Customer experience is a term used to describe a customer’s journey as they explore and discover your brand. In real life, this experience can include interactions with your people and products, which leads customers to form an opinion of your brand. Whether that opinion is positive, neutral, or negative depends heavily on how these interactions play out.

Digital customer experience can be seen as the online extension of your in-person customer experience strategy. Digital CX encompasses every touch point a customer comes across interacting with your brand online, including the obvious, like your website or mobile app, but also interactions with other channels such as online forms, chatbots, email, and social media. Just like in-person interactions, how consumers interact with your people and products online will shape how they perceive your brand.

Why Is Digital CX Important?

Every interaction with your brand influences how users perceive you, and it doesn’t take much to turn customers off.

According to a recent report, 76% of consumers would stop doing business with a company after one negative experience. A separate report highlights other ways a single poor customer experience can impact your brand, finding that while the average consumer will share details of a positive customer experience with nine people, they will tell 16 about a negative interaction.

Given the significance of CX on consumer satisfaction and spending, it’s unsurprising to learn that nearly 45% of recently surveyed businesses say they will be prioritizing CX initiatives over other areas of company investment. And with online shopping continuing to make up a larger and larger portion of total retail sales, digital CX is becoming increasingly important for all businesses regardless of size or industry.

How to Win at Digital Customer Experience

Everything about your digital presence should be geared towards providing your visitors with the best possible experience. With that in mind, here are several strategies that can help you optimize your digital customer experience:

• Identify your audience and cater your content to them
• Create an omnichannel experience
• Prioritize mobile experience
• Use analytical tools to your advantage
• Always be on the lookout for ways to improve

Know Your Audience

The average e-commerce transaction has just under six touchpoints. However, some users’ journeys may see them interact with your brand 20 times or more as they consider, compare, and explore a potential purchase.

Before creating an engaging digital experience, you need to understand who your buyer is and what triggers them to act as they pass through each stage of the customer journey.

Creating buyer personas – fictional representations of your target audience enable you to identify with your buyer and what motivates them on a personal level and then target your digital CX to meet those needs and desires.

Provide Omnichannel Customer Service for a Seamless Experience

Throughout the customer journey, a buyer may interact with your business on multiple channels – mobile app, website, chatbots, or email. Creating an omnichannel experience means that not only can you support multi means of communication which is a must-have to appeal to today’s audience, but also those interactions are seamless and consistent with the various channels capable of communicating with each other as well.

For example, if a buyer begins their journey by filling out a web form on your mobile app but then later picks up that conversation via email, the responding agent will have access to all the information they need to help the buyer complete their purchase.

Make the Mobile Experience Seamless

Over 60% of e-commerce traffic and 53% of retail sales originate from mobile devices, and users have high expectations of how a company manages their mobile experience. To keep your audience engaged and to stop them from abandoning your site, your website must be fast loading, mobile responsive, and simple to navigate from a handheld device.

Implement Analytics

Even if your website or app offers the best digital customer experience right now, there’s no guarantee that strategy will hold in the future. Like any other aspect of your business, you need to be able to adapt to keep up with changing customer demands.

Monitoring your traffic with analytical tools such as Google Analytics can help you identify which areas of your website or app that is performing well and identify pain points that need to be addressed.

Analytic tools can also help you measure the success – or failure – of other areas of your digital CX strategy. For example, you can use analytics to help improve the open rate of email marketing material or monitor brand sentiment and user engagement on social media platforms to curate your content.

Embrace User Feedback

Analytical tools are not the only way to gain valuable insight into how consumers are connecting with your brand so you can also ask for and collect user feedback at various stages throughout the customer journey. This feedback will not only help you identify pain points or obstacles in the buying process, but it also provides an opportunity to win back unsatisfied customers by quickly addressing any negative customer experiences.

A simple customer survey might include questions on the overall experience, how satisfied the customer was with their purchase, how likely they would be to recommend your business to a friend, and ways that you can improve.

Conclusion

Consumers today hold very high expectations of the brands they interact with, and with an increasingly large number of e-commerce retailers, buyers can afford to be selective.

Businesses increasingly recognize that they cannot compete on price or quality alone and that providing an exceptional digital customer experience is vital to survival. If you haven’t done so, make this year the year you choose to prioritize digital customer experience; your brand and bottom line will be happy you did.

The post What is Digital Customer Experience, and How Can You Improve Yours? appeared first on Nirvana Canada.