A digital customer experience (CX) strategy encompasses interactions and journey touch points on online platforms, apps, and social media. Here is why and how to design and implement one.
How a Digital CX Strategy Can Turbocharge Customer Acquisition and Retention
A sound, well-designed digital CX strategy can help:
- Increase Customer Retention and Loyalty – People are looking for high-quality products and services at reasonable pricing. Consumers who believe businesses are adding value through convenient digital interactions are willing to pay more for the same goods and services and stay on with a brand.
- Reduce Marketing Costs – A digital CX strategy decreases the guesswork involved in determining what clients want, saving marketing costs and minimizing campaigns that could fail. Checkpoints built into a CX-centric approach can assist firms in targeted marketing tactics, by collecting data on customers and the wider market.
- Improve Brand Equity – Keeping promises, providing high-quality products and services, and being responsive are all essential aspects of developing positive brand equity delivered through digital channels. A digital CX strategy helps prevent under-delivery, unpleasant interactions, and product recalls through better customer alignment.
- Boost Customer Acquisition – With social and digital media rise, word-of-mouth marketing has become much more powerful. Today’s businesses rely on their customers’ goodwill to circulate awareness about the products. As per a 2015 Nielsen survey of 60 nations, 83 percent of customers trust recommendations from friends and family.
4 Steps to an Effective Digital Customer Experience Strategy
Here are the key steps companies should follow to design a successful digital customer experience strategy:
Step 1: Create a Digitally-Savvy Team
Having a leader that puts customers first ensures the rest of the team follows suit. Furthermore, the entire organization should be digitally focused and customer-centric, not just the front-line workers. Employees should be willing to explore innovative and creative solutions while employers should seek to foster customer engagement and delight.
Step 2: Take Control of Your Brand’s Social Media Presence
Social media platforms can help create consistent and 24/7 experiences while lowering overall support costs. Customer-centric “social hubs” can be particularly useful. These forums thrive on peer-to-peer assistance (reducing support costs and efforts) and positively impact customer trust through community-based advocacy.
Step 3: Use Data to Make Better Decisions
An excellent digital customer experience strategy requires considerable time spent to understand customers personally – which calls for 360-degree customer data and enriched profiles. This way, agents will have a greater awareness of a person’s journey, history, and engagement touchpoints before they even begin working with a customer.
Step 4: Analyse and Locate New Opportunities
It is not enough to keep track of customer service interactions – that data must be put to good use. When customer sentiment, voice, and opinions are analysed and disseminated throughout a firm, it leads to a greater understanding of what customers desire from the company’s products or services.
A Digital CX Master’s Aces Up the Sleeve
Technology is increasingly driving the consumer experience, providing personalized interactions based on recent data across digital channels. Companies should rely on the ever-advancing CX technology stack to supercharge their online efforts, leveraging tools like:
- Customer Experience Management (CXM) platforms provide a wide range of functions under one roof, with the primary purpose being to assess the overall quality of customer encounters. They use scoring algorithms better to identify moments in the customer experience where improvements can be made.
- Frontend Experience Platforms – With quicker page loads and shorter time-to-market, companies can provide a smoother, more engaging experience. That offers websites and apps more agility and control, allowing marketers and designers to make instantaneous adjustments to the site.
- Helpdesk Platforms – These provide a single database and a centralized ticketing system for all customer service interactions. Modern helpdesk systems, often linked with CRM platforms, help track customer satisfaction in real-time. These platforms automatically assign tickets to each encounter and use analytics and dashboards to track resolutions.
- Social Media Tools – Enabling personalized interaction across social media channels puts customer account data to work. Social media software enables brands to generate, manage, and share content across several platforms in a single application. Social media listening, measurement, and customer information management based on social activity are vital features to adopt.
- Customer Feedback Management Tools – They automatically pull qualitative information on user comments, reviews, emails, and conversations, detecting unhappiness and churn risk. When these advanced tools identify unfavourable feedback, they immediately assign helpdesk tickets.
- Personalization Platforms– Personalization solutions turn extensive customer profile data into personalized engagement using proprietary AI and ML. They churn out product suggestions and engage customers on preferred channels at preferred times based on feedback or real-time behaviour.
- CRM Solutions – These connect customer data collection with various marketing automation and analytical tools. Contact management, interaction tracking, and scheduling are some standard features.
Finally, adding digital tools to marketing, sales, or service engagements is not enough. Great CX requires brands to rethink their customer interaction strategy and determine how technology fits into the customer experience and journey.
Eager to support your new digital experience strategy with new customer engagement channels? If so, read our article: How to Identify Efficient and Effective CX Channels
