How to improve your digital customer experience strategy

In today’s globalized and interconnected market, it’s critical for companies to create digital experiences that place the user at the center of every interaction, curating each touch point in the customer journey, offering them quality and personalization. In short, uniqueness.

Customers no longer want to feel like just a number among many. They want every action to be targeted and built specifically for them. That’s why it’s essential for brands to have a digital customer experience strategy.

What does it mean to have a digital customer experience strategy?

Implementing a digital customer experience strategy means managing all the digital interactions that customers have with your brand in the best way possible. Website design, website load time, mobile optimization, social media accounts, email, customer engagement systems are just some of the places where you can work to make sure that the customer experience is as seamless and engaging as possible.

Triggered by the recent pandemic, the race to be digital is real — if you’re not part of it, you’re in danger of being forgotten.

As a result, consumers slowly became much more comfortable taking activities that they used to do “live” into the digital realm.

According to a study from McKinsey on B2B purchases, 70% of decision makers are willing to spend more than $50,000 on new, fully self-service or remote purchases.

So, how relevant is a digital customer experience strategy today? Let’s look at some numbers:

• 86% of users are willing to pay more for an exceptional customer experience
• 76% of shoppers think companies should understand and anticipate their needs (source: Super Office).
• 32% of customers “break up” with a preferred brand after a bad customer experience (source: Hyperceptions).
• Global CX spending is estimated to reach $640 billion by 2022
• 74% of customers may switch brands if the buying process is too difficult for them (source: review24.com).

But what are the benefits of improving one’s digital customer experience strategy?

Benefits of a digital customer experience strategy

1. Increased customer loyalty

The better your digital customer experience strategy, the more likely your customers are to stay with you. By digitizing customer experiences, you will be able to collect and analyze data more effectively, making it easier to understand customer needs, identify problems, and personalize experiences.

You will also be able to engage your customers in a much more meaningful way and build better, lasting relationships.

2. Revenue growth

With a good customer strategy, it will be easier to do business with your company. Smoother digital experiences reduce the chances of customers abandoning you for a competitor.

By simplifying processes and creating personalized digital experiences, you ensure that your customers get exactly what they want, with minimal effort.

3. Reduced support costs

With automation and live chat technology, you can increase customer support and engagements in a much more cost-effective way.

Chatbots can help you answer about 80% of your customers’ questions immediately, without delay. And with live-chats, your agents can handle multiple conversations with customers, simultaneously. It allows you to speed up your customer service with fewer resources

These are the three major benefits that an effective digital customer experience strategy offers.

Now, let’s move on to the main topic of this post, where we will talk about how to go about improving your digital customer experience strategy.

10 tips for improving your digital customer experience strategy

How can you improve your customer experience? And where do you start? Here are some tips!

1. Listen to your audience

Delivering a good customer experience starts with listening to your customers. Also, it’s important to recognize that customers have different needs at different times during their customer journey.

Special software provides a wide range of information, such as interaction and engagement data during the customer journey, which makes it possible to gain access to a broader picture, such as delving into a specific customer’s history, preferences, and behavior to provide personalized service.

2. Create connections through personalization

Customers expect to be treated like human beings, not numbers. In fact, 71% of customers feel frustrated after an impersonal experience (source: Segment). And since 72% of consumers only interact with personalized messages, it pays to develop communication that connects with customers at the right time and in the right way (source: Wunderkind).

Sending personalized product recommendations based on habits or questions they asked in the live-chat can help make the strategy more effective.

3. Provide omnichannel service

Given the abundance of channels that customers use, whether it’s mobile apps, social media, the web or email, serving customers seamlessly can be difficult. With CX software that stores customer data and history, your team has access to context that will allow them to create consistent experiences for each customer across all channels.

That way, customers can contact the company through multiple channels about the same issue and support agents can simply pick up where they left off. And that’s a good thing, because customers don’t like to repeat themselves.

4. Create phygital experiences

Ninety-one percent of customers expect brands to provide both online and offline experiences (source: klarna.com). But now, technology has enabled companies to start pushing the boundaries of customer experience, blurring the line between the digital and physical worlds.

Digital innovation is helping companies develop these kinds of experiences that operate in the boundary between physical and digital, referred to as “phygital.”

5. Be flexible with channels

For individual customers, not all channels are the same: 76% of customers prefer to use different channels for different needs (source: Salesforce). Allowing customers to interact with you on their preferred channels can help personalize each customer’s path, and this makes it more convenient for customers to connect with the business in the way they prefer.

Also, because 73% of customers use multiple channels during their journey, being available on those channels can really impact sales (source: hbr.org).

It’s also important not to overdo it and use only the channels you really need. For example, marketers have reported the best response rates from using 4–6 channels in their campaigns (source: pfl.com).

6. Introduce Artificial Intelligence

Conversational artificial intelligence bots enable you to provide immediate and personalized responses to customers 24/7. Chatbots can connect with your internal systems to reference customer data and provide assistance and even personalized product recommendations based on customer demographics and preferences.

Artificial intelligence also tracks common questions and knows users’ intentions and opinions to improve the conversational experience over time.

7. Simplify shopping

Customers value frictionless experiences. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to purchase your product or service online. Give them secure payment options and offer support through live chat and co-browsing to minimize churn.

For example, with automation, you can solve your customers’ problems faster by directing cases to the appropriate type of support, such as automating answers to the most frequently asked questions. Those same chatbots can also handle routine tasks such as tracking orders or booking appointments. Other ideas might involve one-click template responses within the customer support system.

8. Optimize the user experience

Creating quick and easy digital experiences is a trump card. Customers love simplicity: 78% of consumers want web sites that are, above all, intuitive and easy to navigate (source: thinkwithgoogle.com). And it’s not just customers who benefit. According to Stanford research, having an intuitive, well-designed web site also helps build trust and credibility.

A solid user experience is the key to improving the customer experience when visitors browse your online store.

More than 50% of the world’s population has a smartphone, and 65% of e-commerce traffic and 55% of online purchases occur via mobile device. So, it makes sense to put mobile devices front and center in your digital customer experience strategy.

9. Use real-time analytics

Taking a data-driven approach to your digital experience strategy can help you respond to your customers’ needs more effectively. Seeing customer interactions in real time is particularly useful as it can help you assess what’s working and what’s not and possibly change strategy. This is incredibly important in a fast-paced world.

With real-time analytics, you can have access to detailed information on customer satisfaction, customer engagement, and conversion rates, as well as the opportunity to tailor and personalize interactions as customers move along their customer journey.

10. Gather customer feedback

Customer feedback is critical to understanding things from a customer’s perspective. Try soliciting feedback following specific interactions such as live chat and participate in regular surveys every quarter or so. This can help you discover weaknesses such as navigation problems or conversion hurdles. It’s also an opportunity to show that you are customer focused by acting on feedback or responding to less-than-positive experiences.

Conclusion

Today, the only way to stay competitive is by providing relevant experiences that a brand can evolve and gain visibility.

Building a digital customer experience strategy is not impossible, and it can even be simple with the right approach and customer focus.

This way, you ensure that you can empathize with your customers and create digital customer experience strategies that really resonate with them.

Do you want to read more about how to create a digital customer experience? Subscribe to our newsletter!