9 Ways To Improve Digital Customer Experience (with Examples)
A positive customer experience is important to any business but as we move into a world where more and more interaction happens online, the digital customer experience is critical. Improving it comes from finding out how your customers interact online with your brand, product, or service. Creating a connection through mobile devices allows your customers to provide feedback so you know what issues to address and improve.
But First, What Is Digital Experience?
Obviously, the digital experience has to do with what we do online.
A customer experience strategy involves social media, analytics, data, IT innovation, and the cloud — a combination of any and all digital interactions that a person has with a brand. The digital experience involves everything from browsing a website to following a social media account of a business. To improve customer experience, your business needs to be clear and optimized across a list of digital touchpoints.
9 Ways You Can Improve Your Digital Customer Experience (with Examples)
Moving into the digital age isn’t easy for all companies but if you want to grow sales and compete in a meaningful way you need to make sure you have a digital experience strategy in place that looks at your client experience so you can see what you do well and what needs some work. You should always be learning and working to improve the digital customer experience.
1. Use Analytics and Data to Figure Out What Users Like and What They Don’t Across Channels
Use available analytics and data to understand where users go once they make it to your site or open your app as well as what they do when they get there. Make sure you evaluate cross channel actions. If you see that calls for customer service are focused on issues that shoppers are having with clothing sizes then adding support for that specific issue on digital sites should reduce those calls and make the customer experience better.
2. Listen to the Experts When It Comes to Meeting Customer Needs
Use experts to their full potential. While your customers will certainly point you in the right direction, usability experts help you meet certain customer expectations. They look beyond the simple shopping and buying experience to a more in-depth experience.
A CX specialist will examine navigation, customer trust, and presentation rather than just the final sale. They can tell you if your site navigation is easy enough to translate into a conversion. In other words, you want customers to make a choice and go to checkout quickly and smoothly. Expert analysis can help you get there.
3. Go Beyond the Data and Interact Meaningfully with Customers
Analytics is one thing but getting the opinion of real customers is even better. Talk to those who have been through your digital experience. Taking data from surveys, forms, emails, chat and social media can get you more info. Try new things with your actual customers to help catch problems with usability before you launch something to the public. This is a great way to see how effective your site is.
Plot out a digital customer journey across the entire digital experience to highlight the touchpoints and make sure every interaction works and has an achievable outcome.
4. Make Sure You Have a UCD Process to Keep the Customer at the Forefront of Design
Make sure you are using a user-centered design (UCD) process so that everything you do when it comes to the design of a product or service is based on the end-user and what they want and need.
This process is used throughout any design and implementation. Figure out the right approach to meet these needs through user research, listening to their ideas, and doing iterative prototyping. This process makes sure your product is usable and easy to access.
5. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help
Always get support when you are stuck with digital experience design. Ask those in the know for help if you aren’t sure about the next steps for how to approach doing research through customers. You waste more time and money if you simply guess at how to do things or keep trying to figure them out yourself and you may end up with info you can’t use. Find a customer experience analyst or another professional who can help you do things right the first time and set up for proper future interactions.
6. Improving Customer Experience Doesn’t Stop and Neither Can You
Once you have launched your customer experience design, your work isn’t done. You need to make sure there is a plan for the incoming feedback and integrating customer insights. It needs to be monitored and maintained post-launch. You don’t want all the hard work you’ve just done to get feedback only to let it sit unused. The company needs the best digital customer experience so using any info as you get it has to be an ongoing process.
7. Know Your Brand Inside and Out
While you want your digital customer engagement to build up your brand, you need to make sure you have that brand positioned so that everything online supports it. You need to know your brand and how you want it to engage on these digital platforms. If you don’t have a plan, your customers aren’t going to engage as you would like.
8. Measure Digital Touchpoint Performance vs Business Metrics
Measuring one against the other is a good way to work through business objectives. You can use DX tools to map and measure what is going on with customer response across all your digital channels and then compare to see the return on investment.
9. Unify Your Customers’ Digital Experience Across All Platforms
You want your customers to experience unity across all the digital channels they use when interacting with your brand. Data needs to be consistent and interactions similar across all platforms.
Use the info you glean from customer interactions and customer experience experts to create a unified, helpful digital brand experience for all users.
Final Thoughts
Creating the best customer experience strategy for a positive digital interaction with your brand is critical when upgrading your digital presence to meet current customer service trends.
Every bit of information you can get will be beneficial.
Using all these ideas to improve your digital customer experience along with your own research creates a digital business transformation that can increase user happiness and more sales for your business.
Originally published at https://thecxlead.com April 9, 2020.
