The global pandemic broadly defined the year 2020 as the year of disruption. It was also the year that marked the importance of excelling at delivering great customer experiences. It is not just important to provide a great digital experience all the time, but also in real-time.
It was like the world was already on the brink of digitization, and the pandemic set it in motion. The world has been moving at a breakneck speed since then. In our digitally transforming age, unique customer experiences drive loyalty, sales, and growth. A glitch-free digital customer experience anticipates and reacts to customer needs and truly understands them.
Digital customer experiences play a primary role in gaining an edge over competitors. Most leaders believe that businesses will solely compete on customer experiences in the near future rather than competing on products and services. A promising digital customer experience ensures that your customers feel understood irrespective of the channel they reach out to you on. Their experience must be convenient and hassle-free all the time!
Recently, Forbes reported that eCommerce penetration hit 21.3% in 2020, up from 15.8% in 2019. Hence, the need for a seamless digital customer experience is more important than ever. So, how are you, as a brand, planning to meet these demands? How are you planning to provide personalized experiences to your customers? How are you enabling your employees to exceed customer expectations? How are they leveraging your tech tools to improve customer engagement across digital channels? Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents:
- Digital Customer Experience: The TL;DR
- Factors Affecting the Digital Customer Experience
- Latest Trends in Digital Customer Experience
- How to Improve Digital Customer Experience
- First Get Started With the Right Tools
Digital Customer Experience: The TL;DR
Digital customer experience refers to the total of all online interactions that a customer has with your brand. It may start with your website but could also include mobile apps, chatbots, social media, and any other channels where the touchpoint is virtual.
Why is Digital Customer Experience Important?
Most industry leaders have realized the importance of investing in digital customer experience initiatives. Most of them expect an exponential increase in business revenue by providing a seamless experience to the users. It is easy to understand why.
A PWC report says that a great digital customer experience guarantees a higher share of profit. 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. It means that the more expensive an item is, the more is the customer’s willingness to pay. The same report also states that customers are willing to pay a premium price of upto 13% in order to receive a great customer experience.
The only thing that matters here is the perception that the customers take away from your brand. And your digital customer experience strategies will decide if your CX is cumbersome and frustrating or frictionless, memorable, and delightful. So, what are the factors that affect the digital customer experience of your brand? Let’s take a quick look at it.
Factors Affecting the Digital Customer Experience
KPMG’s annual study about customer experience stated that US companies rank on the following factors:
- Personalization
- Customer Empathy
- Seamless Journey through Communication channels
- Time and Effort
- Fast Resolution
Latest Trends in Digital Customer Experience
While optimizing strategies is essential, so is keeping up with the latest trends that would help you improve the digital customer experience. It’s all about keeping a careful balance between creating seamless experiences and implementing the latest trends to your support.
1. Self-Service (Video Tutorials)
Self-service was initially supposed to be a ticket deflection portal in order to improve agent productivity; however, customers love self-service! Especially because of the speed and efficiency of its results. Lately, video tutorials have become a personal favorite for customers. They choose to interact with all brands from their sofa, and more importantly, they need easier forms of content so that they won’t have to spend too much time solving their problems.
Besides, remote customer service has become a favorite thing for customers who choose to interact with all brands from their house. Brands are connecting to their audience through video interactions. We live in a world where TikTok and Instagram Reels have become the norm, and brands are paving the route to video marketing and support. You can do it too! Imagine your brand’s Instagram page resolving customer problems through 30 seconds reels. You can create everything from KYC how-to manuals, product reviews, and feature upgrades that customers expect.
Pro Tip: Make it as interactive as possible.
Hence, video customer service is here to stay, and you can join the trend and help your customers get a first-hand perspective of the reported issues and workarounds.
Deliver interactive video content and enhance your CX
Check out DeskXpand’s self-service features. Take a demo today!
