What is Digital Customer Experience2

Digital customer experience : How to measure it ?

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The convenience and comfort offered by the online world has forced `customers to leave their traditional practices and magnet towards online interactions and engagement . According to a study conducted by McKinsey and Co. categories such as medicine, groceries , household supplies and personal care products have online shoppers exceeding 35% growth rate .

With that said , it is becoming the need of the hour that companies turn their focus on understanding customer needs and expectation in the online format and take prompt steps to ensure seamless online customer journeys . 

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

Improve Customer Retention

What are Customer Retention Strategies?

Customer retention can be described as the process of turning existing customers into repeat buyers. It refers to the different measures organizations take to reduce customer attrition, and create healthy long term relationships with their customers. Customer retention strategies are the different initiatives and tactics used by organizations to retain existing customers, build customer loyalty, and improve customer lifetime value (CLV). 

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What is digital customer experience and how can you improve it ?

Any and every Business-to-Customer interaction that takes place through the online format is considered a part of digital customer experience. It can be as simple as posting a query on the company website or clicking on a call to action button that redirects you to a company touchpoint , as long as it being performed online , the customer will be considered a part of your digital target audience.

Understanding customer sentiment towards the company can be tedious especially when their communication with the company is restricted to interaction that does not ask for interpersonal engagement . As market footfalls decline , there are certain tools of gauging customer mindset that can prove useful for nuanced market research and informed decision making .

Define your target audience

There may be multiple people visiting your touchpoints, but not all them can be utilized to gather genuine feedback that’ll help improve your online functioning. The basic step of any market research is to understand , separate and segment your target audience into groups based on their similarities and differences to cater to each group specifically.

For example : If you’re a cosmetics company , your target audience may be women belonging to specific age groups . Studying each group separately helps to highlight the highs and lows of your overall online performance and the KPIs that have influenced each group to interact the way they do .

Improve Customer Retention

Map your customer journey

Customers initiate interactions with a certain objective in mind. Mapping customer journeys puts these objectives into perspective by focusing on metrics such average touchpoints visited , ease of navigation , time spent per platform etc. The focus of any company is to make it easier for customers to reach their end result through minimal effort. This requires eliminating additional touchpoints that increase the length of customer journeys without having any substantial value addition.

CSAT ( Customer Satisfaction Score )

Short surveys that ask for customers to rate how satisfactory their digital customer experience was can go a long way. These surveys can be product or service specific or can ask customers to review their entire journey and boil it down to one rating. This can , however , lead to customers rating their satisfaction based entirely on one good or bad experience. It is difficult to strike a balance between multiple experiences which is why companies usually go for the former approach.

CSAT surveys can simply ask the customer to rate their experience immediately after an interaction along with an open ended question that requires them to provide a reasoning for the same.

This can project the efficacy of the current touchpoints in terms of how they offer the right choices that overlap with what customers are looking for. Further , the qualitative remarks highlight grey areas that are acting as roadblocks and positives that make customer experience pleasant.

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NPS® ( Net Promoter Score® )

Net promoter Score® measures customer satisfaction in reference to the likelihood of customers referring the company or the brand to their friends and relatives. It is based on the principle that customers tend to make recommendation of companies when they feel that their own experience with the brand was upto the mark. It assesses the satisfaction levels of current customers along with the percentage of customers that can be nudged to indulge in unpaid promotions using word of mouth. This tool uses a 10 point rating scale question : Based on your own experience with the company , how likely are you to recommend the company and its offerings to your friends and family.  The responses to this question helps in categorizing a customer as a promoter (9 and 10) , passive (6-8) or a detractor. The advantage of such a segmentation is to strategize and target these three groups differently:
  • Promoters are pushed towards acting on their current mindset to promote the company to friends and family. 
  • Passives are marketed with brand awareness and comparison studies to inform how the company better meets their needs and is a better preference than the competitors.
  • Detractors are asked to identify the experiences and aspects that they found unpleasant. This is then acted upon by inquiring how the company can improve upon them so as to prevent customers from churning.
Improve Customer Retention

CES ( Customer effort score )

Customer effort score measure the ease with which your customers are able to accomplish their tasks. This is a reflection on how a company is able to predict a need , and provide a quick solution which can be easily accessed by the customer without putting in much effort . 

The degree of ease and simplicity gets converted into a score which correlates to their overall satisfaction. Low customer effort scores indicate that the customer is easily able to achieve their goals with the company through the online format without much hassle and so the customer satisfaction is high while a higher CES shows that the company needs to revamp their online interactions based on updated knowledge about customer requirements.

These tools are basic methods of obtaining customer satisfaction outlay and can be easily collected through surveys , interviews , focus groups and other commonly used research methods. Tracking your online customer means you need to focus on aspects such as average time taken , monitor touchpoints that have maximum customer engagement and accordingly modify your online strategy . 

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Simple steps that can improve digital customer experience

Gain feedback

Quantitative questions might help you identify that a customer is not satisfied but without a reasoning your decision making lacks direction. Make sure to see the pain points that are troubling your customers . Provide a platform where customers are allowed to express themselves freely .

Customers tend to prefer brands that maintain a practice of asking for their opinions and then acting upon them . It makes the customers feel valued and exudes a belief that the company is not just interested in improving their revenue.

Eliminate unnecessary areas

Mapping your customer journey will put you across many such areas that have little to no contribution in making the customer experiences smooth. Instead they are acting as an extra step which the customers need to take and the company needs to monitor. Removing these areas can help reduce online fatigue and effort taken by customers. The services provided by these platforms can be integrated on some other touchpoints that attracts maximum audience and where it can be of greater relevance.

Improve Customer Retention

Integrated services

Your customer will be much more happy if they know that the company offers solutions to all the customer problems at one place . Of course this can make filtering and searching for the right option , a difficult task for customers. But with the help of suitable categorization and customization , it can do wonders for the company and the customer.

Moreover , the availability of an omni-channel platform comforts the customer by assuring them that they are the right place and that they don’t have to jump through hoops to achieve a simple 5 minute task.

Indulge in online listening

Social media and communication platforms provide a space for customers to be candid . This is where they express themselves fully without any window dressing . Monitoring such content can help understand what customers and the general audience think about the company . It can also bring to light experiences or services which may have negatively impacted customer experiences.

Keeping an eye out for mentions and queries is also imperative . Doing so assists the company in addressing them promptly and minimizes damage to reputation.

With increasing digitization and rapid shift of customers to the online media , companies need to embrace this change and adapt themselves to current practices in order to maintain and grow their market share.

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