How digital enhances the customer experience (and how to optimize it)
Customer experience and digital are no longer mutually exclusive, as they are an undeniable lever for customer knowledge and satisfaction, on a web channel that has become inescapable.
Indeed, if customer experience in general is a major concern for any structure wishing to last, the digital transformation of companies, but also of consumer behavior, implies the implementation of an online customer experience strategy (or digital CXM for digital Customer eXperience Management).
Here's a guided tour of the online customer experience as it relates to today's challenges.
What is the digital customer experience?
Definition of digital customer experience
The customer experience is the fruit of the customer's contacts and interactions with your company.
It's about the customer's experience and perception, good or bad, of your brand and your offer, throughout the customer journey, from the first to the last contact.
For some time now, customer experience has been going digital, whether for :
- getting in touch with brands
- make a purchase ;
- compare product or service offers;
- make a complaint to customer service;
- read blog articles;
- report a problem or ask for advice from the after-sales service;
- comment on news on social networks, etc.
The 5 key phases of the digital customer experience
The key phases of the customer experience, both online and offline, are as follows:
- pre-purchase: the birth of the need, brand awareness and the user's search for information;
- offer consideration: additional research, comparisons, opinions, etc;
- conversion, i.e. purchase;
- evaluation: use or consumption of the product and customer feedback;
- loyalty, or recommendation.
The pillars of a successful digital customer experience
To be successful, digital CX must include :
- personalization, to create a unique experience;
- integrity and transparency, to reassure and inspire trust over the long term;
- problem-solving, to remove obstacles to a satisfying customer experience;
- fluidity, to eliminate potential sources of frustration;
- reactivity, or even proactivity, to meet expectations and needs,
- empathy, to adapt to and better understand the customer.
Digital customer experience: examples
Here are a few examples of digital customer experiences:
- in a clothing boutique: connected mirrors that advise on the size or color to choose ;
- when visiting an online cosmetics boutique: a chatbot that asks questions about the person's skin type, age, preferences and tastes to make recommendations;
- at the time of online purchase, the possibility of creating an account in just a few clicks to start accumulating loyalty points;
- when a technical problem occurs and is reported online, a dynamic FAQ is displayed, followed by a suggestion to speak to an advisor via chat if no satisfactory answer has been found.
How does digital enhance the customer experience?
Customer experience is one of the levers of any effective CRM and marketing strategy.
And a good digital customer experience has become a must. It's not just digital natives and millenials who are hungry for new technologies, interactivity and responsiveness from brands.
Increased customer satisfaction
The web channel has opened up new sales opportunities and touch points in customer relations, giving brands the chance to let potential customers test them out and form a positive opinion.
But if your web media aren't well thought-out, they can also be a source of frustration.
Two statistics illustrate this phenomenon:
- 79% of consumers have made a purchase on a mobile device in the last six months (source Qualtrics).
- If customers can't find what they're looking for in just a few clicks, they give up and leave your page. This probability increases by 32% if a customer has to wait just one to three seconds for your page to load (source Freshdesk).
What's more, the customer experience in the digital age implies a multiplicity of channels to manage: chatbot, emailing, website, blog, social networks...
To avoid a fragmented customer experience, it is essential to opt for an omnichannel customer relationship, the only guarantee of a fluid customer experience.
More efficient, responsive customer service
Digitalization also has a positive impact on the organization and efficiency of your support and marketing teams.
- Online customer journey analysis,
- customer data collection and centralization,
- the history of all interactions,
make it possible to contextualize each request and respond in the most personalized way possible.
Everything is just a click away:
- customer preferences (payment, delivery, etc.),
- previous frustrations,
- current complaints,
- average shopping basket,
- favorite products,
- recurring questions.
Data is the key to improving the digital customer experience.
How to digitize and optimize the customer experience?
As you can see, to improve the customer experience, you need to understand how your personas interact with your brand online.
1. Mapping the customer journey
Mapping the digital customer journey enables you to visualize all digital touchpoints, and understand the impact of each on the overall customer experience.
- What phases does the customer go through? Research phase of varying duration, number of pages consulted before making a choice, etc.
- Which channels do they use? Which social networks? Blogs? Website? Mobile application?
- What are the breaking points and decisive moments? What are their motivations and behaviors? Do they buy more easily when offered a special offer or loyalty program ? Do they abandon their shopping baskets when told about payment options?
