What Is Digital Customer Experience (CX)?
Digital customer experience (also called digital CX) refers to every interaction a customer has with a brand through digital channels. That includes everything from website and applications (apps) through to social media, email, and also newer platforms such as real-time, AI-driven chat via an advanced chatbot.
How does Digital CX Differ from Customer Experience?
Digital CX is a critical component of customer experience, but it is only one aspect of it.
Customer experience is the overall impression a brand leaves on its customers across the end-to-end customer journey – both online and face-to-face. It reflects how people perceive an organization after interacting with its employees, products, or services. Digital CX is the online component of any overarching customer experience strategy.
Why Does Digital Customer Experience Matter?
Today’s customers are digital-first. They expect seamless, intuitive experiences across every touchpoint and at every stage of the customer journey.
Digital customer experience has become a core pillar of digital transformation as enterprises continue to shift to meet evolving customer behavior and expectations.
For the brands that provide exceptional experiences that meet their customer’s needs, the result is greater customer loyalty, satisfaction, and lifetime value, leading to revenue growth.
The building blocks of providing a seamless digital CX are:
- Omnichannel integration. An omnichannel approach means creating a unified experience across all channels, including physical branches, online, and mobile. Crucially, when it comes to digital CX, it’s also about ensuring customers can move between touchpoints without losing context. For example, a customer might start a live web chat to troubleshoot an issue, interacting with a brand’s chatbot to answer a question, then escalate to a phone call for live technical support. When they get there, the customer service agent already has access to the previous chat history, ensuring continuity and minimizing friction.
- Personalization. Advanced AI-powered analytics can help turn customer data-driven insights into actionable intelligence. Using the information they have, brands can tailor their marketing, products, and services, and overall customer experience to each individual customer’s needs.
- Intelligent automation. Enterprises across all sectors can improve CX with intelligent automation. That’s because intelligent automation helps optimize processes around all customer touchpoints and interactions. AI, machine learning, and cognitive technologies, provide brands (and their call center operations) with up-to-date information and options for problem resolution. It also helps customer-facing agents build relationships, creating a smoother, more efficient customer journey across all touchpoints.
Examples of Digital CX in Action
A successful digital customer experience is made up of multiple elements, such as:
- Website and app interactions. Intuitive navigation, with clear categories and search functionality, is essential. The focus needs to be on making sure it looks and functions well on various devices, from mobile to tablet to desktop. Mobile-first design is increasingly important. For e-commerce functionality, brands need to ensure an easy-to-use checkout process with secure payment options.
- Social media engagement. Organizations need to respond to inquiries and feedback quickly. They also need to create and publish content that is timely and relevant to their audience, as well as engage with users to build relationships and establish a community around the brand.
- Email marketing. The key is personalizing content based on customer behavior, tastes, and preferences. This includes sending product or service recommendations, discount codes, or exclusive offers unique to the individual customer.
- Customer service. Companies today have to be able to provide real-time support through live chat on their websites and apps. Chatbots can help in handling basic queries and questions, and providing self-service options. Using the FAQ format can also help brands answer commonly-asked questions.
Digital Customer Experience Best Practices
To provide a best-in-class digital customer experience that builds loyalty, brands need to design and implement smart omnichannel journeys covering the entire customer experience lifecycle – from customer acquisition to sales, service, retention, and support.
The key to creating these journeys starts with following best practices, including:
Know Your Audience
People lie at the heart of customer experience. In order to provide the types of experiences that they will love, and which will exceed their ever-growing expectations, brands need to know exactly who these customers are.
Organizations can start by building buyer personas or ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to understand who they are targeting and how to interact with them effectively. From there, mapping the customer journey will help identify the key digital touchpoints for their customers so they can optimize them for the best possible experience.
AI-powered analytics can also help provide the data-driven insights that enterprises need to adapt their digital CX strategy to meet their customer’s evolving needs.
Ensure Seamless Experiences Across All Channels
When customers engage with brands, it should feel like they’re interacting with one, unified entity, no matter what channel or platform they’re engaging with them on. That means a consistent voice, visual identity, and overall messaging across channels.
It also means transitioning between different touchpoints smoothly without losing context. Data integration underpins this capability. Brands need to collect and analyze customer data from various touchpoints for insights into their behavior and preferences.
Personalization at Scale
Organizations can use the vast amounts of data they hold about their customers to personalize marketing efforts, product recommendations, and overall customer service experiences.
To gain a competitive edge, brands need to be able to personalize experiences at scale. AI and machine learning can help identify patterns and predict customer behavior based on past interactions.
Speed and Efficiency
Customers expect quick and efficient service and support. Hyperautomation can help by allowing businesses to automate as many of the processes connected to customer interactions as possible.
Combining AI, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), and more enables organizations to accelerate efficiencies and scale operations by creating new digital workflows quickly and easily.
Collect Customer Feedback
The value of customer feedback is priceless. To have insights from the very people who are buying from and interacting with a business makes it significantly easier to optimize what is working and adjust what isn’t.
Brands can collect customer feedback through multiple channels, combining email surveys with social media, live chat, phone calls, and in-app feedback to reach diverse segments. It’s important to be transparent about how feedback is used to improve the experience.
The Future of Digital CX
Digital CX is the foundation of successful overall customer experiences. Enterprises that lead the way in their industry will need to focus on key areas, such as:
Hyperpersonalization
In the future, brands are going to have to move beyond basic personalization. That will require using advanced data analytics, AI, and real-time insights to create highly tailored and bespoke faexperiences for individual customers. Examples include dynamic website content that is adapted in real-time, or offering relevant support before the customer even asks for it.
Chatbots
Advanced chatbots are a vital cog in the digital CX machine. By using capabilities like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, they can answer questions, resolve simple issues, make product recommendations, and help with purchases. The benefits are round-the clock support, instant responses, and personalized interactions.
Conversational AI
Going a step further, Conversational AI allows customers to engage with bots more naturally. It uses machine learning, NLP, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and contextual awareness to simulate human conversation.
This allows brands to automate more natural, human-like interactions with customers. It improves customer service, reduces costs, and maximizes sales opportunities. Sutherland has a Conversational AI solution, which ensures consistent, engaging interactions for sales, support, and other functions. Tailored for each organization’s unique needs, it helps:
- Automate customer self-service interactions and business processes
- Improve customer service and user experience
- Expand after-hours support
Discover How Sutherland Can Help Improve Your Digital CX
There are a growing number of case studies of enterprises across industries with effective digital CX. Examples include:
- A gaming and technology giant leveraging Conversational AI to solve complex problems in real-time. That included helping gamers change their IDs – which they hadn’t been able to do for 15 years – without increasing labor costs.
- A top Middle Eastern conglomerate integrating advanced tools such as Sutherland Connect, Conversational AI, and Sutherland Engage to understand customer preferences and hyperpersonalize offerings for a 25% improvement in the overall customer experience.
- A leading insurance provider implementing Sutherland Connect, a comprehensive, cloud-based omnichannel customer experience platform, as a key component of its solution to facilitate a direct-to-customer approach and streamline the end-to-end customer experience.
