Today, everyone uses their online resources for everything: researching solutions, connecting with others, and yes, running their businesses. With robust digital channels that allow us to interact with the world at large, the first contact consumers have with your company is your online experience.
Do they continue engaging with your brand or content? Do they consider your business or website trustworthy? Do they lose patience with your website or even know how to understand your business offering?
Consumer behaviors can tell you a lot about how your brand functions online, and while you may find yourself facing challenges with your digital profile and marketing, honing the digital customer experience you offer can completely transform your organisation.
Become more competitive with digital improvements, connect with consumers with personalised and consistent interactions, and ultimately control the narrative of your company online when you optimise your digital customer experience strategy. How do you do that? Read on to find out.
What Is the Digital Customer Experience?
The digital customer experience (DCX) is the total online interactions a customer has with your business and brand, including apps, social media, chatbots, your online store, digital content, email chains, or any other virtual means of connection. Every digital engagement in the marketing funnel is part of the consumer’s experience with your brand and impacts their opinion of your product or service. Digital customer experiences also include consumers who engage with your brand with IoT sensors and devices and voice-activated devices since these tools use the internet.
Digital Customer Experience vs Customer Experience
The customer experience (CX) is basically the feeling or perception a customer has from the accumulation of their experiences with your company. Personal interactions that occur in-store or in-person are the foundation of the customer experience; this helps build rapport and trust with customers and provides a human connection, which is essential for a positive and attractive brand experience.
Then you add the digital customer experience, which only deepens and expands the connection and relationship between your audience and business. Instead of customers only reaching you during specific business hours, customers can find answers about your brand online at any time, as well as consume your content, learn about your values and processes, and do all kinds of shopping around the clock.
People may interact with your brand in the physical or digital world, but one thing is certain: digital marketing and online customer engagement are a huge part of someone’s experience. Companies that want to be competitive in their field need an online presence and positive interactions with your brand to truly trust and rely on your services.
The Evolution of the Digital Customer Experience
20 years ago, customers might interact with your brand after seeing a billboard, walking into your store, getting a recommendation from a trusted friend or family member, or finding your number in the phone book. Essentially, customer experiences used to be in person or over the phone, and those two forms of connection were easier to control and navigate compared to now.
For modern businesses, customers can access your brand at any time online; they expect to interact with a brand 24/7, whether they shop online, track their orders, look at customer reviews, send links, share content online, etc. The more digital our social structures move, the more businesses must respond with digital solutions and means of communication, which they have.
Now, your goal should be to build an evergreen digital customer experience framework, a system that you can continually adjust and perfect over time. Digital advancements will continue to change and grow in every industry, and your brand needs to be able to grow with those updates. Embracing online resources means creating a cohesive experience for your customers across all platforms and finding creative ways to engage with and catch the attention of your target audience.
Why Organisations Should Care About Their Digital Customer Experiences
You may lean more traditional and struggle to adapt to online formats and marketing strategies, but they are essential if you want your business to thrive. Not only will it make your business better, but in the coming years, it will be the only way your business can survive. Let’s get into the details.
Customer Expectations
First of all, customers want and are coming to rely on the digital experience. They have high expectations for a brand’s online experience and use your online presence and quality to gauge how trustworthy your brand is. They need and want websites that are easy to navigate, have quick load times, and offer a personalised experience.
Competitive Advantage
Creating a unique and positive digital experience helps brands set themselves apart from competitors, too. When people start shopping for something, like say a new pair of headphones, they are going to first go online to see what is available to them, research pricing, and compare brands. Your brand has to have an online presence to be a competitor, and if you want customers to actually choose your product or service, you need to have a robust and thoughtful digital customer experience.
Being online with your business evens the playing field; having a great digital customer experience puts your brand on top. Customers will go with well-designed websites, brands that pay to be more visible through SEO efforts, companies with helpful and high-ranking content, and services with plenty of customer reviews and other types of social proof. If you want your company’s services to rise to the top, then you need to provide a seamless, engaging, and robust digital customer experience that will make consumers choose you over other competitors that are just one click away.
Brand Reputation
A good digital customer experience is critical to a brand’s reputation. Word spreads fast in the age of social media and a bad digital experience can hurt a brand’s reputation. The better customer experiences your consumers have, the more you can fortify your brand reputation. This means prioritising positive interactions with products and services, engaging with people online, implementing customer feedback, and more. From the first ad or social media content a customer engages with to the checkout button on your website, the digital customer experience is what shapes your presence online and ensures that your brand reputation is protected.
The Key Elements of a Digital Customer Experience Strategy
It can be overwhelming to create or adjust the digital customer experience that you want your brand to offer, so here are the core elements to get you started.
Understand the Target Audience
Understanding the target audience is a crucial first step in developing a successful digital customer experience strategy. What inspires your audience? What does your service solve for them and how can your online assets communicate your solutions? What channels do they frequent most often? What kind of story do you need to tell to pique their interest?
