Whether it is directly shopping online or using online reviews, websites, and apps as a barometer to choose a business, the overwhelming majority of the population in developed economies use digital media when choosing when and how to spend their money. According to surveys of UK and US customers, upwards of 80% regularly shop online, and that figure is even higher in Japan and mainland Europe.
Regardless of industry or size, businesses nowadays are expected to have a meaningful digital presence. What does that digital presence look like, however? Is creating a website enough? How do you engage with social media? What do customers expect? These are all questions answered by a business's digital customer experience (digital CX) strategy.
A good digital customer experience strategy is seen as critical for success in many industries. It broadens the reach of your business. It opens up digital interactions with customers and potential customers. It gives you tools to build your brand online. And last, but certainly not least, it offers a competitive advantage that will help you edge out your competitors.
In this article, we'll go over what a digital CX strategy is, what benefits your business can expect from adopting it, and what creating one looks like. In short, it has everything you need to know to curate the perfect digital customer experience.
What is a digital customer experience?
A digital customer experience refers to all interactions potential customers have with your business online. It is an all-encompassing term that includes everything from online shopping to your social media channels and web and mobile platforms.
The digital CX includes all digital customer interactions with your business, both positive and negative. It governs online sales, impacts customer retention, and is foundational to brand perception. In short, the digital customer experience is one of the foundations of success for businesses in the modern environment.
How does digital customer experience differ from traditional customer experiences?
Taking advantage of digital channels proves challenging for most businesses that come from a traditional brick-and-mortar background. In some instances, the factors that impact traditional customers' experiences wholly translate to the digital environment; in others, some factors are paramount for traditional customer experiences that are wholly irrelevant for digital channels. Business owners often have a hard time delineating between the two.
Why is having a digital customer experience strategy important?
"Failing to plan is planning to fail." This adage by Benjamin Franklin is certainly true for all business plans, but it is especially true for digital services. Nowadays, not only do most customers rely on digital channels to interact with businesses, but customers also expect a seamless digital experience with websites that are easy to use, responsive apps, and social media accounts that are curated to their interests.
To ensure customer satisfaction, you need to create a comprehensive digital strategy, and in this section, we'll guide you through what that might look like!
#1 It has become a core part of the customer journey
Whether it is retailers or healthcare facilities, when surveyed, businesses point to digital channels from their online storefronts to their websites as primary sources for customer acquisition. Today, many demographics rely primarily and sometimes solely on online shopping to conduct business, and this trend is only set to accelerate in the future.
The digital space has become an integral part of the customer journey. If you ignore the digital landscape, your business will be unable to reach large swathes of the population, limiting your company's growth and leaving potential revenue on the table.
#2 It is easier to customize
Making changes to the brick-and-mortar experience of customers requires significant capital. Whether it is redecorating a store, hiring additional staff, or moving into a larger office, these require substantial initial investments and add ongoing costs that many smaller and medium-sized businesses simply can't afford.
Curating a digital experience, however, is far less costly. Web real estate is certainly not as costly as actual real estate, creating a social media presence doesn't have huge bills attached to it, and adopting digital tools can often be a cost-saving measure. This makes digital channels an accessible way for businesses to increase their outreach.
#3 It gives you insight into your customer expectations and behavior
An expansive online footprint gives you access to valuable customer data, including purchase history, habits, demographics, and more. This information not only gives you insight into how your store is performing, but it can also show you seasonal patterns, interest by location, and much more.
This data can then be used to construct key performance indicators (KPIs) your business can use to evaluate the success of business ventures, products, and services, identify gaps in the market, and capitalize on trends. Data-driven decision making is vital for a business's success, and an expansive digital presence gives you unprecedented access to customer data.
#4 It is vital for brand recognition
In today's business landscape, people are inundated with ads. From the TV to the internet and billboards, every piece of real estate is used to capture potential customers' attention. This has made creating a loyal customer base an increasingly harder task for businesses. How can they remember your business's name or the services you provide when they've seen ads for 10 other businesses that afternoon alone?
This is where a digital customer experience strategy comes in. By cementing your presence online, interacting with your customers on social media, and performing on local search engines, you can slowly increase your brand recognition and create a stable customer base.
#5 It improves sales
Digital tools allow you to reach more potential customers, directly advertise to and communicate with them, and ultimately, close out sales that would've otherwise never been possible.
What percentage of your revenues that will come from your digital presence will vary depending on the industry you are working in, the demographics you are targeting, and the effectiveness of your digital CX strategy. For retailers, it can be as high as 80-90% whereas, for B2B businesses, it can be as low as 20-30%. Nevertheless, it will likely represent a substantial stream of revenue you can use to grow your business and improve profits.
Creating a digital customer experience strategy: step-by-step guide
A successful digital CX strategy needs to achieve a few goals: It needs to allow you access to more potential customers, it needs to help you create stronger customer relationships, and it needs to give you insight into customer needs.
As long as these goals are met, businesses have great leeway in how they approach their digital CX strategy, and there are certainly businesses that have seen immense success with unique and unorthodox approaches. Despite that, there is a successful blueprint that businesses can adopt to improve digital customer experience:
Decide on effective digital touchpoints
Digital touchpoints refer to the primary digital platforms that you use to reach your customers. Each business has its unique digital touchpoints. A B2B enterprise, for example, might use a local online listing website to reach potential customers, while a cake shop will primarily use social media to advertise its products.
To create a compelling digital experience, you need to meet potential customers where they are at, and this means taking advantage of channels and platforms that are popular within demographics you want to reach or are commonly used by your industry rivals.
