How to Improve Digital Customer Experience
A recent study revealed that 94% of shoppers said they would shop with a brand again if they had a ‘very good’ digital customer experience.
This statistic alone proves the importance of providing an exceptional online journey. Not only are they more likely to come back, but an overwhelming amount would actually recommend your brand to others.
So how can you improve your digital customer experience and boost sales, satisfaction, and overall success? Follow along to discover our favorite digital customer experience tips and take your sales platforms to the next level.
What Is Digital Customer Experience?
Before we jump right into the dos and don’t of digital experience, it’s important to understand exactly what we are attacking. Digital customer experience describes the entirety of your shopper’s online interactions with your brand.
This includes every online touchpoint from social media to the actual checkout on your website.
As you can imagine, forming an excellent online customer experience involves a lot of planning, analytics, and testing. The purpose of this strategy is not only to increase conversions but to boost your customer satisfaction and encourage repeat shopping.
Understand Your Customers
First things first, you’ll need to develop a thorough understanding of your customer. This includes who they are, what they want, and how they behave.
To do this, you’ll want to invest some time into your customer persona. This is a hypothetical customer(s) that you would identify as your target audience. This persona outlines their demographic, interests, hobbies, etc to really get to the root of who you are serving.
Use your existing data and analytics to form this persona and build a customer journey. This customer journey (based on real data) should allow you to understand how customers are discovering and shopping with you.
With the use of synthetic transaction monitoring, you’ll know how your page is loading and what the digital experiences look like. You can then approach these areas with proven data to adapt and optimize.
Integrate Self-Service
It’s no question that customers love self-service. Just think about all of the success grocery stores have seen with the self-serve checkouts.
Take this preference into consideration when designing your digital customer experience. You can utilize the features that allow your customers to ‘self-serve’.
Add in an FAQ section, provide automated chat-bots, and make your checkout process complication-free. Not only does this encourage customers to shop with you more often, but it also reduces the amount of time your team needs to spend answering emails.
Be Consistent
Consistency is key, especially when it comes to the digital world. As we mentioned above, the digital experience includes every online touchpoint. This means it’s important that customers can expect the same experience across the board.
Whether your shopper contacts you on Facebook or through your website, they should meet a familiar and consistent service. Your brand voice, reliability, and response time should be bulletproof to earn the customer’s trust and gain their loyalty.
Not only should your branding and service quality be the same, but your shopping experience should stay consistent. Customers don’t want to have to re-enter information, re-learn your checkout process, or fiddle around with their cart. Keep it simple and clean from mobile to desktop and across all sales platforms.
Optimize for Mobile
On that note, let’s talk about the importance of mobile optimization.
These days, everyone and their dog has a mobile device almost permanently attached to their hand. This, of course, means that the majority of your customers are visiting you through the little handheld screen.
With this in mind, it’s more important than ever for your website, advertisements, and even shopping apps to be 100% mobile-friendly. Ensure that all of your media is readable on a mobile device and make the checkout process as simple as possible for on-the-go buying.
Measure Satisfaction
Once you’ve implemented some digital experience optimization, it’s time to see what your customers have to say. After all, the best way to discover what they like and dislike is to ask!
Communicate with your customers through surveys and short questionnaires for honest feedback. Ask specific questions and take their responses seriously.
Beyond your customer’s feedback, evaluating your analytics for ‘drop off’ is a great measure. Take note of where you are losing customers. Are they abandoning the cart right at the end? Perhaps your checkout process could be more simplified or easier to use.
No matter where your hiccups are, measuring and identifying them is the first step to crafting a solution.
Ask for Help
When it comes down to it, digital customer experience is never a one size fits all solution.
Your brand may notice trends and tricks that simply don’t work for another and vise versa. Because of this, following generalized tips doesn’t always get you where you want to do.
If this is the case, it’s a great idea to seek professional help from a digital experience specialist such as decibel.com. Experts like this know exactly what metrics and patterns to watch for to offer the best possible results.
Always Growing
Last but certainly not least, it’s important to remember that customer experience is not a set it and forget it system. As your brand grows and time passes, your digital customer experience must grow as well.
From the engagements you have with your customers to the technical ease of your site, the key to a successful business is adaptability. Keep on top of the trends and offer your customers the best, no matter what!
Improve Digital Customer Experience
Now that you know these key digital customer experience tips, it’s time to put your knowledge to the test. From discovering your audience to optimizing for their unique needs, there is no better investment in your business than a pristine online customer experience.
Want to learn more about growing your online business? Check out our other articles to discover the business tips and tricks you need to grow in 2021.
