Written by: Brittney Johnson, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Each digital platform businesses use for clients to interact with related to their product or services makes up a piece of their digital customer experience. Research shows that businesses with a robust omnichannel strategy retain an average of 89% of their customers vs. companies that present as being more siloed. Here are three things to consider to cultivate the best digital experience for customers to remain competitive in this market.
What is digital customer experience:
Digital customer experience is how customers engage with a brand online. It includes social media, websites, the cloud-based software used to take inbound calls, a YouTube channel, or an app ‒ it is any/all online touch points customers can use to interact with a brand. The platforms a company chooses to market and provide services or products through, make up the omnichannel. The omnichannel experience is representative of the overall digital customer experience strategy as it facilitates the digital customer experience; allowing customers to begin their journey with your brand in one channel and end it on another. (Patrick Brown, 2023).
Consider this:
Someone watches a YouTube video and clicks the link to a company's website. They sign up for an upcoming summit and are now receiving emails, one of which provides the link to join the event on the set day and time. The day of the summit, they click the link and enter the Zoom room. As the summit comes to a close, The brand CEO offers for them to join their new membership that only opens a few times a year. They click the link dropped in the comments, taking them to the landing page for the membership.
They see the button that says "Join Us!" and click it. Now the order form appears. Ideally, they will finalize their purchase and join the advertised membership, triggering a workflow with them as a new customer. Here we identified how a customer participates in a brand's digital customer experience.
Now, this example only includes some elements of the experience necessary to consider or flush out to ensure cohesion across all digital channels, but you get the gist. While there can be multiple avenues by which a customer can engage with a brand, the key thing to remember is that experience must be effortless for customers to be confident in making a purchase. The same goes if the goal is to have repeat customers.
"Research shows brands with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% of companies with weak strategies. Digital customer experience strategy needs to incorporate multiple channels, all working toward the same goal – delivering customer satisfaction, no matter the journey." (Qualtrics, 2023)
In today's virtual age, customers rely heavily on a company's digital presence to make buying decisions.
Digital Experience vs. Customer Experience
With the many options available to them comes a much higher expectation for companies to create exceptional experiences through and through. There are no excuses for poor experiences. Gone are the days of settling for a lackluster experience that leaves them feeling like a second thought. Alternatively, worse, like their needs were not a thought at all. So any business that wishes to remain competitive in today's market needs to prioritize meeting this need for their audience if they wish to retain customers and have a good reputation.
The customer experience is the sum of all customer touchpoints with a brand's people, products, and presence. So the digital experience created is just one facet of the overall customer experience.
Digital customer experience is the sum of all the digital mediums customers use to
interact with those people and products. Moreover, the perception they take away is based on their experience (Hubspot, 2022).
The Importance of a Digital Experience
Seamless experiences benefit customers and businesses alike, and customers who engage across many channels are the most valuable to businesses. According to a study by Harvard Business Review, omnichannel customers are more valuable. (Qualtrics, 2023)
Customers who can start their journey with a podcast episode and then continue engaging on the company site with as little friction as possible are more likely to buy once and become repeat customers. The moral of the story, make it easy for people to achieve their goals and easy for them to invest, then everybody wins.
3 Ways to Improve Digital Experiences
1. Provide self-service options
Self-service tools allow businesses to provide convenience for customers without including additional staffing for services to be received. They are creating an environment for customers to move quickly and gather the information they came to get. Customers have a need for speed in this digital age, so it is more important than ever to have options that allow customers to find the answers they want quickly. Some standard self-service options businesses use are chatbots and FAQs.
Having an FAQ section on a website helps customers get answers quickly for things like, "what is the financial investment?" "what is the time commitment?" "Do you have a payment plan option?". This forward-thinking also reduces the support emails a business receives.
Chatbots are great because the creator can design the flow of communication so that customers move seamlessly through a conversation they initiate based on their end goal. Even more exceptional, chatbots for a website can act as more of an interactive FAQ section for potential customers, as can one inside a client portal or course hub for active clients.
2. Personalize experiences
Creating customer personas will help personalize their experience with the brand.
Knowing client preferences, purchase habits, and what they value is invaluable data to create better offers, marketing materials, and any suggestions made to an audience.
Gather this data to create accurate customer personas and use them as a guide for supporting different customer segments.
Requesting customer feedback and utilizing a Customer Experience Management Tool can effectively gain insights into what customers experience working with a company's tech, people, and products/services.
Once there is a baseline of data, begin personalizing things like the website's layout because maybe there was feedback saying it was difficult to find information. It can also be unexpected and engaging to have a sort of "Choose Your Own Journey" option for when potential customers enter a sales funnel, you gather specifics about them that relate to a service/product you offer, and they progress through the customer journey created for people that match those interests ‒ the client personas help to develop this too.
3. Invest in customer support
A fast response time is a crucial element of an exceptional customer experience. Now apply that to the digital experience. No one expects to get a "quick" response when sending emails but think about adding a chatbot or LIVE chat experience. That is a game-changer. That means less opportunity for missed emails or emails ending up in spam. If the offer is an actual product, it can benefit a company to have LIVE support in case of an issue with an order. It is imperative to have resources dedicated to supporting customers to have a competitive advantage in the market.
There are tons of different SaaS options available for incorporating more effective customer support for a business. When making the list to find which one may work best for based on the type of business model a company has chosen and many other factors, consider these things:
What is the commitment? Will there be 24-hour support?
Will it be LIVE or via a form or chat?
Will people have the option to book support calls?
Who will be responsible for responding to support requests? What will the KPI's of that role be?
And So
Companies have realized the importance of putting customers front and center to create better experiences. These experiences must be cohesive across all channels for the digital customer strategy to yield the best results ‒ more excellent customer retention, transforming customers into advocates for a business, and delivering a competitive advantage.
A digital presence crafted with intentionality is a requirement in today's market, as businesses face new competitors daily. This trend will only continue, and customers' response to it is a demand for better experiences. It will be interesting to see how many businesses accept their challenge.
Brittney Johnson, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Brittney Johnson is an expert in creating exceptional Customer Experiences. After 12+ years in customer support, administrative, and leadership roles, she decided to put her experience to use where she is most passionate ‒ serving consumers. Only now the mission is to improve the experience consumers have overall and not just one person at a time. As a Certified Ops Director and Member of the CXPA she knows that it is both the tech and intentionality we place on keeping customers at the center of all that we do that will increase a businesses longevity and revenue.
