The digital customer experience (DCX) is about providing the same level of service to your online customers that you provide to your in-person customers. If you can do that, you can increase your sales, revenue, and customer base. But how do you do this? This blog will explain what DCX is, why it's important, and how to use it to create a better customer experience.

What is digital customer experience?

The more customers rely on digital channels to communicate with brands, the more digital customer experience becomes a key factor in their purchase decisions. The need to maintain a clear and transparent customer experience is crucial in the way brands interact with customers. While the most common digital channels for customer interaction are social media, website, email, phone, chat, and mobile, the digital customer encapsulates all digital touchpoints, including augmented reality, apps, chatbots, in-store digital display and more. It is the escape to reality individuals can experience with a company.

Dr Dave Chaffey says, “A brand’s total digital experience includes a brand’s presence on different platforms, including the desktop website, mobile sites, mobile apps, ads on gaming platforms and digital in-store. The quality of digital experience is based on the combination of rational and emotional factors of using a company’s online services that influences customer’s perceptions of a brand online.”

Digital customer experience vs customer experience

A customer experience is a customer's perception of the quality and value of your product or service. In contrast, the digital customer experience is the customer's perception of the quality and value of your brand across all digital channels and touchpoints. While the customer experience is a holistic view of the customer journey, the digital experience is a more specific concept, as it spans your digital ecosystem. The digital customer experience includes the content, technology, and services that your customers use to interact with your brand when online or through digital interfaces in-store, whereas the customer experience includes all the digital interactions as well as the offline interactions such as call centres, TV ads, product packaging and more.

The digital customer experience (DCX) is inseparable from the all-encompassing customer experience (CX), which includes in-store and other interactions in the physical world. It has become more and more difficult to tell the difference between the two, and DCX is proving to be the future of business.

Why is digital customer experience important?

If customer experience is important because it drives the perception of the company and shapes customer loyalty, digital customer experience is important because our digital interactions with businesses are increasingly becoming the default way we interact with companies.

Consider these stats:

• 67% of customers will willingly pay more for a great experience.

• Consumers have a level of passion that is unrivalled when they have an emotional connection with a brand. Their lifetime value is 306% higher, and they are more likely to recommend to others.

The global customer experience has changed. It's not just about the product anymore. It's also about the customer's experience with the company and its services. It's about the customer's perception of the company and how they feel about it. It's about the little things that make them feel like they can really trust you.

Having a positive digital customer experience can improves the company's image. It can be a differentiator for your business versus your competition. Numerous challenger banks such as Monzo use the digital customer experience to set themselves apart from the competition. One of the ways that challenger banks use their digital customer experience is by providing banking services via a mobile app with features that traditional banks did not offer. These banking services provided customers with an easy and convenient way to access and manage their accounts. This saw Monzo, Starling and Revolut taking large chunks of market share from traditional banks.

What makes a great digital customer experience?

The definition of a great digital customer experience is where the user has a pleasant and seamless experience from start to finish. There should be no lag time, no unexpected glitches, and no daunting, complicated tasks. Providing a great digital customer experience means having a website or app that is easy to navigate, personalisation for users with content relevant to their interests, and a clear, concise idea of what you will get from the site.

Personalisation

Digital customer experience is all about making your customers feel special and appreciated by tailoring their experience. If your customer goes to your website and sees a banner with their name on it or gets a discount because they bought something from you before, they'll feel very appreciated and like they matter to you. Giving your customers a personalised experience can make them return, particularly if you use personalised recommendations tailored to their interests.

Integration

Customers expect their experience with your business to be seamless. All the digital and non-digital touchpoints need to be linked and consistent from one to another. The customer must have an integrated and smooth journey from beginning to end.

Intuitive and easy-to-use

Companies like Apple, Google, and Netflix have raised the bar for what good, easy-to-use, consumer-friendly software looks like. An easy to use interface will provide customers with an efficient and pleasurable experience. People don't want to click a large number of times, nor do they want to go digging through multiple menus and settings in your product to find what they are looking for.

Consistency

Consistency is one of the most important factors in creating a good user experience and good customer experience. Whether you are launching a new product, onboarding a customer, or upgrading a service, your customers need consistent messaging as well as consistent communications. For example, to keep a consistent promotional marketing message, you should always ensure that your email campaigns and website messaging are aligned. This will help make sure your customer understands what you're trying to communicate and help your message be more effective. If people read one thing on an email campaign and see different messaging on your website, that leads to a confusing customer experience.

How to improve digital customer experiences

There are a lot of ways a company can enhance their digital customer experience. Still, one of the best ways is by incorporating analytics, monitoring customer experience metrics, and capturing customer feedback as part of a digital customer experience strategy. Such feedback programs allow a company to analyse what customers want, enjoy, and don't like about their website, app, product, or service. The results from this ongoing research feed into future updates to the product design or delivery.

One common metric used in a digital customer experience strategy is the customer effort score. A Customer Effort Score is a tool that’s used to help businesses gauge the effort their customers go through to complete a task, such as completing a purchase on an e-commerce store. It helps companies evaluate specific elements of their customer experience and measure how often they’re meeting expectations at key touchpoints.

Identify key touchpoints in your digital customer journey

There are many touchpoints in a customer's digital journey. Your challenge is to identify what the most important touchpoints are to be able to improve them. You can do this by looking at your digital customer journey and identifying customers' tasks to complete to achieve the desired result. These touchpoints could include: creating an account, paying for a product or service, updating communication preference, adding items to a basket, searching for products on a mobile device, or pretty much anything you can think of.

Capture customer feedback at the touchpoint you want to improve

Once you have identified your key touchpoints, you want to start capturing some customer feedback when they are at that touchpoint. Businesses would typically use the Customer Effort Score survey or the Customer Satisfaction Score survey to capture this feedback; the survey they use would depend on the nature of the business and what exactly it is that they are trying to ascertain.

For example, if you are a service-based business and you want to assess customer satisfaction at a key touchpoint, you will use a satisfaction survey. However, if you are a product-based business and want to assess how easy your product was to use, you would likely use the customer effort score survey.

Acting on the customer feedback

Effective customer feedback is not just about understanding customers' thoughts but about gaining insight into how customers are interacting with your product. Feedback gathered can be used to identify opportunities for improvement, monitor changes in consumer behaviour, and ensure that your company continues to meet your customers' needs.

Put time aside regularly to analyse the feedback you receive from your customer surveys. Bring together key stakeholders to review how customer feedback is being used. If necessary, update the survey questions to ensure they are capturing the true feedback you're seeking. Identify opportunities for improvement, prioritise which changes to your product or service based on the feedback received, and implement them. Monitor changes in customer behaviour using the feedback you've gathered.

This is a simple but powerful example of using customer feedback, especially when you are serious about improving your digital customer experience.