Author: Nick Reese
Date published: February 22, 2024
In a world of smartphones, social media, and always-on connectivity, the digital customer experience is no longer just one aspect of the customer journey but the primary way—if not the only way—that a customer interacts with a brand. By focusing on how to deliver a digital customer experience (CX), businesses can be more effective at meeting customers at the true start of their buying journey.
Digital CX refers to all the digital interactions and experiences a customer has with a brand throughout the customer journey. Almost every brand delivers at least part of its CX digitally as customers search for information, make purchases, and get support from a brand's website, mobile app, or social media profile. This can also include the technology that customers use to receive support, such as chatbots, email and text messages.
Digital CX can play a critical role in engaging customers at the true start of the customer journey. By making the totality of a brand available through a smartphone or other device, a customer can engage with a business as soon as they've identified a need, regardless of what device they have or the channel they prefer to use.
Your digital customer experience can help deliver deeper insights into your customers’ needs while making it easier to deliver a personalized response at scale. This can help build stronger relationships, endear loyalty and ultimately increase KPIs such as conversion rates or cart size.
As customer usage of digital channels has increased and matured, so have their expectations. According to Salesforce:
Moreover, a consumer survey conducted by Zendesk found that 67% of respondents preferred self-service.
Meeting these expectations can be an uphill battle. Customers demand flawless, personalized, and even proactive service as the minimum standard. Not only do you have to deliver this across common digital channels like smartphones and PCs, but you must be able to also do it through emerging channels like virtual reality or wearables. Brands must also be able to do so without alienating customers or feeling too intrusive.
By leveraging the following solutions, brands can add more value in the form of streamlined processes and deeper engagement, which in turn generate greater loyalty and customer satisfaction. As new digital channels rise in prominence, this will help ensure the digital customer journey continues to meet their needs for ease and convenience.
Leveraging your CRM, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven data analytics tools can help you collect and analyze data about individual customer behavior and preferences across digital channels. This will help you then identify patterns and preferences at the individual level that might not be obvious at the cohort level, allowing you to fine-tune your targeting. You can also leverage data analytics to power other tools like chatbots so you can deliver more immediate service, while analysis of customer purchases can help you predict future trends and offer more relevant follow-up offer.
AI-powered recommendations can leverage insights from what other people browse for and buy to make stronger, individualized suggestions across your different channels. Similarly, you can leverage sentiment analysis to gauge the specific emotions of a customer, helping you understand when a customer can be served with a chatbot or IVR and when they need to be connected immediately with a human. According to Market Research Future, the AI-Based Personalization Market is expected to increase from $461.9 billion in 2023 to $672.2 by 2032.
AI and machine learning can help analyze customer and cohort data to identify potential needs or issues before they arise. For example, predictive analytics could power a chatbot to reach out to a customer at risk of churn to provide helpful advice or a valuable coupon, strengthening the relationship. Instead of waiting for a customer to raise their hands, a proactive approach brings a solution to the customer before they even knew they had an issue. A HelpLama survey found 89% of consumers consider proactive customer service to be a positive experience or pleasant surprise, while 92% improved their perception of a company after being contacted proactively.
Your website, social media platforms, mobile apps, and customer outreach channels allow you to collect customer sentiment and analyze it for new insights. By leveraging sentiment analysis in near real-time, you can instantly react to emerging issues to ensure customer expectations are being met.
Digital CX can play a critical role in engaging customers at the true start of the customer journey. By making the totality of a brand available through a smartphone or other device, a customer can engage with a business as soon as they've identified a need, regardless of what device they have or the channel they prefer to use.
Research from Power Reviews shows the most common starting points for customer journeys are search engines and the websites of stores and retailers. The most influential factors website visitors think about when considering further exploration of a product are:
Prioritizing or making this information easily available at key starting points will improve the digital CX for your customers.
Getting digital CX right is important across every digital channel a customer chooses to use, no matter which device they prefer. While today digital CX is most likely to be delivered through a smartphone or PC, brands should also consider how they will provide a winning customer experience through emerging technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and wearables.
Brands can leverage their digital channels and other technologies to become customer-fluent by allowing them to be more effective in understanding, responding to, and fulfilling their customers' online and offline needs. There are four key elements a business should use as it considers how to optimize its digital CX.
A customer-centric approach to digital CX ensures that everything you do, build, and provide is based on the needs and wants of the customer, not just your business. Designing digital experiences with the customer in mind can help you ensure all your touchpoints are intuitive, convenient, and meet the expectations of your users.
Remove data silos to help ensure every piece of customer data you collect can be leveraged across your business. This allows an insight gleaned through your mobile app to be reflected in the rest of your digital customer interactions across sales, marketing, fulfillment, and customer support, in addition to offline interactions with your call center and in-store staff.
A customer using their smartphone shouldn't have a disadvantage to one using their PC, just as one using your mobile website shouldn't have a substandard experience compared to one using your mobile app. A winning customer experience takes place on the customer's terms, not yours. By leveraging an omnichannel approach, you can ensure customers receive the same winning digital customer experience no matter which channel they prefer to use.
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can play a critical role in enhancing customer experience. AI can help customers receive the answers they need through 24/7 access to self-service resources and chatbot assistance or determine how and when to proactively communicate with a customer. Automation can help employees work more efficiently and focus on more critical tasks—Salesforce estimates businesses save at least 109 billion hours each month through automation tools.
CX leaders are already used to A/B testing changes to the digital experience with small groups of users that they then roll out later to the larger community. When testing different design elements, messaging, or strategies, keep in mind you're not looking for one solution to please all people, but multiple solutions you can use to strategically deploy to please anyone depending on their preferences. Leverage your customer data to identify customer cohorts who respond to a specific solution so you can find other customers who will respond similarly.
When it comes to digital CX, it's no surprise that technology has a major role to play. This requires CX leaders and marketers to work closely with the CIO and other technology leaders throughout the organization to ensure the business can share and leverage data across all offline and online channels.
This requires a cloud-based data infrastructure that utilizes big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things to collect, process, analyze, and share data across your business. 5G connectivity ensures that data can flow quickly throughout the organization, while mobile-access edge computing enables data processing to take place closer to the network's edge so digital channels can take action faster. In addition, solutions like Verizon’s Virtual Contact Center could help to make it easier to deploy automation and AI-powered bots to uncover customer insights, conduct intelligent conversations, and enable self-service.
Digital CX that engages customers on their terms can drive more sales and conversions by reducing friction while delighting customers with personalized engagements. Verizon's CX consulting services can help you provide a digital customer experience that helps you meet growing customer expectations for responsiveness and service. Learn more about Verizon CX consulting services and solutions.
The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.