What is the digital customer experience? The ultimate guide

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Things are changing really fast in the CX landscape. Just three years ago, Gartner found that for 58% of customers, digital experience had no effect on their purchase decisions.

Today, 81% of businesses find digital customer experience extremely or very important, focusing a large share of their attention on building unique experiences.

Why is digital customer experience gaining such traction? As technology evolves and customer journeys move to the digital space, businesses must meet them there to ensure satisfaction and loyalty, which, in turn, strengthens the brand’s competitiveness. This post will explore digital customer experience and outline a roadmap for building it.

What is digital customer experience?

The term “digital customer experience”, or DCX for short, describes any interaction between a customer and a brand via digital channels: websites, chats and chatbots, email, or social media. When you browse a company’s catalog on the website, read reviews on a social network, or open an email, you are engaging with a digital touchpoint and perceiving a DCX.

Many interactions represent digital customer touchpoints: online ads, social media posts, surveys, push notifications, support chats, and more. Each contributes to the overall digital experience the customer has with your brand, affecting their further buying behavior.

Just like regular customer experience, DCX is defined by three main components: success, effort, and emotion.

Emotion has the strongest effect on the overall experience. For customers, the most important thing in their interaction with your brand is how it makes them feel. This gives you a great clue about how to build relationships to create the best CX.

The role of digital experiences in your CX program

Today, customers expect good experiences from every business they deal with. As many as 54% of them would prefer slow-moving traffic to poor CX. The same applies to digital customer experience, as, in the customer’s mind, there is no difference between regular and digital CX. They want to get an equally good experience at every touchpoint, digital or otherwise.

An effective DCX strategy brings a number of valuable long-term benefits for brands.

• Higher customer retention and loyalty: Good experience leads to repeat purchases and prevents customer churn.
• Increased customer lifetime value: Customers who receive positive experiences and, therefore, make repeat purchases with the brand end up spending more over the entire time they are with the brand.
• Improved brand recognition: A seamless and consistent experience across channels creates a steadily positive brand image with customers, boosts trust, and enhances the brand’s reputation.
• Data-driven insights: You can analyze the data obtained during customer interactions by using specialized software to build strong digital experiences. You can use this data to make informed decisions and better align with your customers’ expectations.
• Stronger competitiveness: With digital technology gaining traction, customers prefer brands offering omnichannel digital customer experiences.

The components of a digital customer journey

Customers perceive experience as a unified concept creating a generally positive or negative sensation. For brands, however, creating a smooth digital customer experience journey is a multi-part task, where each component is important.

1. User experience (UX)

Aim for an intuitive journey across your brand’s digital platform that creates a feeling of success and accomplishment. To build a positive UX, pay attention to the following components.

• Website and app design: Focus on creating a user interface that is visually appealing and intuitively clear. If you want to delegate website design to third-party companies, you could rely on presentation design services. Include important information about your business to help outsourced talents perform their task better.
• Navigation and speed: Implement logical and clear navigation to enable straightforward customer journeys. At the same time, make sure that the pages load fast, as slow loading dramatically reduces the conversion rate — from 40% at one second to 29% at three seconds.

2. Personalization

By using customer data, you can create tailored experiences to reach individual customers and boost satisfaction. As many as 71% of customers expect a personalized approach, so it is a good idea to adopt the following personalization techniques.

• Tailored content and offers: Customer data analytics allows you to select content and product recommendations that resonate with individual customers.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): By leveraging the computing power and speed of advanced AI/ML tools such as Adobe Target or Dynamic Yield, you can analyze your customers’ demographics, browsing and purchase history, and social media activity to create highly personalized content and recommendations.

3. Omnichannel interactions

Strive to create consistent experiences at every customer contact channel. Here’s how to achieve them.

• Seamless integration across channels: Customers moving from your mobile app to your website should not feel any difference in UX. At the same time, maintain consistency in the public-facing content that you share on social media, in marketing emails, and in your blog.
• Effective omnichannel strategies: A holistic omnichannel strategy includes defining your target customer, selecting your preferred interaction channels, mapping digital customer journeys across each channel, and building a strong, unified experience at every touchpoint.

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Best practices for creating a digital customer experience strategy

Building an effective digital customer experience strategy may be daunting. To help you get started, we outlined a basic roadmap for implementing great DCX.

1. Understand your audience and use segmentation

Any marketing strategy starts with researching your customers. By defining your target audience and customer persona, you will understand how to create digital customer experiences that reach them. This is how you do it.

