It is not news to anyone that most consumers have migrated online.
While brick-and-mortar stores will never go extinct, an increasing number of consumers are searching for products and learning about new brands online.
In response to evolving consumer behaviors and preferences, businesses are developing digital customer experience strategies and investing extensive resources to deliver an enjoyable and memorable experience.
What Is a Digital Customer Experience Strategy?
A digital customer experience strategy is a company’s plan to engage and interact with its existing and potential customers online.
The comprehensive strategy should include the following steps:
- Defining the customer experience objectives
- Identifying the customer touchpoints across channels
- Implementing the tools and setting operational flows in motion
- Tracking and optimizing the customer experience
The strategy leverages multiple digital channels, such as websites, mobile apps, emails, and social media, with the goal of creating a seamless and personalized digital experience for customers throughout their journey.
When designed well and executed successfully, a digital customer experience strategy can improve customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, increase customer engagement, and ultimately, drive revenue growth.
Why Is a Digital Customer Experience Strategy Important for Businesses?
With close to 5 billion internet users worldwide, businesses cannot afford to ignore digital channels and the overall customer experience on these channels.
A digital customer experience strategy is important for businesses because it will determine whether they can meet customer needs and expectations in the digital age.
By successfully developing and implementing a customer experience strategy, marketers can create effective customer interactions and engagements along the digital customer journey.
The strategy will color the overall customer experience throughout the customer journey and determine a company’s success in customer acquisition, customer conversion, and customer retention.
Companies with great customer experiences tend to have higher net promoter scores. This means that their customers are likely to recommend the products or services they buy from you to people they know.
Simply put, a great digital customer experience strategy can make the difference between whether a business continues to grow and profit with its customers or fades into the background of an increasingly competitive market.
Tips For Creating a Concrete Digital Customer Experience Strategy
Now, for the section you came here to read. The tips you can benefit from to create a concrete digital customer experience strategy that will help you with your digital transformation and take your digital presence to the next level.
We have consolidated some of the best practices for creating a digital customer experience that encompasses different aspects of the customer relationship such as customer engagement, customer service, and customer support.
These tips are to ensure that you create a positive customer experience and can easily replicate and adjust it based on each individual customer.
1. Understand the Customer Very Well
The success of any digital customer experience strategy is contingent on how well a company understands its customers.
Understanding customers and what they need, want, and like will greatly influence how you go about crafting your digital customer experience.
To start, gather and analyze the customer data you have available to you.
Companies have more customer data at their disposal than ever before with so many different channels such as physical stores, websites, mobile apps, and social media.
Comb through the data and segment different groups of customers so that you can develop a deep understanding of what each type of customer likes and dislikes about their experience with your company.
Make these insights the foundation for creating a digital customer experience strategy that works.
2. Create a Personalized Experience
A 2021 McKinsey research found that “71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions.” In other words, personalization is a must.
Once you have analyzed and segmented your customer pool, you are ready to personalize their experiences.
Personalization pops up in many digital interactions, whether that is a personalized email with a customer’s name in the subject line or a personalized recommendation section that showcases items that will pique a particular customer’s interest.
Not only do personalized experiences add a more human and VIP touch, but they also make sure that businesses are presenting customers with relevant information that they may need and products they may purchase.
3. Make an Omnichannel Customer Experience
As more channels have emerged, businesses need to link them together to create a seamless customer experience whereby users can go from one channel to the next without disruption to their overall experience.
This is known as the omnichannel customer experience, which the modern consumer, especially millennial and Gen Z consumers, desires from the brands they support.
To make an omnichannel customer experience, companies need to create a consistent and unified experience for customers.
It should allow for easy switching between channels without any disruption so that customers can interact with brands on their own terms via the channels that are most convenient to them.
This task, which involves all physical and digital channels, may sound daunting. Fortunately, there are now solutions on the market to help businesses create omnichannel experience tools which we will touch on in the next section.
Provide Maximum Convenience
Convenience is at the core of a great customer or user experience.
Everything we have mentioned — personalized and omnichannel customer experiences — and everything we will mention deals with maximizing convenience for the customer.
Especially in an increasingly saturated and competitive market, businesses that want to stand out and acquire customers must make it as convenient as possible for customers to move along the customer journey stages.
For brand discovery and research, set up a social media account on the channels your target customers are most active on so they can easily find and learn about you.
For inquiries, use live chats so people who are browsing can ask their questions on the spot and get answers immediately.
For sign-ups and purchases, make the process as short as possible with as few clicks as possible.
