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7 Key Stages to Consider in Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy

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Against the common misconception that customers care about digital, customers actually don’t think of their experiences in digital and non-digital categories. They want to access your services or products in the most convenient way possible, across different channels. That’s all they care about.There are countless digital channels today. The fast rise of these channels where customers can interact with brands has created lots of challenges.

Watch the video below to learn how Voxco can help you can enhance your overall customer experience.

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Introduction: Digital customer experience

According to a 2020 Customer Expectations Report published by Gladly, 71% of consumers want a consistent experience across all channels, but only 29% actually get it.Consumers who don’t get a personalized experience across all channels, do not prefer to stick by the brand. Another report published by Accenture shows that 33% of consumers discontinued with a company in 2018 because they didn’t get a personalized experience.

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Such are the shifts in consumer behavior when it comes to the kind of digital CX that consumers expect. But, these shifts also create a great opportunity for the brands that embrace this new digital reality.To stay ahead of the curve, brands must have a digital CX strategy for measuring and improving their digital customer experiences.In this post, we’ll discuss what digital customer experience (DCX), the key steps to consider in your digital CX, and some really useful tips to continually improve your digital customer experiences

Let’s get started.

What is digital customer experience (DCX)?

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Digital customer experience means the overall impression of your brand in the eyes of your customers — i.e the perception they walk away with.It is built upon the consistent digital interactions that customers have with your brand, across different platforms.

Some examples of digital platforms you may want to prioritize digital customer experience efforts on include social media channels (Facebook, Twitter,, Instagram, etc.), live chat and email, your website, mobile apps, digital kiosks and Internet-of-Things (IoT), hardware, and desktop and Software-as-a-Service software.

How is customer DX different from CX?

While customer experience (CX) can cover anything from traditional customer service channels to new digital interfaces customers use to interact with brands, digital customer experience (DCX) only focuses on the latter. The former focuses on the overall brand impressions, while the latter focuses on the digital communication tool experiences.

The 7 key stages to consider in Digital CX

When building out your digital customer experience program, mapping the customer journey is critical. Read this detailed post about mapping your customer journey.

Let’s get to the key steps to consider in your digital customer experience strategy:

Awareness

The first stage is the awareness stage where you must aim to make it as easy as possible for your new customers to find you. When new customers discover your brand, it’s important they hear good things. You can consider engaging media or influencers to generate authentic social reviews and mentions. Another way you can improve your brand’s awareness is by optimizing your website for SEO.

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Discovery

This is the stage where you make it convenient for your customers to navigate and access your digital channels. To deliver a great digital CX in this phase, you must have an idea about how your customers engage with you, their intention when they arrive at your site or app, and most importantly, the points where customers leave your brand. Insights into these things will help you act accordingly and improve customer journeys.

Evaluate

At the evaluation stage, you’ve got to make sure you understand what aspects of your experience or business offerings customers favor. For this, you can monitor the reviews customers post about the experience you’re providing, across different digital channels, and respond to them. Accordingly, you can act in a way customers expect from your brand.

User Experience

Conversion

The fourth stage is the conversion stage where you should aim to actually capture customer experience data to understand why customers fail to convert and then take appropriate measures to get more conversions. Some common reasons why customers don’t convert include hidden shipping fees, delayed delivery times, or poor site navigation.

Experience

Stopping at the conversion phase isn’t ideal. This is the stage to turn your customers into your brand advocates who would increase awareness of your offerings. Digital channels like social media platforms, websites, mobile apps, etc, prove to be great platforms to foster customer loyalty and advocacy.

Support

Similar to the first phase viz awareness phase, consumers today, usually turn to digital channels to resolve any challenges they encounter. They expect brands to offer an online portal, say an AI-powered chatbot, for self service. Enabling your customers to solve common challenges or escalate things will drive satisfaction and give them a reason to not just buy from you, but actually stick with you.

Buy Again

The last stage is the “repeat purchase” stage where your aim must be to encourage your customers to buy again from you. For this, it’s important that you follow up with your customers as part of your post-purchase. It often leads to happy customers who share good reviews online.

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Importance of digital CX

More customers are going digital

Customers grow with technological advancements. For instance, with mobile apps and e-commerce advancement, most people have turned to online shopping and they now find it more convenient than in-store shopping. The time-saving, no sales pressure, convenience, and discreet shipping benefits all add up to this shift.

According to UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper Study 2018, consumers in the U.S., Europe, Mexico and Brazil have the highest satisfaction with their overall desktop/laptop shopping experience.If it’s not possible for you to build an eCommerce website, you may consider promoting your brand and offerings on other digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Digital channels uncover customer insights

While digital channels may lack a personal face-to-face human touch, the absence of this touch is not so bad, after all. Although the digital marketing channels lack human contact, they allow you to interpret customer data effortlessly. For instance, you can measure web performance and customer behavior using Google Analytics. Some digital metrics for websites that you can leverage from this tool to create a positive digital customer experience include traffic, page views, unique page views, average time on page, and bounce rate.

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Digital channels allow greater personalization

Digital CX is not just about going digital, it’s about harnessing the digital channels to create individualized customer experiences. The data that digital channels provide help marketers to analyze it and tailor experiences to individual needs.The role of personalization in delivering a meaningful overall digital customer experience and brand loyalty is vital.

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How to improve your digital CX?

To stay ahead of the competition, you’ve got to make sure you have a digital customer experience strategy in place that can help you see what you do well and what needs improvement.

Here are a few ways you can improve your digital CX:

Use Analytics to Figure Out What Users Like and What They Don’t Across Channels

Use available analytics to get an idea about where users go and what exactly they do once they land on your website or mobile app. Evaluating cross channel actions helps.

Listen to the Experts When It Comes to Meeting Customer Needs

While your customers will point you in the right direction, it’s always good to use experts to their full potential to meet specific customer expectations. These experts focus on a more in-depth digital customer experience.

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Go Beyond Analytics; Interact Meaningfully with Customers

No doubt analytics is useful, but getting the opinion of real customers is even better when it ces to improving your digital CX. Talk to your customers, they’ve already been through your digital experience. Taking data from surveys and social media can get you detailed feedback from your customers.

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Conclusion

Simply collecting information about your customers is not enough. To delight customers at each of the stages discussed above, you’ve got to understand their preferences and decode their behaviors on a deeper level.

Customer experience loyalty metric like CSAT scores, will provide you with a holistic view of your customers. Voxco’s feedback survey tools can help you deliver personalized digital CX to your target audience.

Digital customer experience management isn’t about simply managing your digital channels. And it’s definitely not something that only your marketing or sales team must focus on.Customers expect personalized interactions from you, throughout the entire customer journey, across both digital or non-digital channels.