How to improve your digital customer experience
The majority of businesses appreciate the benefits of having a solid online presence, but in order to optimise the way customers interact with your brand, you need to create a best-in-class digital customer experience (CX) strategy.
However, getting started can be a challenge, which is why we’ve put this helpful guide together to ensure you can produce a digital CX that’s engaging, user-friendly, and enjoyable for your online audience.
In this article, we will explore what a digital customer experience strategy is, how to improve it, and the benefits of doing so.
What is digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience refers to the total amount of interactions a customer has with your organisation online. It’s all about ensuring that your customers have a positive experience when dealing with your brand, creating beneficial outcomes for both themselves and the business.
A lot of interactions will take place on a website, but there are some other online communication channels:
- Mobile app
- Social media
- Chatbots
- Enquiry forms
By creating a digital customer experience that incorporates all of the channels above, and any others that act as a virtual touchpoint, you can help to build a CX that’s unrivalled in your industry and helps your business grow.
How to create an effective digital CX strategy
Before you start developing your knock-out strategy, it’s vital to understand the importance of developing a holistic CX strategy that considers all marketing channels and the full user journey.
Here, we take you on a simple step-by-step journey through how to improve your digital customer experience, so you can control how customers perceive your company.
1. Learn about your customers
Before you start creating a digital customer experience strategy, you need to ensure you know who your customers are. You should understand your customers’ demographics, goals, and behaviours – who are they and why are they interested in your business?
One way of achieving this is with customer surveys, which allow you to gather essential engagement and interaction data across the customer journey that can help to inform your strategy.
Tracking and revising the entire customer journey is critical for building an excellent customer experience. This way, you’ll be able to meet your target audience’s specific needs and improve your business offering accordingly.
2. Identify your customers’ pain points
By gathering customer feedback, you’re able to gain insights into how your business is perceived. You can also determine what their pain points are, whether that’s website navigation issues or a lack of social media interaction.
This allows you to react to your customers’ primary needs by identifying which areas of your business you need to improve to boost customer satisfaction.
Other than relying on customer feedback methods, you can also use tools that leverage customer service data and analyse underperforming channels or products.
3. Create personalised experiences
The online world is more competitive than ever before. One way to stand out from your competitors is to personalise the customer experience to show that you truly care about every single member of your audience.
Customers want to be seen and treated as individuals. In fact, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions, and companies that excel at personalisation generate a staggering 40% more revenue from those activities than average performers.
If you don’t want to get left behind and need help creating bespoke, personalised customer experiences, then Red Letter Days Corporate are on hand to help.
4. Consider all marketing channels
Whether it’s social media, mobile apps, or emails, considering all marketing channels is essential when optimising the digital customer experience. A truly omnichannel customer experience creates a seamless conversation across the customer journey, considering how they interact with your brand through different channels.
Customers will have different preferred ways of interacting with your brand online depending on what’s most comfortable for them, which is why you need to be accommodating by providing more options. This ensures you minimse the risk of creating a negative customer experience for an individual or a particular demographic.
In short, customers will be happier if you support an array of different channels, allowing you to create a more personal and meaningful digital experience.
5. Measure results
Finally, you need to make sure you analyse the results of your CX strategy to see how successful it’s been and inform future business decisions. Real-time analytics help you to evaluate exactly what’s working using accurate, time-sensitive data – something that’s invaluable in our technology-driven, fast-paced world.
You’ll have insights into customer satisfaction and preferences, conversion and bounce rates, and so much more. Using this data, you’ll then be able to personalise your digital customer experience to retain and attract new customers to your business.
The benefits of an effective customer experience strategy
Digital customer experience isn’t all about the potential rewards for your customers, as it can also have a huge impact on business performance.
Having improved your digital CX with a first-class strategy, you’ll be pleased to know that you’ll be rewarded with a whole host of benefits.
Improve customer loyalty
A better customer experience will inevitably lead to an improvement in customer loyalty. A customer who is happy and feels like they’re receiving a personalised service is more likely to return than one who has a negative experience. Not only does a positive experience help to boost sales and keep customers loyal, but it also means they’re more likely to recommend your business to someone else.
Approximately 63% of executives have increased their company’s loyalty budgets during the last planning cycle, which means now is the time to think about how you can improve customer loyalty at your business.
To do so, why not reach out to Red Letter Days Corporate? We can help you build an effective customer loyalty programme that will enhance your brand image and give customers an incentive to stay loyal to your business.
Keep costs down
Statistics reveal that an increase in customer retention by 5% can gradually lead to a company’s profits growing by 25% to 95%. This shows how much more cost-effective retaining customers can be and why it deserves just as much attention as your attempts to acquire new business.
One of the primary reasons for this is that loyal customers are more familiar with your business, which makes upselling products or services a worthwhile tactic. This could involve creating different subscription plan tiers or additional features only available to loyal customers.
Also, a lot fewer resources are used when comparing customer retention to acquisition, which will further drive down your business costs.
Increase revenue
Last, but by no means least, is the positive impact an effective customer experience strategy can have on revenue. This is best demonstrated by a McKinsey report, which showed that between 2016 and 2021, companies that were leaders of CX achieved more than double the revenue growth of those that failed to deliver good CX.
This all boils down to the simple fact that happy customers are more likely to return to your business and keep buying your products and services. The more sales you make, the greater your business revenue.
How we can help create positive customer experiences
The digital world is incredibly competitive, which is why a standout digital customer experience is vital to leading the way ahead of your competition. Just remember, the customers’ needs should always be the focal point of your strategy.
Now you know how to improve your digital customer experience, you’re one step closer to turning this knowledge into positive results for your business. However, to do so successfully, you’ll need the help of a company that’s an expert in creating a positive customer experience.
Get in touch with a member of the Red Letter Days Corporate team today to see how corporate gifting can play a big part in achieving your digital customer experience goals.