Understanding digital customer experience
Tools & Resources
Key learnings
- Digital customer experience (DCX) refers to the experience people have when they engage with your business online.
- Good DCX can be the difference between someone purchasing your products and services or leaving your website straight away.
- Understanding how your customers engage with your business online will help you improve satisfaction and increase revenue.
The experience your customers have when they interact with your business online is critically important to whether they purchase your products and services and come away with a good impression of your brand. That's why it's super important to make sure the digital customer experience is as good as it can be. Here, we explain the fundamentals of digital customer experience (DCX) and how you can take yours to the next level.
Digital customer experience (DCX) refers to the touchpoints a customer has while interacting with a brand online.
It involves a series of actions, including information search, evaluation of alternatives, product enquiries and purchases.
1
Why is digital customer experience important?
Customer experiences are important as they can determine the decision to purchase (or not purchase) a product or service.
Therefore, you need a great digital customer experience strategy to encourage a satisfied customer base.
If customers can't find what they need with a few clicks or taps, they'll give up and leave your page.
When online shoppers encounter even the slightest inconvenience, they can often leave the website in question immediately. That's why you need to thoroughly monitor and optimise your company's digital customer experience.
2
What is a great DCX?
A 'great' digital customer experience provides a fast and responsive experience for consumers switching between channels on their journey towards becoming clients.
Brands with great DCX provide cohesive and consistent online experiences that impress their customers, regardless of which channel they are engaging with the brand on.
To put together an effective digital experience strategy requires brands to think specifically about how digital interfaces work into their customer engagement approach.
A company's DCX can be assessed through six key areas:
- Reach: A customer's preferred channel (newsletter, social, etc.)
- Flexibility: How seamless it is for customers to switch channels.
- Simplicity: Digital navigation and timeliness
- Convenience: Ease of service and support
- Purchase Convenience: Seamless payment transaction processes
- Personalisation: Recognition of individual customers
Therefore, your digital experience strategy requires you to think differently about engagement and identify how digital fits into the overall customer experience and journey.
There are a number of ways to create a great customer experience, which will help you improve satisfaction and increase revenues.
3
Tactics for your DCX strategy
When putting together your digital experience strategy, you should consider the following:
Create a DCX vision – Before you start building your strategy, you must clearly define your customer-focused vision and share it across your business. Create a few key statements that communicate your vision and make sure everyone across your organisation is on board.
Understand your customers – It's important that understand the situations and issues your customers face. By understanding their wants and needs, you will be able to connect and empathise with them more effectively.
Capture customer feedback – Whenever you collect data from customer experience tools like surveys and focus groups, send a follow-up email to instigate real-time conversations.
Use a framework for the development of your team – Identify the training needs for each member of your customer support team to deliver exemplary customer service.
Listen to employee feedback and act on it – A lot of businesses carry out annual survey processes where they collect feedback from their teams. It's important to listen to how your employees engage with the overall business to ensure they can deliver an exceptional service.
4
Measuring your customer experience
There are many ways to measure customer experience, including:
- Intent - visitor intent measures why a user visits a website.
- Surveys - customer satisfaction surveys measure how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or experience with a company.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) - a Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauges the customer's overall satisfaction with and perception of a brand. This metric helps businesses assess the loyalty of their customer relationships.
- Customer Churn - customer churn refers to the rate customers abandon a product, service, or brand.
Next steps...
- Look at how you engage with your customers, consider how you could improve their experience.
- Put together a digital experience strategy considering your overall vision, capturing customer feedback and implementing a quality framework for your team.
- Measure your customer experience using satisfaction surveys, net promoter scores and customer churn rates. 'Surveymonkey' has a useful template for NPS surveys.