In today’s time, digital customer experience is an important business differential as a digital customer experience strategy can showcase the company’s unique value to potential customers, earn their trust, boost conversions, and nurture long-lasting relationships with customers. Research also suggests that brands that combine the three essential elements of great products, powerful digital experiences, and memorable human connections have customers who are more engaged, more satisfied, and more loyal.
Keeping these benefits in mind, the following are 6 strategies that can be used to create the best digital experience for your customers:
- Know your customers: The first step in any business endeavour is getting acquainted with the customers- what makes them tick, what they want from you, how they use your products & services, and, most importantly, how they want to acquire them. By building this buyer persona, you will be able to empathize with your customers, see the digital world through their eyes and meet them halfway. In other words, it is like creating a social media profile of your average user; except it is not created by them.
- Refine your digital customer experience by addressing each stage of their customer journey: Just like everyone has their own story, every customer has a specific journey, with different expectations associated with each stage. Once you are mindful of these customer journeys and the intent behind their behaviour, the experience you design becomes more and more personal and personalized. Therefore, you must know at which point the digital channels play a bigger role in their behaviour.
- Innovate to better fit into the digital lives of the customers: Digital is all about new technologies and finding the right way to incorporate them into your strategy. Yet the concept uncovers a much deeper reality: innovation should not necessarily be all fancy and complicated. Take Uber, for example. The idea seems simple and obvious, yet it appeals to its users. This is because it creates a frictionless experience, eliminating the frustrating problem of anticipation. It connects users and drivers, configures the route, and shows you exactly when the car will arrive.
- Use customer data to fuel your digital transformation efforts: According to Accenture, 75% of customers admit being more likely to buy from a company that recognizes them by their name, knows their purchase history, and recommends products based on their past purchases.
This is why Amazon is thriving: they found the secret recipe to customer’s happiness and satisfaction. Their algorithm promotes upselling by recommending products their users are highly likely to be interested in, based on a solid knowledge of their buying patterns. Therefore, digital can be leveraged to know the customer better and provide exceptional services to them.
- Leverage design thinking for better digital customer experience: Design thinking is a human centered, iterative design process consisting of 5 steps- Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype & Test. A process like this is important because it helps to create personalised experiences at every interaction with the customer. In other words, it enables businesses to travel the last mile and really engage & connect with its customers.
- Ensure all digital initiatives complement existing customer journeys: Many companies add digital components to customer journeys that do not directly benefit the customer. At best, these additions fail to gain traction; at worst, they can make the experience more complicated and drive people away. A better approach is to include features that simplify some aspect of the journey on which customers are already engaging. The Starbucks mobile app is a great example of this. It manages a customer’s loyalty points and lets customers place orders ahead of time, so they can skip the in-store lines. Customers love that the app saves them time.
- Make the experience never-ending: An excellent digital customer experience strategy takes into consideration what happens after users become customers. It ensures that even after the sale, customers continue to enjoy a memorable experience with the brand. By implementing a never-ending digital customer experience strategy, not only would brands build their reputation, but they are also more likely to retain existing customers and ultimately impact their bottom line.
- Train your leaders on designing exceptional digital experiences: While organisations are investing in digital technologies, it is equally critical for leaders to adopt a digital mindset to re-imagine customer experience. Hence, improving digital acumen in leadership and increasing their ability to design innovative customer journey is also an important aspect.
Conclusion: Based on the above statements, it can therefore be stated that that digital customer experience management is neither about simply managing specific digital channels and ensuring they work well nor is it an effort that only marketing or sales should focus on. Instead, it focuses on being aware of the digital touchpoints that the company shares with its customers across platforms and continually improving the experience its customers have within and in-between those touchpoints.
Keeping this in mind, InspireOne has developed a program on Digital CX that helps leaders to adopt a digital mind to reimagine customer experiences. To know more about this program, feel free to visit our website.
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