The more convenient the customer experience is, the better it is for your company as well since customers are likely to move through the customer journey faster and convert.
Give Attention to Mobile Experiences
Think about the amount of time you spend on your phone versus the amount of time you spend on your computer.
Nowadays, a significant number of consumers, even entire markets, are mobile-first; they prefer using their phones or tablets over their desktops or laptops for accessing the internet.
Businesses need to make sure that their digital customer experience strategy takes the mobile experience into account.
Giving attention to the mobile experience can take many forms, but one simple approach that most businesses have adopted is a responsive web design that adapts to the device the user is viewing the website on.
Such a simple feature guarantees that customers can have the proper and intended experience with your brand regardless of the device they use, which goes a long way toward customer satisfaction.
Always Take And Incorporate Customer Feedback
Going back to the tip about understanding customers, the best way to do this is to go through customer feedback.
Customers are not shy about letting you know what you can do better, whether that is through your customer feedback forms, contact centers, or live chats.
Businesses should incorporate constructive feedback from customers into their digital customer experience strategy because each piece is a customer taking the time to tell you what worked and didn’t work for them.
By reviewing customer feedback, businesses are, in a way, working with their customers to make the experience better for them and ultimately guarantee both customer and business success.
Use Analytics & Maximize AI
Analytics is another way to figure out what elements of the digital customer experience are effective and what elements are not.
Businesses should actively engage in analytics, such as customer analytics and product analytics, to understand how customers are interacting with their brands and products or services.
The objective of analytics is to identify meaningful patterns and extract insights from data in order to empower businesses to make better decisions.
In this case, these actionable observations and insights will help businesses continue to improve their digital customer experience.
Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) can help businesses with this process, as it can more effectively comb through large volumes of data and identify patterns and trends that the human eye may miss.
Beyond analytics, AI solutions can also share the workload when it comes to creating personalized experiences, recommendations, and addressing customers’ questions around the clock.
This is a nice segue into our next section about the tools marketers can use to enhance the digital customer experience.
What Are Some Tools That Can Help You Enhance Your Digital Experience?
We are aware that there are many aspects to the digital experience and what each company is looking for in terms of enhancing the experience is different.
However, there are a few tools that all businesses should consider when thinking about creating and enhancing their digital experience.
Customer Journey Mapping Tool
A customer journey mapping tool simplifies and accelerates this process of creating a customer journey map that businesses can use to visualize the journey customers are on with them. This includes creating touchpoints, identifying pain points, and improving customer experience.
Marketers can refer to existing customer journey map examples to better understand the elements that make up a great customer journey map and how to best leverage their mapping tool.
Digital Experience Platform
A digital experience platform (DXP) integrates the many technologies and features used in digital customer experience management.
Businesses can use the DXP to more efficiently create, manage, and deliver digital experiences across all their channels.
Analytics Platform
An analytics platform empowers businesses to track and analyze their customers as they move along the customer journey.
Woopra offers a customer journey analytics platform that will come in handy for enhancing the digital experience because it allows businesses to really understand the people behind the numbers.
By understanding why people are engaging the way they are with your channel or content, you, as a business, can make data-driven decisions to improve your customer experience and increase your chances of conversions.
Automation Tools
Several automation tools, such as email marketing tools and chatbots, can help marketers with outreach and engagement.
Since you never know when customers will be active on any digital channel, these automation tools can maximize your chances of catching their attention and addressing their issues.
Best Digital Customer Experience Examples
A quick search on the internet finds that Apple is recognized by many as having one of the best digital customer experiences.
The reason is that with Apple, customers can sync everything across all their Apple devices.
This sync creates the omnichannel experience we mentioned whereby users can go from their MacBook to their iPhone to their iWatch and pick up whatever they were doing exactly where they left off.
Another example of a truly great digital customer experience is Sephora.
The personal care and beauty product retailer creates a personalized shopping experience powered by technology that makes the process of looking and trying out a product fun and convenient.
Sephora’s mobile app has an AI feature called Virtual Artist that uses augmented reality technology so customers can try on makeup products virtually and see what it looks like on them without ever having to step foot inside the store.
Both Apple and Sephora make it convenient for customers to use their products, which is one of the reasons why they are so popular with consumers.
Key Takeaways
In 2023, a digital customer experience strategy is a must for brands that want to stay relevant.
To create a great digital customer experience, businesses must put themselves in their customers’ shoes and figure out what will make the customer journey as convenient and relevant as possible.