Creating an experience for the right audience involves conducting thorough research and analysis to gain insights into the demographics, preferences, needs, and behaviors of that target audience. By understanding their motivations and pain points, businesses can tailor their digital experiences to meet their specific needs and expectations.
Connect With the Target Audience on Multiple Platforms
In today’s digital landscape, customers interact with businesses through various platforms and channels. To effectively engage with the target audience, it is essential to have a presence on multiple platforms such as websites, Google search (SEO), mobile apps, social media, email, and more. This also means that no matter where your customer first interacts with you, like in-stores, in your app, or on social media, they will have a consistent experience that helps them journey through their experience with ease.
Each platform provides different opportunities for customer interaction, and businesses should strive to create consistent experiences across these touchpoints to maintain a cohesive brand image and ensure a seamless customer journey.
Ensure Digital Customer Experiences Are Optimised for Mobile and Desktop
Speaking of cohesiveness, your digital customer experience must be available and consistent across both mobile and desktop platforms. Mobile optimisation involves designing responsive and mobile-friendly websites and applications that provide a smooth and intuitive experience on smaller screens. Desktop optimisation, on the other hand, focuses on utilising the larger screen real estate effectively and ensuring a seamless experience for users if they switch back and forth between device types.
Follow the Data
To understand the needs of your consumers, including the potential roadblocks or frustrations they have with either your website or the problem they want to fix, you need data-driven solutions. Tools like Google Analytics or text analytics tools provide important insights into how customers interact with a brand’s online presence. This data-driven approach allows organisations to identify areas for improvement, make informed decisions, and personalise customer experiences. By analysing data, businesses can track customer interactions, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), discover customer behaviors and preferences, and continuously optimise their digital customer experience strategy.
How to Enhance the Digital Customer Experience
The right digital customer experience tools and resources will make all the difference when improving the ins and outs of your online brand interactions. Prioritise these goals to make your digital customer experience more competitive and attractive to your consumers.
Create Personalised Experiences
By leveraging customer data and insights, businesses can deliver tailored content, recommendations, and offers that resonate with individual customers. This can be achieved through techniques such as dynamic website content, personalised emails, targeted advertising, and product recommendations based on past behavior. The goal is to make customers feel understood and valued, leading to increased engagement and satisfaction.
Prioritise Seamless Site Navigation
Make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for and answer their own questions with little effort. If your website looks, feels, or moves in a clunky or confusing manner, people won’t even become frustrated—they will simply leave and head to a website that is easier to navigate.
Try providing a searchable database for FAQs and helpful resources and make sure your navigation bar offers the right shortcuts and links that will address your consumer’s pain points. Make sure checking out is easy and logical and that consumers know exactly what they are getting by engaging with your brand.
Collect Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is a valuable source of insights for improving the digital customer experience. By actively soliciting and collecting feedback, businesses can identify pain points, uncover areas for improvement, and gain a better understanding of customer preferences. Feedback can be collected through surveys, feedback forms, social media monitoring, and online review platforms. Also, make sure you interact with customer feedback and take it to heart—this makes your brand far more authentic and likable.
Leverage AI
Stay up-to-date and embrace tools like AI, or artificial intelligence, which can play a significant role in enhancing the digital customer experience. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide instant support and address customer queries in a personalised and efficient manner, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing response times.
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Your Digital Experience Transformation Roadmap
Want to learn more about digital experience transformation and how your organisation can develop a successful digital strategy?
Improve Your Digital Customer Experience With InMoment
The digital customer experience can be your greatest asset if you know how to deliver what your consumers want. Presentation matters; how people interact with your brand leaves a much bigger initial impression than your product or service. Your audience will have a customer experience one way or another, and depending on the quality and intention of your offered experience, you can either create loyal life-long customers or lose viable consumers right out of the gate.
InMoment helps ensure that you accomplish the latter; with our many resources and over 45 years of experience, we can ensure that you foster a faithful community that loves their experience with your company. Here are just a few of the benefits you can expect when you partner with InMoment:
- Customer Feedback Insights: You don’t have to rely on your gut or personal insights alone—instead, trust the data. InMoment provides businesses with the tools to gather real-time feedback from customers across various touchpoints. This can include online purchases, customer service interactions, and website usability. From there, this feedback is analysed to provide actionable insights and improve the customer journey in the moments that matter, outlining the exact adjustments you can make to get the results you want across all your most vital business metrics.
- Predictive Analytics: Using advanced AI and machine learning algorithms, the InMoment platform can identify patterns and trends in customer behavior and feedback. This predictive analysis can help businesses anticipate customer needs and tailor their services to provide personalised customer experiences.
- Unified View of Customer Experience: InMoment allows companies to consolidate data from various sources into a single platform, including data from your CRM, survey, social media, online review sites, and more. This provides a unified view of the customer experience, helping to identify any inconsistencies and areas for improvement.
Ready to start optimising your digital customer experience? Learn more about how you can identify what matters most to your customers today!
