TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. What is the digital customer experience?
3. Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Vs Customer Experience (CX)
4. Digital Customer Experience Best Practices
5. Trends Influencing Digital Experiences
6. Successful Online Experience Strategies of Leading Brands

Introduction

When building digital customer experiences, businesses can no longer ignore building a solid online presence. Research shows that 65% of consumers prioritize their website experience when determining whether or not to recommend a brand. In today’s world, it’s imperative that digital experiences are more personalized and targeted to influence the customer’s decisions. Launching a web portal and waiting for results is no longer enough. You must develop a digital customer experience that inspires user-friendly adoption, engaging interfaces, and delightful interactions. Audience delight must drive successful online marketing.

If you aren’t sure how to approach a digital experience strategy (DCX) for 2022, this guide has everything you need to know to get started. Read ahead to understand the drivers of change in digital experience management and online marketing. Let’s explore ways to influence a positive CX to foster delightful customer journeys.

What is Digital Customer Experience?

The digital customer experience (DCX) refers to every interaction customers have with your brand via digital media. Most user interactions happen on your website or application. Social media, search, email, and live chat are all channels that influence the online user journey. A DCX strategy helps you leverage how consumers connect with your brand to position the best products and services for users online.

Why You Must Identify Your DCX Strategy

In the virtual age of autonomous cars and door-to-door drone delivery controlled by personal devices, a digital experience is indispensable. Online consumer touchpoints like surveys, ad clicks, and chatbots are vital to modern industrialists. Companies gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior and patterns by studying user-generated data. It has thus become pivotal to create and nurture delightful online experiences with your brand’s products or services.

When a consumer finds that your digital platforms match their expectations, you foster brand loyalty by transforming customer experiences using data. For example, a new lead to your SaaS product should easily find product details through your website content and pages. They should understand what to purchase from you, and returning customers should just as easily navigate your web portal.

Customer support features built into your website or app increases the chances of identifying people who need your solutions. A digital experience strategy can reinvent the way people perceive your brand. You can facilitate interactive experiences for your customers to experience your brand’s ethos seamlessly.

A recent FullStory survey revealed that 74% of customers expect brands to use existing technology in diverse ways to improve their experiences. And 75% of the customers surveyed desired optimal experiences via new technologies. Undoubtedly, the digital customer is aware and expects only the best!

A good digital strategy powers brands to anticipate and map the customer journey online to foster a positive customer experience (CX) by reaching customers where they are. By creating cohesive experiences for the customer, your brand builds loyalty.

Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Vs Customer Experience (CX)

Everywhere in the world, digital customer experience is becoming the key component of customer experience. Customer experience, or CX, refers to the impression you leave on your customers during their whole journey with you. CX is the merger of customers’ various touchpoints and interactions with your representatives and products.

DCX is the underlying focus of your digital experience strategy as well. Using digital mediums, your customers can interact with your people and products. Their understanding of your business and its offerings is based on their digital experience. Digital customer experience management refers to mapping this customer journey at every touchpoint with your brand’s digital presence to increase marketable availability.

The image below illustrates some key differences between DCX and CX approaches in retail.

Digital Customer Experience Best Practices

Even if your digital customer isn’t the majority of your customers, digital experience management is imperative to modernizing your approach to the market.

Following are seven digital customer experience best practices you can employ right away.

• Knowing your customer
• Building omnichannel engagement
• Delivering mobile-friendly experiences
• Adopting user analytics
• Collecting customer feedback
• User testing
• Future-ready strategy

 

1. Knowing your customers

Before building the digital customer experiences they love, you need to outline the ideal customer personas. Buyer personas are an effective method of understanding who is buying your product and why. Using personas to identify customer desires and needs can help tailor your DCX strategy for them.

To build personas, you can start by asking questions like, When your customer finds your app, what do they want to achieve? By mapping out their journey into essential steps taken, you can determine which aspects of your app experience to improve or what new features to add.

1. Building omnichannel engagement

Omnichannel experiences are delightful for customers since there are various communication options available to them. Businesses can engage their customers on their preferred medium, which makes their experience seamless.

Being present on more channels makes your brand more visible and accessible, inspiring greater trust. Your customers are thus more likely to continue buying from your brand. Omnichannel strategies for CX transformation imply that all your channels are interconnected as though they were speaking to each other. Unifying various communication touchpoints with an omnichannel engagement strategy creates a consistent and uninterrupted experience for your customers. When customers find you on the medium they most frequently use, it’s easier for them to interact with your content online.

