What is Digital Customer Experience and How to Improve It

Before you can figure out how to improve digital customer experience, you need to know what affects it.

Let’s go over what those factors are!

Defining Customer Experience

If you’re doing business online, I’m sure you know the importance of digital channels. When your customers interact with your brand mostly through digital channels, you need to ensure that you’re providing them with exceptional digital customer experience.

There were more than 3.9 billion internet users worldwide in 2018. This means half the world’s population has access to the internet. This makes digital customer experience important for businesses because you can’t ignore your customers who interact with your business digitally.

What is Digital Customer Experience?

So what exactly is this digital customer experience and how it’s different from the conventional customer experience?

HBR defines digital customer experience as:

“Digital customer experience includes only those experienced through a digital interface, like a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Researching a product online, using a mobile app to find a store’s nearest location, searching for tech support information on a smartphone—these are all digital customer experiences.”

On the other hand, customer experience includes all the customer’s interactions with your company including online as well as offline interactions. For instance, a customer visiting your local store, a customer calling your customer support helpline, etc. are offline customer experiences that don’t involve any digital interface.

Customer experience, therefore, is a broad term and digital customer experience is its subset that only deals with a specific type of customer experiences.

The internet, social networks, IoT, and other advances in technology have changed the way how people find and search for what they’re looking for, therefore, digital customer experience has become equally (if not more) important in today’s era.

What this means is that you have to ensure you provide a seamless yet superior customer experience across all digital channels.

Digital Customer Experience Improvement Techniques

Not sure how to improve digital customer experience? The following techniques and tactics will help you improve it across all digital channels.

1. Understand Customers

It all starts with a clear understanding of your customers. The more you know them, the better. When you know your customers, you can provide them with a personalized experience.

If you know that your customers prefer watching videos instead of reading the text, you can create more video content to provide your customers with an experience they will love.

You need to collect data, do research, and create customer personas to know who your customers are and what they like and what they don’t like.

One easy way to know your customers is to collect feedback. You need to ask your customers what they feel about a specific product, product feature, experience, and interaction with your brand.

For instance, you can send a quick survey to your subscribers via email and collect feedback about their latest interaction with your brand. This will help you identify loopholes in digital customer experience.

At the end of the day, feedback lets you improve the experience across all levels and channels.

2. Focus on Customer Lifecycle

One important aspect of digital customer experience is that it needs to be incorporated throughout the customer lifecycle. This means you have to ensure that digital customer experience is highly personalized in the awareness, interest, consideration, and action stages of the customer’s lifecycle journey.

You can’t ignore any lifecycle stage. Doing so will significantly lower conversions.

If potential customers in the consideration stage prefer reading comparison articles, you need to make sure that you provide them comparison articles throughout the consideration stage. That’s what they expect and this is what’s most likely improve customer experience.

3. Improve Site Load Speed

Your website is the single most important entity that shapes the digital customer experience. All online customers have to interact with your business through your website. And it has to be optimized and should load fast.

A slow website ruins customer experience and nothing hurts more than a slow site speed. According to Google, 46% of people say waiting for web pages to load is something they dislike the most when browsing the internet.

If there is one thing that’s more important for digital customer experience, it’s your website’s loading speed. There are several practical steps that you can take to improve the load speed of your website on both desktop and mobile. Here are a few actionable tips to get started:

1. Compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
2. Use browser caching.
3. Use a reliable hosting company so you can reduce server response time.
4. Optimize images.
5. If you can afford, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
6. Minimize HTTP requests.

Ideally, your website load time should be 5 seconds or less but that’s extremely hard to achieve. You should reduce the load time as much as you can. Keep working on improvement continuously.

4. Social Listening

It’s extremely challenging to improve digital customer experience without listening to your customers on the internet. Social listening is an essential part of listening that involves monitoring digital conversations about your brand to understand what your customers are saying about your company.

What your customers say about your company tells you a lot about your customers and their likes and dislikes. Social listening lets you improve the digital customer experience without collecting any type of data. You just have to use a tool to monitor your brand mentions and understand conversations.

If, for instance, a customer shares his experience with your online store and mentioned that your store isn’t offering a guest checkout which is the reason why that particular customer left. This information means a lot.

You now know that the absence of a guest checkout feature is costing you customers. Adding a guest checkout feature can help you reduce cart abandonment to a great extent.

Social listening helps you a lot in improving the digital customer experience.

Final Words

Improving digital customer experience is a must. You can’t go without it because a major percentage of your target audience interacts with your brand digitally. You need to offer them an experience that will keep them coming back to you.

If you fail to provide superior experience digitally, you’ll lose customers. You don’t want to lose customers, right?

If you are not sure where to get started, book a meeting with our professional or take a free trial for our software which is especially made for getting customer feedback from customers and creating testimonials out of those feedbacks.