Digital Customer Experience: The Ultimate Guide in 2024

Nishrath

August 6, 2024

Gone are the days when selling a product only required a TV advertisement. With technological advancement happening every day, customers now use digital channels for purchasing. That's why providing a positive digital customer experience should be a top priority for any business.

Now, if you're wondering—

How do you create an exceptional digital customer experience, and where should you start?

Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through what the digital customer experience is, how it can benefit your business, and tactics you can try yourself for creating a winning strategy—so you can delight customers and drive business results.

Let’s get started.

What is Digital Customer Experience?

The digital customer experience, or DCX, is the collective result of all the digital interactions a customer has with your brand—from the moment they find your product online to talking about payment methods and reaching out to customer support if they face issues post-purchase.

These interactions can occur through several digital channels, including emails, live chat, social media, websites, mobile apps, etc.

Simply put, DCX is all about customers' emotions and impressions—the sum of the highs, lows, delights, and disappointments they face when interacting with your brand digitally.

Through these interactions, businesses can either build a stronger bond with customers or weaken them.

Customer Experience vs. Digital Customer Experience: What is the difference?

The main difference between customer experience (CX) and digital customer experience (DCX) is that customer experience measures customers' overall perceptions of your brand. This covers a multitude of touchpoints, both online and offline—including pricing, product usability, customer support quality, and website visuals.

The digital customer experience, on the other hand, is a component of the customer experience and refers to customer interactions on digital interfaces. You can think of the digital customer experience as a chapter in a book, while the customer experience is a whole book.

An optimised DCX is essential for a good CX. If the digital interactions are frustrating or confusing, it will negatively impact the customer's entire experience with your brand.  

What are the Benefits of a Good Digital Customer Experience?

Boosts Customer Satisfaction

Customers are more likely to be happier with your services and return for future interactions when their complaints are promptly addressed. This is extremely beneficial for the sustainability of your business, as keeping existing customers is far more profitable than winning new ones.

To bring some numbers into play, famously, it costs five times more to acquire a new one than to retain existing ones. And it makes sense since you need to spend a lot of time and resources on advertising, promotions, and customer service to convert a potential lead into a customer.

Increase Brand Awareness

Studies show that when a customer is satisfied with the service they received for a potential problem, they are more likely to want to share their experience and promote it to others.

By delivering quick, personalised interactions, you have the chance to establish credibility among your potential customers and improve brand value.

Boost Sales

With the overwhelming number of options available, it’s no surprise that customers are only paying attention to products that precisely meet their needs.

By getting to know your customers' preferences through service interactions and delivering exceptional support that is specifically designed for them, you gain their trust and loyalty, which in turn helps you generate more sales.

Gives a Competitive Advantage

Customers always have something to say. However, whether it's negative or positive, it always has the potential to help you grow.

Understanding customer feedback and utilising it to identify issues they are currently facing helps you curate opportunities that better fit their needs and stand out from the crowd.

How to Improve Digital Customer Experience?

There is no question by now that the digital customer experience is key to growing your business in a tech-savvy world.

But executing an effective DCX can be daunting. Follow these five strategies to fine-tune customers digital journeys and improve your overall bottom line:

Get to Know Your Customers

To build an outstanding digital experience, you must first understand your customers. A great way to do this is by creating customer journey maps.

A customer journey map is a complete visualisation of how customers interact with your brand across all digital platforms over time. The support team can then analyse this data to determine client needs and preferences. Plus, you may identify those golden occasions to offer proactive support.

Pro Tip: Update the map monthly with new data and customer feedback so the strategies remain aligned with customer needs.

Develop an Omnichannel Experience

When strategizing a winning digital customer experience, companies need to make sure they can offer a seamless digital support across multiple channels. For example, a customer may find your product on your website, ask about pricing on social media, and complete the purchase process via email.

Therefore, the support team must ensure they are available on all digital channels and can maintain context throughout cross-channel engagement.

Step Up Your Game: Mevrik offers an AI-powered omnichannel unified inbox that makes these hand-offs seamless. This feature collects customer interactions from multiple channels and organises conversations from repeat customers into a single thread. 

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Use DCX Platforms to Create Personalised Experiences

DCX platforms can be instrumental in taking the digital experience one step further. It offers a centralised inbox that allows businesses to track and view interactions from multiple channels effortlessly.

Additionally, the powerful CRM system integrated within these DCX platforms can analyse large amounts of customer data across channels. This allows businesses to personalise support at every interaction.

Take a simple example—let’s say a customer is looking for a new car. By tracking customers browsing history and their demographics, you can get an idea of what they are looking for in terms of budgets, features, etc. Thus, when the customer speaks to your business, you can provide the right support instantly.

Pro Tip: If you are looking to deliver a personalised experience, but at a scale, Mevrik's has a solution for you. Use Mevrik AI-powered customer support tools to provide real-time, context-driven support on the spot.

