The Importance of Having a Digital Customer Experience

Do you want to attract customers and foster loyalty and trust? With a digital customer experience strategy, you can alleviate pain points to provide a better overall customer experience.

This kind of strategy is the first step in boosting customer engagement and customer loyalty so that you can create long-lasting relationships with your buyers. Trust us — creating a seamless customer journey will benefit your brand immensely!

That’s why we’re going to show you what a digital customer experience is, why experience management is important, and how Jebbit can help.

What Is the Digital Customer Experience?   

“Digital customer experience” (DCX or digital CX) is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the digital world, but what does it really mean?

In short, the digital customer experience represents the interactions that customers have with your digital products or services. It includes everything related to your online presence: your e-commerce website, interactions on social media, omnichannel customer experiences if you sell on multiple platforms, the ease of use and functionality of your digital channels, and more.

When you’re mapping these experiences, they’re sometimes referred to as the “digital customer experience journey” — and that’s because buyer interactions with your brand resemble a journey made up of various customer touch points. The first digital touch point might be your corporate website, or it could be a mobile app, chatbot, social media, or other points of contact. As you’re considering the components that make up your brand’s experience, include everything from initial lead generation forms to the shopping cart and checkout process.

No matter the touch point or the stage in the customer journey, the impression that customers take away from the experience is what counts. Is it difficult and frustrating to request customer support or place an order? Or have you created a simple, engaging, and memorable process? 

Every interaction helps customers build an overall impression of your brand, which means you need to provide a consistent, engaging, customer-centric experience to create a great impression.

Why Is Having a Great Digital Customer Experience Important?

In today’s digital-first world, a digital customer experience is absolutely essential. It can make or break a customer’s opinion of your brand and ultimately determine whether they become a repeat customer or seek out another company for their needs.

Think about it: Odds are, you are more willing to pay for a memorable, trustworthy experience from one of your favorite brands. The same goes for your users. Studies show that providing experiences that create strong emotions between the customer and brand will shape brand loyalty and purchasing behaviors. 

Consider these digital customer experience statistics from the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report:

• Ninety-one percent of consumers say they're more likely to buy again after a great digital customer experience.
• Seventy-one percent say they’ve made a purchase decision based on experience quality.

Ultimately, improving your brand’s digital CX strategy will not only build trust and loyalty but also help you boost important metrics like your conversion rates, your net promoter score, and your customer lifetime value.

What Does a Positive Digital Customer Experience Look Like?    

A positive digital customer experience should be simple, intuitive, and secure. Customers should be able to easily find the information they’re looking for, complete tasks quickly, and feel safe sharing their personal data with your company.

‍Want to see an example?

The Jebbit interactive lookbook for Free People demonstrates the power of a positive digital customer experience. People want to see the latest fashions, and this lookbook delivers, satisfying both customer expectations and customer needs in one simple, seamless experience. It also provides relevant content along with pricing — and it’s brand accurate, featuring Free People’s messaging, which helps elevate customer trust.

How Does the Digital Customer Experience Relate to the Broader Customer Experience?

When you set out to improve your digital customer experience, one thing you cannot forget about is the overall customer experience. In other words, remember this: The online experience you provide directly influences in-store experiences.

So let’s say that you’re running a chain of furniture stores. How does your online experience impact your in-store experience? Well, imagine a hypothetical customer who wants to buy a sofa. Now, imagine how angry they’ll be when they discover — after having borrowed a truck and then driven an hour or two to reach the store — that the sofa they wanted to purchase is, in fact, not in stock (even though your website claimed that it was).

That’s one example, but there are others. In general, if you’re operating both an ecommerce site and brick-and-mortar locations in tandem, your website should make it easy for people to find locations, products within the store, driving directions, contact information, and other important details. 

Real-time inventory updates are a huge plus, too, so that customers can check the stock of items they want prior to making the trip. 

You should also leverage local SEO and services like Google Business Profiles to make it super easy for customers to find you.

Strategies and Best Practices to Help You Improve Your Digital CX Strategy

Ready to ramp up your customer experience management game? The strategies and best practices that you need are below.

Start With the Customer’s Journey

The first step in providing a personalized customer experience is to understand — then analyze — the eight stages of the customer journey:

1. Awareness: The shopper needs to know you exist and be able to find your brand easily.
2. Interest: The shopper needs to have a general interest in your product or service.
3. Evaluation: They need to evaluate the product or service.
4. Purchase: The shopper makes a purchase.
5. Delivery: You deliver the product.
6. Service: You provide top-notch support and service. 
7. Loyalty: After a successful transaction, the customer’s loyalty increases. 
8. Advocacy: Customers with high loyalty levels advocate for your brand among their peers.