2. Hyper-personalized Chat Interactions
One-to-one chat has been identified as a high-touch channel for instant communication. Personalized chats are a great way to delight customers with hyper-personalized interactions. Consumer insights can be analyzed and leveraged to trigger customized chatbot conversations and customer needs.
3. AI-assisted Customer Experience
Automation is picking up pace and is the most relevant in today’s time. With advanced tech powered by automated solutions, customers can do anything from anywhere and as quickly as possible. It also facilitates the customer support agents to fulfill their regular tasks on time by reducing their work redundancy.
The customer service industry is also gaining momentum, especially due to the disruption of artificial intelligence. It is a technological breakthrough that has taken almost every business industry by storm. Customer support leaders consider AI tech as a solution that will open doors for real-time self-service for customer service platforms. It is true that technology has the power to change the way digital customers’ experiences are perceived. There is a massive hype that AI-assisted responses will completely replace the need for human agents. What are you doing about it?
How to Improve Digital Customer Experience
In order to drastically improve the digital customer experience, you need to focus on the holistic customer lifecycle. You need to pay equal attention to the way digital and non-digital experiences complement each other and then frame strategies to optimize both of them. Treat the digital customer experience as one part of the overall customer experience strategy and then work around them. Here are six ways to improve the overall digital customer experience for your customers.
1. Upgrade Your Tools and Technology
Upgrading your digital customer experience is not possible without a highly equipped workforce. You cannot expect your agents to adhere to certain strategies when they have the right tech to perform seamlessly. If you want an agile and well-connected work environment, it is imperative to adopt the latest tools and features. Besides, tech like live chat, AI-assisted chatbots, self-service, etc., is now an integral part of digital customer experiences.
Customer touchpoint tools and technologies are a great value-add to digital customer experience and customer support practitioners. These tools enable increased productivity, simple processes, and seamless in-team (and cross-team) collaboration. As a result, your support reps will feel empowered to make rational decisions and strategies to delight your customers.
Here’s a list of some features that can help you ramp up your digital customer experience strategy:
I. Live Chat
Add a live chat feature to your website. Live chats can assist your customers throughout their purchase journey. Live chat conversations are usually asynchronous; therefore, people find it to be a no-frills medium to reach out for support.
II. AI-assisted Chatbots
A chatbot is a live chat plugin. It can automate answers to basic queries. It can also facilitate and connect the customer to the agent whenever the situation demands. You can leverage AI-assisted customer support to automate resolutions, reduce handle time and improve your overall customer satisfaction scores.
III. Self-Service
Most people think that the digital customer experience only counts when customers interact with your agents or contact you. But that’s not true.
Why?
Most customers do not directly contact the support agents to resolve their issues. They try to troubleshoot it on their own too. This is exactly why you must have reliable information on your website that customers can use and help themselves. A self-service knowledge base, FAQ page, video tutorials, and community forums will empower customers to find answers by themselves without reaching out to your agents for help.
A self-service knowledge base with a good UI and UX is an ideal solution to empower users. Some benefits of self-service features include:
- Easily adaptable
- Customers will become self-reliant
- Quick and reliable solutions
- Support cost reduction
- Boosts social engagement
- Increases customer satisfaction & success
Remember: Self-service features or portals are an extension of your help desk. It enhances the digital customer experience as no other feature does.
IV. Upgrade Your Helpdesk
Helpdesks simplify many things for customer support teams. But, sometimes lethargic systems can hinder your digital customer experience. Helpdesks embedded with the latest features can help you aim to serve a personalized and unique experience. A well-built helpdesk will resolve issues quickly and become proactive and empathetic towards customer expectations.
Deliver flexible and enhanced support experience
Check out DeskXpand’s robust and collaborative ticketing features. Take a demo today!
2. Dive Deep into Actionable Insights
So now you’ve updated your helpdesk and tech as per the latest industry standards. The next important thing to do is to find out the pain points from your workflows that hinder the digital customer experience. You can do this by getting actionable insights from your helpdesk data (or rather customer data).