1. Delivering mobile-friendly experiences

Mobile experiences are essential for both websites and apps. Up to 90% of all global internet usage is via mobile devices. Smartphones are handy, easily accessible, and allow customers to compare brands while shopping. They can easily see branded content and evaluate your offering against competitors’ offerings before buying. If your mobile experience doesn’t help, they won’t bother looking through the product pages.

When strategizing your digital customer experience, mobile-friendliness is a must-have. When displayed on a phone or tablet, your application interface should be able to adjust automatically to the resized screen. The mobile user experience dramatically impacts consumer decisions when interacting with your branded content.

1. Adopting user analytics

Your digital strategy is a process of continuous improvement. Today, software plugins make it easier for you to collect data and create reports to analyze the digital customer journey.

Platforms like Google Analytics and Apple App Analytics have in-built features to track pages customers interact with frequently and guide your teams to identify problem areas. Any friction within the website or app can be resolved to ensure that your customers access everything they need conveniently.

Also, eCommerce companies can effortlessly pinpoint where leads abandon their carts while shopping in real-time. For returning customers, brands can study their favorite pages and adjust their experiences to personalize the navigation. In return, this increased visibility gained by adopting user analytics software helps companies better acquire, retain, and engage loyal customers.

Besides the website and app experience, you can also measure areas of DCX requiring your attention, like email, where you can find better ways to strategize outreach programs and open rates using data. Also, when your brand’s social media channel leverages a social listening tool to track customer sentiment and engagement, you can ensure the optimal delivery of content. Gaining insights into the CX of online users helps refine your digital experience strategy continuously as new market opportunities are leveraged.

1. Collecting customer feedback

Customer feedback is the central piece of the customer experience. You can gain information from the customer by asking for their feedback about a product, service, person, or experience with your brand. A pop-up survey while using your app or website to gather feedback on whether they would recommend you to someone is a classic example of acquiring feedback.

Using an NPS, or Net Promoter Score, to gain quantitative and qualitative insights into the digital experience of customers helps plan for better branding activities. You can leverage data about how customers react to your content to create more relevant content.

1. User testing

User testing is a great way to determine whether customers enjoy using your digital assets and channels. A group of users, usually your customers, are asked to test your product experience in the user testing environment. Their feedback is collected to work on specific features of the user experience. Testing ensures that your website or mobile app is fully functional and efficient when it’s released to all your customers in the future.

The most popular type of user testing is usability testing, which assesses how intuitive it is to navigate your digital experience. Users are required to perform simple tasks, which are evaluated based on their ability to get the job done. This testing method gives your software developers an idea of your website’s or app’s user-friendliness.

1. Future-ready strategy

Digitalization is rampant and evolving rapidly. Your DCX strategy should adapt accordingly. Without a digital CX strategy for 2022, your business is compromising on untapped market opportunities. And if you are to implement the digital experience best practices, you may as well start right now.

As technology advances, new digital trends will emerge and redefine customer expectations and experiences. Identifying the trends suited for your expansion goals and preparing to evolve with your digital experience strategy is key. For the best results, it’s always suggested to involve everybody in your organization while identifying a digital strategy for your employees, customers, and business objectives.

Trends Influencing Digital Experiences

Some great digital customer experience trends influencing customer perception show popular use cases across industries. Digital adoption is widespread, and the implications of more agile business processes to govern customer touchpoints are revolutionary. Being aware of these drivers of digital customer experience transformation is pivotal to strategizing your business expansion roadmap in 2022.

Key trends influencing digital customer experience include:

• AI advancements
• Increasing Chatbot adoption
• Imrpoved self-serivces
• Predictive analytics
• Augmented Reality (AR)
• CX Personalization
• Data privacy and security

 

1. AI Advancements

Advancements in AI have skyrocketed innovation and digital adoption across industries globally. We are often caught thinking of sentient human-like robots that are natural at conversation. Although Sci-Fi villains aren’t an accurate representation of AI used in business, they do present limitless possibilities.

The most popular technologies leveraged are AI used to automate business processes and personalize the customer experience. For example, AI programs to generate email newsletters can create multiple templates to send to a large consumer base. This prevents the message from being misconstrued as insincere, boosting credible brand engagement.

Using information collected from vast customer databases in your CRM, you can personalize bulk emails with customer names and other information easily. This allows agents to facilitate and govern customer interactions purposefully. Customers love personalized experiences and using AI to deliver users interactive content changes the branding game forever.

1. Increasing Chatbot adoption

Chatbots are getting smarter. Businesses of all sizes use chatbots and virtual assistants to guide customers through their journey. Previously, bots were in limited availability and had fewer functionalities to execute complex actions. This resulted in the inefficient frontline, customer-facing operations for many businesses earlier. But now, chatbots are designed to get customers exactly what they want.

