In this article you will find out…
- A good digital customer experience is about the customer journey on digital platforms, including social media, e-commerce, apps and the website.
- Committed employees are necessary for a good digital customer experience. They can positively influence customer perception and companies should focus on collecting feedback, act on it and make it easy for customers to find and stay with the company on digital channels.
In today's society, 64 % (February 2022) of Sweden's population use e-commerce to buy products or services from a company. Competition is fiercer than ever and it is very easy for customers to switch to another company or to shop in a physical store. We therefore give you six steps to follow, in order to actively work to meet the customer's demands and expectations of the digital customer experience.
What is a digital customer experience?
A good digital customer experience not only contributes to increased sales, but it creates a demand for a company's brand that leads to a positive impact on customers' future satisfaction and loyalty. It is about the digital customer journey and is a general perception of a customer's experience of a company based on the interaction and content of digital platforms, including social media channels, company advertisements, e-commerce, e-mails, apps, live chat/chatbot and the company's website.
On the other hand, a digital customer experience does not only mean managing digital platforms, but it is above all about a personal interaction between customer and company. A company must keep track of the digital touchpoints between the company and the customer, and companies must continuously improve the digital customer experience between and within the touchpoints. It is therefore important for a company to find, understand and develop digital touchpoints, as well as know how this affects customer loyalty and experience. Customers tend to recommend a company or brand if the experience contributes to increased interest and expectations.
Connection between employee engagement & a good digital customer experience
Employee engagement is of great importance for a customer's experience to be good. A research report from the Temkin Group has concluded that companies that work actively in customer experience and outperform the competition have 50 % more engaged employees. It is therefore important to involve employees in the work of creating a good customer experience, as the employees have a closer contact with the customers compared to the top management who make the decisions.
6 steps to a better digital customer experience
There are three important factors that create a good digital customer experience: success, effort and emotions. These include how the customer achieved their goal, how smooth the process was for the customer and how good the experience felt. In order to develop, improve and preserve a digital customer experience, your company should create a good starting point for your digital channels, so that customers can easily find the company and be able to navigate easily.
Below we give you 6 tips on how you can get started with creating a better customer experience.
Collect feedback on the digital customer experience
Digital channels today can collect basic feedback from customers using pre-installed tools, for example in social media channels. There are also live chats and customer support agents who can directly interact with customers, but to get in-depth customer feedback, your company should implement customer surveys (CX). These can be automatically sent out to your customers after some kind of digital interaction, whether it concerns a purchase, a web visit or a contact with customer service.
The most effective customer surveys for this purpose are to send out a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) or a Customer Effort Score (CES), in order to measure both the customer's satisfaction through the digital experience and the digital interaction with the company.
Take the feedback to heart
It is important to take advantage of the feedback that emerges from customer surveys in order to improve a digital customer experience. All points of view are equally important and it is a good starting point about what needs to be fixed to create a good digital experience. The most important thing is of course to actually sit down and read the feedback and see what it is that customers feel needs improvement.
Break the feedback into categories for different parts of your business, such as social media interaction, online shopping, the website as a whole, and customer service to easily see what needs to be addressed first.
Work with the feedback
After taking note of what kind of feedback was received and what customers think needs to be addressed, it is time to start working with the feedback to improve the digital customer experience.
The most beneficial approach is to first find solutions to the biggest and most important points of view, for example to fix something in the website, in the social media channels or in the e-mails. The measures can also mean quickly getting back to customers who want a quick answer to a question or share an opinion via customer service.
It is important to help all customers with different problems in order to maintain a positive attitude towards the digital customer experience in your company.
Make it easy for your customers to find the right one
It must be easy for customers to find your company via digital channels and the easiest way to spread it in today's society is via social media, especially Facebook and Instagram, as these platforms reach both existing customers and also new potential customers.
It is also important to understand how customers interact with the company, i.e. what they want to achieve, what is the purpose and what intentions they have in visiting or contacting your company in particular. By getting answers to these questions, a company will get an overview of what customers think about their digital channels and can then act on the point of view that is considered the most important to solve.
Retain customers with ease
Your company should strive to get as many existing and new customers to stay with you. For example, in a good shopping experience, various factors play a role in the customer's perception of your company and it is not only about being able to sell products, but it also means having advantageous and safe payment options, shipping costs, delivery options, delivery times and easy navigation on the website.
It is also important to have a simple and helpful customer service because some customers want direct help with problems they may encounter during the experience. Securing a functioning customer service benefits your business as customers can easily solve problems or get answers to questions, either by interacting with a person or by finding the answers themselves via a question and answer forum.
Follow up on customer interaction
An important part of online shopping in particular is to follow up the customer's experience afterwards, for example by sending emails about what they thought of the product or service. A common way to follow up customer interaction on digital channels is to ask them to review a product/service or to share both the purchase experience and the experience of the company itself. You can also send out recommendations of similar products that customers might like and want to buy. One idea is to give customers special offers from time to time on different products that might entice them to make a purchase. These follow-ups can be carried out in different ways to reach all customers, for example emailing is most common, but this can also be done via social media or via text messages to reach as many customers as possible.
Summation
Creating a good digital customer experience can be difficult in the beginning for your company and finding the right factors that make your digital channels attractive to customers is not always so easy. It is required that you invest resources to make the customer's experience as good as possible in order to retain both current and new customers. What you can do to improve your digital channels is to work on developing a functioning starting point to create a good digital customer experience. You should therefore make it a priority to:
- Collect feedback from customers
- Take the feedback to heart
- Work with the feedback
- Make it easy for customers to find the company
- Make it easy for customers to want to stay
- Follow up the customers' digital experience
Customers are the most important thing your company has, because it is the customers that make your organization run. When customers visit your website, it is important that their stay remains a really good experience for them to consider visiting the same website again, and therefore a good digital customer experience is extremely important.