Choosing the right digital touchpoints is one of the core decisions you'll make as a business owner, since different platforms have varying requirements for businesses, offer unique environments, and are governed by different codes of conduct. Your digital customer experience management strategy needs to be designed, from its initial stages, with specific platforms and channels in mind.
Analyze the typical customer journey
The customer journey encompasses the breadth of experiences a client goes through when interacting with your business. From the initial "awareness" stage where they hear about your products to the decision stage when they make a purchase or sign up for your services, up until the advocacy stage where they become loyal customers, these all form the customer journey.
To create an effective digital strategy, you need to tailor your digital services to aid customers at every stage of the customer journey, which, holistically, creates better customer experiences and increases conversion rates.
A strong social media presence, for example, can help people not familiar with your business learn more about the products and services you offer, your unique selling propositions (USPs), and your brand, helping people who are reaching the awareness stage of their customer journey. Meanwhile, blog posts, detailed guides, and tutorials are vital for long-term customers, helping people who have made purchases reach the advocacy stage of their customer journey.
Here, one approach isn't "better" than the other; rather, they both work together to create a more comprehensive digital customer experience strategy that can help your business expand its reach while keeping existing customers happy.
Introduce key performance indicators
Determining "digital success" is a nebulous term. Do increased website visits mean your digital strategy is successful? What about app downloads? Sign up for your mailing list? In short, there are many ways to define success in the digital arena.
Businesses have to identify and keep track of a few key performance indicators (KPIs) that they can use to gauge success. These indicators aren't universal. A hospital, for example, might mostly use a mobile app to simplify the management of appointments, whereas in the case of a retailer, their mobile app would likely be one of their primary revenue sources. So it makes sense for a retailer to use app downloads as a KPI, but in the hospital's case, the number of app downloads doesn't tell you much about the app's success.
Adopt tools that can complement your digital strategy
Navigating the digital environment is complex. From building user-friendly interfaces to collecting and analyzing data on customers to creating communication channels and regulating customer interactions, there are many elements you need to properly manage. What's worse, most of these elements require specialized knowledge and technical know-how.
Creating custom solutions to these problems from scratch is prohibitively expensive, and in some instances, not even technically possible for most businesses. Thankfully, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. There are digital solutions you can use that will give you powerful tools to shape your CX strategy and create a seamless digital customer experience.
At Waitwhile, for example, we offer software solutions that allow businesses to create virtual queues, manage appointments, deploy self-service tools, create communication channels, and even incorporate feedback into their processes. All while giving you powerful data analytics tools that give you insight into customer behavior.
Finding the right tools can be the difference between a great digital experience management strategy that increases customer retention, improves access to target audiences, reduces overhead, and increases profits, and a cost-prohibitive customer experience that customers perceive as out of touch.
How to identify gaps in your digital customer experience?
No plan survives first contact with the enemy - this quote is as true of business strategies as it is of real-world battlefields. While creating a strategy is necessary for success in the digital space, it isn't sufficient. You need to test that strategy in the real world, look at the results, identify gaps, and iteratively improve on it until you create an exceptional digital customer experience.
Thankfully, identifying gaps in your digital strategy isn't difficult. Here's how you can potentially go about it:
#1 Analyze customer behavior
As we mentioned above, creating an expansive digital presence gives your business ample access to valuable client data, but this data needs to be properly analyzed and employed to create actionable insights you can use to improve the digital customer experience your business is providing.
As an example, a particular landing page might have awful conversion rates, but that doesn't necessarily mean the product is unpopular. It could be the structure of the landing page, it could be the way in which that product has been advertised, and it might even be something as simple as the photos used to advertise the product.
#2 Use customer feedback
While using customer data is invaluable, data ultimately can't capture everything. Often, simply asking your clients for feedback can give you valuable insight into missing features, inefficient processes, and gaps in customer support.
Thankfully, the digital medium has also made collecting customer feedback easier. While traditional businesses had to rely on expensive focus groups to collect feedback, digital management tools like Waitwhile now have in-built features that automatically ask for a client's input once an appointment or purchase has concluded.
This allows you to get direct feedback from customers on specific products, on services and customer support, and even on app and web clients. All that's left is using this information to make changes to better meet customer expectations.
#3 Conduct tests
Businesses can make changes to their digital presence far more easily than to their physical one. As we mentioned previously, this has been one of the primary reasons digital channels have gained more popularity with enterprises in recent years.
A substantial benefit of this fact, which might not be readily apparent at first glance, is the fact that this allows businesses to conduct tests in affordable ways. Known as A/B testing, you can present groups of customers with two or more product pages, app interfaces, or service descriptions, and then see which one sees more success.
Though the concept of A/B testing isn't new, since it is all happening digitally in this case, it is more affordable and more accessible than ever before, and it allows your business to curate a seamless digital experience through direct testing.
Conclusion
The digital world opens up a host of new possibilities and opportunities for businesses, but without creating a customer experience that’s tailored to the online medium, you can’t capitalize on it properly.
Thankfully, in many ways, digital CX is an extension of regular CX, with many concepts and strategies either carrying over or having clear digital analogues. However, there are considerations and pitfalls that are exclusive to the digital world, and this article will help you navigate them by empowering you with effective strategies and tools! If you are interested in learning more, you can read about how Waitwhile has helped businesses across various industries craft successful digital CXes with our tools.
Jakob Larsson Stern
Jakob is a seasoned product marketing lead with a strong track record of transforming customer insights into compelling value propositions and effective marketing strategies.
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