Juniper Research forecasts that in 2022, 75% of business inquiries will be efficiently resolved by chatbots. The bots are further estimated to save businesses of all sizes up to 2.5 billion work hours by the end of 2023. Significantly reducing the burden on your customer support teams, a chatbot streamlines your frontline operations for agile and responsive customer support services.

1. Improved Self-services

Customers dread waiting for long hours to get support. Thankfully, they don’t have to. Businesses of all types are already focusing their efforts on self-service portals for their employees and customers.

Besides chatbots, self-service capabilities include other areas like:

1. a) Workflow automation: This is aimed at deploying self-operating business processes that automate manual tasks, minimizing human involvement and saving time and resources. For example, when a customer submits an inquiry for a specific product, an automated email is triggered to engage with the customer while they make up their mind.
2. b) Knowledge bases: These comprise extensively searchable databases for customers to access resources about your services or products. An example would be the FAQs pages on many company websites. When information is made readily available, it streamlines the purchasing experience and frees up your customer service agents for more strategic work.

1. Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics are used to determine how customer interactions influence your business. For example, how will customers react to your partnership with an English football club? Does this partnership cater to your goals of engaging with the desired target group?

By generating AI-powered reports, business leaders can better understand, define and predict customer behavior and position efforts to improve their experiences.

The advancements in AI and ML will accelerate the development and adoption of predictive analytics software. Fundamentally, to fuel your digital presence, you must adopt software that generates an urgency to reach your customers with an effective pitch. 

For this, reports can be built into the internal mechanisms of your website or app interface, which is updated with each customer interaction. Using this data, business leaders can make decisions confidently for the company and with customers’ best interests in mind.

1. Augmented Reality (AR)

The Metaverse is here to stay, and Augmented Reality (AR) furnishes brands with numerous opportunities for DCX transformation. AR technology replaces real images and environments with digital worlds, like text overlays and computer-generated graphics. AR for customer service has huge potential. Some brands are already substituting in-person customer operations with virtual product displays that are more accessible, interactive, and convenient.

When a customer visits the store, they can simply use their smartphone to scan products and get more information – like nutrition, product details, customer reviews, safety rating, etc. By reducing the steps taken to purchase a product, the customer finds it easier to get what they want at the right time.

A popular example of AR in retail is the “try-as-you-buy” experience. If your brand has online outlets, you can offer customers a virtual try-on option. Using virtual reality and augmented reality, they can use a version of themselves, an avatar, to try on clothes and accessories. With minimal hassle, your customers can make their purchase decisions without having to buy and return samples.

1. CX personalization

Accenture reports that 83% of shoppers would exchange their data for the guarantee of a more personalized experience. That customers are willing to give their data is, in itself, a big win for marketers. All the customers want in return is for your brand to position services and products exactly where the customers are in their buying journey.

A great way to personalize the customer’s shopping experience is by sending personalized emails. Product recommendations based on a customer’s shopping history are a popular example of personalization. Leveraging customer data, brands can create unique experiences to cater to the diversity of their consumer base.

By gaining an in-depth understanding of consumer patterns, you can also build the technology to enhance your distribution network via personalization. You can leverage the latest software on the market to automate your marketing personalization efforts and meet customers exactly where they are in their journey.

1. Data privacy and security

Data is the new oil, and with customer data comes great responsibility. Since customers are willingly sharing their data, they expect your protection. Data theft and network breaches can compromise security and drive customers away from you. 

Keeping your digital systems and environments threat-free is essential to ensure seamless customer experiences. Compliance with the latest regulations and updating your systems with the latest privacy laws are ways to engineer a secure digital strategy. When customers feel their data is protected and their experiences are valued, they become loyal advocates for your brand.

Examples of Online Experience Strategies by Top Brands

1. Warby Parker – Virtual Try-on

Warby Parker, a retailer of affordable, quality eyewear, contact lenses, and sunglasses, has a cool feature online. If you want to buy a pair, their app lets you try on the frames using AR tech on your device.

1. Apple – Omnichannel Experience

Apple is a pioneer in technology and has built a successful pipeline to engage its digital customers seamlessly. Using iCloud, customers gain centralized access to all their data – like photos, messages, and contacts – regardless of which Apple device they’re on.

1. CURLBOX – Interactive chatbot

CURLBOX is a monthly box service subscription for exclusive, affordable curly hair products. When visiting the CURLBOX website, their chatbot lets you quickly submit inquiries based on typical customer queries, like shipping information or subscription updates.

Conclusion

Digital customers want access to your brand where and when they decide to buy a product or avail of your services. Today, digital channels are buzzing with social activity and trade. To transform your customer experiences for increased value and loyalty, you must find new and innovative ways to optimize the digital customer experience.