• Market research techniques: Use customer surveys, interviews, and data analytics to gather information about your typical customer. All details — from age, location, gender, and education to website preferences and mobile device types — will help you build an “image” of your target customer.
• Customer persona development: Based on the details you gathered, define one or several personas representing your ideal customer. Once you have a vision of your product’s typical consumer, you can research trends and patterns in their buying behavior and use these trends to shape digital customer journeys.
• Audience segmentation: Break your target audience into groups unified by similar behavior. For example, you can identify customers who only shop at discounts, first-time customers, brand loyalists, and others. Such segmentation helps you personalize interactions further.

2. Map and optimize your customers’ journeys

To create great digital customer experiences, you need to understand where and how interactions with customers occur. This knowledge will help you optimize experiences at each touchpoint. Consider the following aspects when doing so.

• Journey mapping tools: Many tools can help you build an entire customer journey map. Some provide analytics to research customer behavior (Google Analytics, Hotjar), while others simplify and accelerate the visualization of journey maps (Gliffy, Lucidchart). Choose those that best meet your requirements.

• Continuous optimization: Continue to monitor customer feedback and data analytics results to identify pain points. Address them to ensure a consistently smooth journey across all touchpoints.

3. Go omnichannel

By providing multiple communication channels, you facilitate customer interactions with your business. To create a perfect digital customer experience, make sure all channels comprise a cohesive ecosystem and are easy to switch between.

Take into account the factors below before going omnichannel.

• Channel integration strategies: Use customer data to consistently segment and personalize interactions across your entire network and create unified experiences. Allocate sufficient resources to support all channels. And, of course, maintain the same brand style and voice wherever you meet your customers.
• Opt for multichannel if omnichannel isn’t possible: For some businesses, especially startups, a truly omnichannel strategy may be too costly to implement. Choose channels that are most optimal for your business and develop them until you can switch to a fully omnichannel experience.

• Monitor and adapt: Use monitoring tools, for example, Semrush or Brandwatch, to measure the performance of your communication channels and customer satisfaction. Adapt your strategy if necessary.

4. Improve the mobile experience

With the number of mobile users worldwide forecast to reach $7.5 billion by 2025, businesses are adopting a mobile-first approach, creating products and experiences focused primarily on mobile device use. Consider these methods if you want to do the same.

• Mobile-first design principles: Your app’s design, speed, and responsiveness may earn or lose you points even before customers begin the purchase process. Design with mobile experiences in mind to get a competitive advantage right from the start.
• Responsive design techniques: Pay attention to how your app is displayed on mobile devices of different types and sizes. Responsiveness contributes to creating the first impression, which may be the factor pushing the customer to continue using the app or look for a competitor.

5. Provide tools for self-service 

Even if you provide full-scale support, allowing users to reach out to a customer service rep, never ignore self-service resources. For the majority of people — 73%, to be exact — the ability to resolve issues independently is important.

• Self-service tools for digital customer experiences: Today’s technology offers multiple opportunities to set up self-service options for customers. Consider creating a knowledge base (KB), configuring a chatbot, or designing a frequently asked question page.
• Monitor and update self-service content: It is essential that the content you offer through your self-service portal is up-to-date and consistent. Make sure that the information on all channels is synchronized and that customers get the same experience, whether they use your KB, chatbot, or a human-powered support service.

6. Scale with AI and automation

With the growing adoption of AI and, especially, generative AI, customer interactions are transforming. The broad analytical and text-generating capabilities of AI tools open new dimensions in building unique digital customer experiences. Here’s how to use AI to grow your business.

• AI for personalization and segmentation: Leverage the speed and accuracy of AI algorithms to analyze your target audience, identify fine patterns, and achieve hyper-segmentation of customers for ultimately personalized experiences.
• AI for omnichannel experiences: Use generative AI to create content for multiple communication channels. These algorithms can assist in generating content for chatbot scripts, emails, and social media posts with a high degree of personalization.

7. Collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback

Implementing a system of tools and measures for building digital customer experience is just the beginning. To assess the performance of your techniques and make the necessary adjustments, you need to listen to your customers’ feedback and continuously act on it. 

Use the following techniques to do that.

• Feedback collection methods: To receive feedback, you can contact customers in multiple ways: surveys, social media polls, reviews, and follow-ups. In addition, practice social listening with sentiment analysis to find out whether your brand is mentioned in a positive, negative, or neutral context.
• Feedback-based adjustments: Use feedback data to gain insights into your audience’s perception of their digital customer experience and make improvements and adjustments whenever necessary.

Conclusion

Digital customer experiences cannot be ignored. Customers interact with brands over digital touchpoints more and more often. Your success in the digital universe directly depends on choosing the right strategy for building CX and being ready to change when change is needed.

We hope our roadmap of building an actionable digital customer experience strategy helps you create or improve your customer interactions and establish a strong bond with your audience, boosting your sales and competitiveness.