Embrace Self-service Options

Implementing a self service option into your strategy can be valuable for your digital customer experience. 

Studies show that a significant 81% of customers want to take care of matters themselves before calling the company's human services. This is because customers can get answers to their questions at their own pace and when they need most, instead of waiting in long lines.

The simplest way to get started with self-service options is to build an open source knowledge base. Tools like Mevrik Knowledge-Base can help you achieve that by creating, editing and accommodating hundreds of support questions. This database can include FAQs, how to guides, troubleshooting shooting steps and user manual.

Additionally you can invest in tools like chatbots that help your customers get answers 24/7.

Social Media for Real-time Engagement 

Around 62.6% of the world population is on social media space. Which means having your brand present on social media channels will enable your customers to reach out to your business instantly.

You'll likely need to manage multiple social media channels, for which you can invest in social media marketing tools like Mevrik Social. These tools help you track customer inquiries across all social media channels and bring it to one inbox. You can then visualise and send context aware responses quickly.

Beyond personalised interaction, social media tools help your business create high-quality posts, run contests, and polls to keep your followers engaged.

Optimise for Mobile

As the usage of smart devices such as phones and tablets continues to rise, making your website mobile-friendly has become more important than ever. A mobile-friendly website ensures customers can easily onboard and navigate your site, no matter where they are.

In addition to website optimisation, consider investing in a mobile app. A mobile app allows for more personalised product recommendations and in-app messaging. 

However, the cost of building a mobile app can be high since it needs to be built for various operating systems. Therefore, businesses should define their goals and carefully consider their target audience before investing.

Make it Easy for Customers to Give Feedback

When you allow customers to provide feedback, it creates an opportunity to turn casual customers into loyal advocates. For example, a CSAT pop-up that asks customers to score their experience on a scale of one to five can make customers feel involved and important.

You can take this one step further by providing open-text response forms. Here, you can tap into customers' authentic voices and understand their issues more in depth.

Pro Tip: Consider using customer satisfaction tools like Mevrik CSAT, which automatically pop up a rating metre as soon as an issue has been resolved.

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How to Measure the Digital Customer Experience?

First Response Time

First response time, or FRT, is a measurement of how long a customer has to wait to get the initial response from a brand.

FRT has a direct correlation with customer satisfaction, as customers expect their issues to be addressed quickly. If your business fails to meet these expectations, you are likely to bring down their experience with your brand.  

Customer Satisfaction Score

CSAT, or customer satisfaction score, is a DCX metric that directly measures how satisfied customers are with your online support. 

While the design of the CSAT scale can differ from brand to brand, here are some common formats you may find:

  • Star Rating Scale: Displays a set of stars, usually from 1 star (strongly disagree) to 5 stars (strongly agree).
  • Smiley Scale: Features a range of face emojis, from a frown (very dissatisfied) to a smile (very satisfied).
  • Likert scale: Can be a five, seven, or ten point rating scale, with 1 signifying "strongly disagree" and the highest number being "strongly agree".

You can place these surveys strategically in any stage of the customer lifecycle—emails, phone calls, or in-app—to collect customer feedback.

Once the score is collected, divide all the satisfied responses by the total number of responses, then multiply by 100. The result shows you the overall percentage of satisfied customers at your business.

To accelerate your workflow, you can also use tools like Mevrik CSAT, which can record every step of your customer's satisfaction journey. You can automatically deploy a rating metre in seconds after the contract ends, and later, use the data visualisation dashboard to analyse survey keywords and satisfaction scores.

Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is considered the gold standard measurement in customer experience. It predicts how likely (or unlikely) your customers are going to recommend your brand to others.

Typically, it is measured by collecting data from a single survey question that asks, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or service to a friend or a colleague?”.

After being presented with the question, respondents choose a rating between 0 (highly unlikely) and 10 (extremely likely).

Once all the responses have been gathered, they’re grouped into three categories:

  • Promoters respond with a score of 9 or 10.
  • Passives respond with a score of 7 or 8.
  • Detractors respond with a score of 0 to 6.

Based on this score, just subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to find your NPS. The scores can range between -100 and 100, with scores above zero being considered good.

Final Thoughts

Delivering a breakthrough digital customer experience becomes easier when all parties are aligned and you understand your customers' needs.

Thus, when setting out your digital customer experience strategy, make sure to identify your target audience, their needs and expectations, and where they’re coming from. It will help you to deliver digital experiences that truly empathise and resonate with them.

If you want to use a DCX platform to manage all aspects of your customer support, why not try Mevrik? Book a Demo today to see how Mevrik can benefit your business.

Embrace Self-Service Options:

  • Empower customers to find answers to their questions and solve problems independently by providing a robust self-service knowledge base.
  • This knowledge base can include FAQs, how-to guides, troubleshooting steps, and product manuals.
  • Consider using chatbots to answer basic inquiries and provide 24/7 support.

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