total of all the digital interactions that a user has with a particular brand or a company. 

Rather than improving digital customer experience at individual touchpoints, companies are hiring a customer success team so that they can improve their mobile design and responsiveness, communication channels, user interface, resolving customer queries, and generating real-time data at all interactions. Digital customer experience is a major component of customer experience(CX). 

The customer experience (CX) is a total of all impressions that users come across in the entire customer journey. It is a digital medium used by your customers in interacting with both your products and the people of your company. The final perception they take with them is the experience with your company. 

The digital customer experience (DCX) mainly focuses on both the front-end and back-end processes optimization which ultimately benefits the customers and helps them in achieving their goals. Businesses generally put themselves into the shoes of their customers when they talk about ways to improve digital customer experience and try to understand the importance, impact, and scope of various digital channels from their viewpoint.

4 Common misunderstandings related to digital customer experience

1. It’s all about strategies and technologies

Companies put more focus only on discussions related to digital transformation in greater depth. Even if the companies use the right technologies, they still need to build a customer-centric culture in the organization to practically improve the digital experience with a powerful strategy.

2. It’s only related to marketing and sales

Companies think that digital experience only focuses on marketing and sales but it covers the overall digital customer journey such as engagement, brand loyalty, customer service, retention, and many more. It also improves the entire customer lifecycle and simultaneously businesses can earn a profit on a large scale.

3. Customers only think about the digital

Customers generally don’t think or divide their experience into both digital and non-digital categories. They just want to access your company through a laptop or a mobile device in the most cost conveniently and efficient channel they are using.

4. Digital-only brands can provide DCX

All companies should have their presence on online platforms to create a great impact on the current digital economy. Using digital technologies can provide a great customer experience and can drive more sales and revenue for all businesses and not just only for digital-based brands.

How can you develop a digital customer experience?

1. Mapping your digital customer journey

Firstly, you need to outline all the processes or actions that take place on your website. Once you know how customers are achieving their objective with your site, you put them in the place of those buyers and map out each stage using the customer journey mapping tool. Finally, you compare your data and develop an insight on how to optimize your digital customer services.

2. Personalize your service and provide an omnichannel customer experience

If you want to provide a unique digital experience to each customer, then you can perform an audience segmentation by dividing them based on channel preferences or distinct content. 
Now you can personalize your content across different platforms using the content personalization tool. With this, you can have different variations of a single content on all your platforms which will help to provide a unique digital consumer experience.

3. Provide real-time customer engagement services

In today’s digital world, if prospects don’t find an answer to their questions on your website, then they might don’t make a purchase decision.

It’s extremely important to deliver real-time customer support so that users can immediately interact with your organization. For this, you can use chat support services to provide a personalized digital experience.

How can you improve your digital customer experience?

1. Take the opinion of your customers

You can guess what your customers think or you can simply ask what they feel about the digital environment of your company or the digital experience that you provide. 

For productive digital customer experience management, you can also gain valuable insights from your company’s users by conducting regular surveys of those people who visit your site or app but don’t make any purchases. With this, you will know the areas where your company lack and hence you can find scope for improvement.

2. Build a customer-centric culture in the organization

Your employees should always know what role they play in delivering customer experience and the method of communicating effectively with the upset customers as it will help in the long-run and smooth functioning of your business.

3. Take necessary actions to improve your DCX

All these important answers will be on the data that you collect from your website which has all the facts and figures in detail.

5 Best practices of digital customer experience

There are many good practices that you can follow to ensure digital experience at all stages.

1. Research your primary customer journey in detail

Touchpoints at each stage are building blocks of delivering a great digital experience. The key here is to understand the digital customer experience strategy and to ask the right question at the right time.

Check your site’s payment and checkout process, first impression, or the look of the home page of your eCommerce store or places where users generally get stuck.

2. Know detailed information about your audience

Before you start providing a digital experience, you should always know your audience. One great method is to find out about your buyer’s persona such as who is buying your products, tastes and preferences, location, etc. 

By knowing the buyer’s persona, you can tailor your digital customer experience strategy to meet the desires and needs of your target audience. You can create a customer journey map and determine the important digital touchpoints of your customers.

3. Pay more attention to the customer experience through mobile devices

If you have an app or a website for your company, then you need to focus on the mobile device experience. According to Statista, almost 90% of the global population uses mobile devices to search for anything online. It’s because smartphones are easy to carry and consumers can compare different companies when they look for a product. 

Thus, you need to make sure that your website or app is mobile responsive. This will dramatically affect your user experience as the content on your site will become much easier to navigate on different mobile devices.

4. Improve your customer feedback strategy

Another way to improve your digital experience is to ask for feedback from your customers. Once they use your website or app, ask them to fill out the form so that they can inform you about the necessary recommendations. 
You can also use a Net Promoter Score (NPS) for quantitative and qualitative data and then develop a goal-oriented customer feedback strategy.

5. Check your insight by using an analytics tool

You should be actively looking to monitor your digital experience by checking insights and improving your digital customer experience management. You can use software such as Google Analytics to track the performance of each webpage so that your team can identify points where your website lacks. 

With this, you can prevent churn and find out why the leads are abandoning purchases after they add products into the cart. If you are on social media, then you can also monitor or track the engagement and sentiments of your audience and then optimize your content accordingly for the best results.

Conclusion

We live in a digital age where buyers expect quick solutions to their issues with your company and need a quick improvement of their experience across different digital channels. The use of numerous platforms and methods to engage with your customers has increased rapidly resulting in digital transformation and making customer experience critical for the success of any company. 

Customers now only choose to engage and interact with your company only if you are providing a personalized digital experience and resolve issues immediately as they arise. You need to thoroughly understand the ins and outs of digital experience, create a result-oriented customer journey map and stick with the best practices of DX that will help in creating a profitable online business.

We have covered all the aspects of digital customer experience which will help your company in improving the user experience at all stages of its lifecycle. You can also check information about customer success vs. customer experience to know more.