Now that you've harnessed your data to adapt your digital strategy, you can start thinking about your added-value proposition for your customers' experience.
2. Test customer journeys and experiences
Once you've clearly defined the customer journeys on your site, it's essential to make sure that everything works perfectly.
All it takes is one small difficulty in the customer journey, whether it's an anomaly on a button, a feature or a product sheet, to spoil your marketing efforts and lose you sales.
To ensure effective monitoring of user journeys, you need to deploy tests on a regular basis. For this, using a representative test automation platform like Alfred Monitoring is a very good strategy. No technical skills or installation required! Once the tests have been launched, you'll receive alerts in the event of a malfunction, and know exactly what you need to correct to ensure a smooth customer experience.
3. Careful UX design
Pampering UX design allows you to fine-tune online customer journeys down to the last detail.Inseparable from UI design, which refers to the creation of a pleasant, intuitive interface, UX design is the conception of a fluid experience, whether using a mobile application or navigating a site:
- information is easy to find,
- call-to-action buttons are clearly visible and attractive,
- the act of buying or subscribing to a newsletter is simple and fluid.
4. Include phygital in your strategy
Digital does not exclude human contact and visits to physical stores.
To offer a fluid, consistent experience whatever the channel, you can offer a phygital experience, a contraction of physical + digital.
Indeed, while some customers appreciate a 100% online experience, others prefer to combine the best of both experiences:
- finding and reserving a product online,
- trying it out and buying it in-store.
Hence the birth of click and collect, long before health measures!
5. Implement tools
Customers love to try out new technologies, but they only have a positive impact on your brand if they serve their research and experience:
- virtual reality or augmented reality (3D), to discover a product or service virtually and in a fun way ;
- self-care tools, such as chatbots , for engaging in conversation with a friendly, efficient robot without having to pick up the phone;
- interactive tablets and kiosks, to revitalize and modernize your physical points of sale, etc.
It's up to you to find the tool that will appeal to your target audience and enhance your offer 😉
6. Solicit customer reviews
Give your customers the opportunity to give you feedback on their experience.
Here are a few digital customer experience indicators, and the question to ask to obtain them:
- NPS, Net Promoter Score:
"On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend brand X to a friend?" - CSAT - Customer Satisfaction:
"Were you satisfied with your shopping experience on our site?" Yes/No - CES - Customer Effort Score:
"On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate the effort you made to...?"
Compiling the results obtained, via a satisfaction questionnaire on the site or sent by email at the right moment (usually just after the purchase), enables you to identify your strengths, but above all your weaknesses.
The very fact of asking the question already proves that the customer experience is at the heart of your preoccupations, an attention that the customer will appreciate.
Essential omnichannel customer relations software
There's no secret about it: for an optimal customer experience, your company needs to digitalize its processes, culture and tools, making customer satisfaction a top priority.
Equip all your teams directly or indirectly involved in customer relations with a tool... and train them in the new uses and functionalities.
CRM software, helpdesk software, customer relations software are real supports for :
- analyze the customer journey ;
- collect and centralize customer data
- monitor customer relations;
- automate low value-added tasks;
- personalize the customer experience;
- promote collaboration and better information sharing within your company.
🛠 easiware is a customer relationship management and personalization platform . It enables you to centralize customer requests, prioritize them and assign them by processing them within a single interface, for all your web channels (social networks, LiveChat, WhatsApp, email, web form, telephone, dynamic FAQs, customer reviews, etc.).
🛠 Mobile Service Cloud is an all-in-one customer service platform. Thanks to its omnichannel dashboard, all your conversations are in one place. Interact with your customers across all conversational channels (SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, etc.).
Bonus: the option of integrating a chatbot to be available 24/7!
No more duplicates, hesitations or wasted time: every customer is recognized, regardless of their contact channel. Thanks to the information in the customer file, advisors can respond in a contextualized and personalized way, a source of satisfaction. Customers benefit from a single, unified digital experience.
🛠 Create your customized contact platform with Twilio Flex to deliver personalized, efficient and memorable experiences for your customers. It connects via APIs to all your tools to centralize interactions in its interface, whether they come from a call, instant messaging, social networks, SMS or email.
An intelligent shared queue automatically distributes each request to the most appropriate contact person, enabling a quick and efficient response. Each agent has rapid access to customer history and information from multiple sources, so they can provide complete satisfaction without having to repeat information they've already communicated.
What have you done to digitalize the customer experience?
Article translated from French