Pick a helpdesk with robust analytics and reporting tools. And then find out the pitfalls and roadblocks in the customer journey. Customer service analytics is a must! It helps companies generate actionable insights about what will happen next. The end results are:
- Reduced costs
- Increased revenue
- Personalized services
- Higher customer satisfaction scores
- And of course, an improved digital customer experience
3. Audience Segmentation
Segmenting your audience is yet another powerful approach to improve the digital customer experience. Audience segmentation can be done based on the products they buy, the frequency of their purchases, type of products, customer lifetime values, new customers, existing customers, etc.
For example, Millenials are now the largest generation in the US workforce. They’re handy with every type of digital resource. Hence they may reach out to you through channels like email or social media. Social media is convenient to Gen-Zs as well. So, if you have a product specifically targeted towards millennials and Gen-Zs, you know that you’ll need strong social-media strategies to provide an excellent digital customer experience to them. This will directly make a difference in your brand’s retention rates and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
4. Make It Personal
Customers of 2022 have come to expect personalized experiences that make them feel seen, heard, and recognized. Personalized services are no more “optional” for brands. Plus, it significantly leads to increased revenue.
Personalization can come in the form of tailored messages, relevant offers, and recommendations. For this, you will need to capture customers’ data, have tools to analyze the data to glean insights, and leverage it to segment the audience and create valuable personalized experiences.
5. Optimize Your Website Content
The ramifications of slow loading time are severe. It degrades the digital customer experience and costs you business revenue. This is why it is probably one of the most important challenges you should overcome while crafting your digital customer journey.
Studies show that Autoanything reduced their load time by 50%, increasing their sales by 13% and conversion rates by 9%. The same study found that Edmunds.com witnessed a 17% increase in their page views and a 3% increase in their ad revenue just by reducing their load time by seven seconds.
Here are some tips that you can consider to optimize your website content:
- Optimize image size
- Minify and combine files
- Choose a more powerful web host
- Reduce the number of plugins you have installed on the website
- Keep updating your knowledge base content
These quick and easy steps will help you get started, but it’s just the beginning of an improved digital experience that offers seamless digital services.
6. Omnichannel Support Largely Contributes to Enhancing Digital Customer Experience
Offering omnichannel support is another great way to create an amazing digital customer experience for your customers. Consumers expect brands to know their purchase history regardless of the customer service channel or type of issue reported. Customers also expect to continue talking to the same support agent even after switching channels.
This will help them to avoid sharing details again and again if another agent comes to their rescue. Customers also want a seamless experience on all channels when they reach out to them for help. Hence, businesses should consider turning their digital customer support into omnichannel experiences.
This way, if a customer begins a conversation through a chatbot, their queries can be easily transferred to a live agent in case it is not resolved on time. Only an omnichannel experience setting can make this possible.
First Get Started With the Right Tools
In order to get started on digital transformation to improve your CX, you need to revisit the understanding of your current customer journey and ask yourself two questions:
- Do customers have a clear path to complete their journey from start to finish? If not, what hurdles can you solve for them with better digital tools?
- Are you able to meaningfully measure customers’ progress from beginning to end? If not, what systems will be needed to measure the progress?
When you are trying to understand these pain points in your customer’s experiences, the above criteria will help you understand how much of an impact digital transformation can make in improving your CX.
Remember, customers need to feel good while they’re interacting with your brand. If they don’t, they won’t stick around to make a purchase. This is specifically true for businesses that thrive on digital customer experiences.
Helpdesk tools integrated with the latest features can help you effectively create a better digital transformation customer experience. DeskXpand is a robust omnichannel customer support software that lets you connect your support data into a single platform. We are ISO27001 certified portal experts with 14+ years of industry experience. We aim to help you achieve complete visibility and attain a high-resolution rate through customer service analytics. Take a free trial today!