This is where customer journey mapping becomes crucial if you want to improve your digital customer experience. As you can see, each stage of the journey will come with different touch points — like discovering your brand on social media, using your site’s shopping cart and checkout process during the purchase stage, or speaking with a customer success representative during the service stage.

To create an overall better customer experience, you need to first identify as many touch points as possible for each of these stages — then look for ways to make those touch points better. 

For example, if customer feedback reveals frustration when they try to get support from on-site bots or FAQ pages, then this tells you that you can improve experiences by providing more robust support services.

Prioritize Trust

If there's one priority your brand considers, it should be trust. And in the age of digital technology, it’s also something that can be hard to come by. Here are a few more stats from the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report to underscore this point:

• Forty-eight percent of consumers say they usually trust businesses.
• Twenty-seven percent of consumers understand how businesses use their personal data.
• Eighty-six percent of consumers want more transparency on how their personal data is being used.
• Sixty-one percent of consumers feel like they’ve lost control over how their personal data is used by companies.

As you can see, building trust — and thus, increasing loyalty — isn’t just about providing personalized experiences or products and services that people love. It’s also crucial to approach the digital customer experience with an eye toward data and privacy.

Ultimately, this means that you need to do a few things:

• Maintain high standards for data security across your company.
• Avoid collecting more consumer data than what you need.
• Be transparent with customers about why you’re collecting their data.
• Use tried-and-tested secure customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
• Give customers ways to protect themselves, like two-factor authentication or the ability to opt out of having their financial details saved on your platform.

Create Seamless Omnichannel Experiences

Omnichannel experiences include experiences that go across channels — like from social media to your ecommerce site or between one selling platform and another. So how do you create better omnichannel experiences?

Optimization is key. Analyze user behavior, understand the hows and whys behind their purchase decisions — and how, exactly, they go about making those purchases — and then look for ways to make the entire process easier.

For example, your social profiles should include links back to sales pages, and when you post about particular products, you should make it as easy as possible for would-be buyers to get their hands on the goods. 

One way to do this is to include links to product pages within your posts. Another option is to create shoppable posts, which provide a quick and easy user experience in which buyers can spot a product and immediately make the purchase.

Understand Your Audience

Creating more pleasurable digital interactions largely comes down to understanding your audience — and to do that well, you need to go beyond basic demographic data to truly understand the kinds of people who are purchasing from your brand.

Start with a digital experience platform, which is software that you can use to track customer information and create a content management system so that you can keep track of your content creation process and the types of content that perform best.

Once you have that in place, start reaching out to customers. Use Jebbit to create customer satisfaction surveys or other types of surveys designed to help you learn more about the common interests that your customer segments share. For example, this Jebbit survey for Centrum captures an average 8.9 data points per completion.

Lastly, be sure to pay attention to what people are saying on social media, as comments will often shed light on things that people like or dislike. Put all of this information together with the rest of your customer data to get a clear picture of the kinds of people who make up your audience.

Look Out for Trends

If you haven’t already, make trend-watching a part of your digital experience strategy initiatives. Why? Because consumers love to be a part of the latest zeitgeist — and if you can tap into that, you can provide an amazing digital experience.

We’ve seen a few great examples of this in recent years: the rise of artificial intelligence, the smash-hit show Squid Game, the Olympics, and more. Each year brings trends and events like these, and you can leverage them to great effect.

Just make sure that the trends are relevant to your audience. For example, if you do an Olympic-themed campaign among an audience who isn’t interested in sports, there’s a good chance that you’ll come across as tone deaf and inauthentic. 

Tie the latest trends to your audience’s interests to create a fantastic digital experience that makes them want to interact with your brand.

Improve Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy With Jebbit

Jebbit is a digital experience platform that helps companies create personalized digital experiences for their customers. It gives companies the ability to customize digital interactions based on customer data, which helps create a seamless user experience that customers love. Plus, Jebbit makes it easy for businesses to collect and manage customer data, which can be used to further enhance the digital customer experience.

Take the next steps on your digital transformation journey and leverage our tools to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention by creating engaging quizzes, lookbooks, guides, and other interactive assets.  We can be the platform that helps you succeed with your digital customer experience!

Schedule a strategy call today.