4 ways to improve digital experiences and grow your business 

In today’s world, where choice is endless, consumers are likely to switch to a competitor if met with a customer journey that breaks. Creating a frictionless digital experience, therefore, means designing a user-centric journey. This includes minimising loading times, removing pain points, including relevant payment and delivery options, and much more.  

According to a study from PWC, 42% of customers say they would be willing to pay more for a welcoming and friendly brand experience. This extends to digital channels as well. Delivering an excellent digital customer experience starts with setting up a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme and identifying pain points in the customer journey.    

What does digital experiences (DX) mean? 

A digital experience (or DX) refers to how your customers or users feel about the time they spend on your digital channels, such as your website, mobile app, customer service chat functions, etc. It refers to all your channels or contact points that occur online.  

How do you measure the customer experience on your digital channels? 

Measuring your DX is usually done with a mix of quantitative analytics (like website sessions, app downloads, conversion rates, etc.) and qualitative feedback. This includes customer feedback scores, like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction rate (CSAT), but also open feedback comments and other user insights.  

Read more in our e-book: CSAT, NPS, and CES: Your guide to choosing a CX metric

To collect and measure customer feedback from your digital channels, you typically need an experience management system, like Netigate.  

What challenges do digital channels face? 

A common obstacle that occurs when optimising digital channels is data getting stuck in silos. To optimise the digital experience, every team needs to be involved, not only the user experience or the marketing team. Data needs to be democratised across the organisations, with clear action points being set up.   

Another common issue is complying with privacy laws like GDPR while still delivering a personalised, data-driven experience. Therefore, choosing the right tools for your martech stack is important. It ensures that data is being stored and processed correctly. 

4 ways to improve digital customer experiences 

To improve your DX, you need to set up a strategy to create a smooth, digital customer journey that crosses every team in the organisation. These are a few steps to get started.   

1. Set up clear goals and work teams 

Start with setting up clear, measurable goals for your digital experience programme. What do you want to measure, how are you going to measure it, and what steps will you take once you’ve received your results?  

To ensure that the data reaches all the right people, set up work groups with clear roles and project leaders. Using experience software that allows you to integrate with the tools your team is already using makes democratising the customer experience optimisation (CXO) data frictionless.  

2. Listen to your customers: Create a VOC programme 

Setting up a Voice of the Customer programme will help you gain valuable, real-time insights. Well-targeted and structured digital feedback surveys allow you to uncover several breaking points in the customer journey. For example, why a certain product isn’t converting, why drop-offs occur on a specific page, if the content you are posting is resonating with your customers, and much more.  

Tapping into your customers allows you to understand why they are behaving the way they do, what they like about your business and what could be improved.  

3. Prioritise action points based on data with the help of AI 

Manually analysing data is both time-consuming and prone to error, especially when it comes to qualitative data, like customer feedback. Humans often fall into the obstacle of ‘research bias’. This means that you look for an assumed outcome or result, rather than seeing what the numbers are actually saying.  

Using AI, like Netigate Insights, for your analytics helps you overcome this bias, and it greatly reduces the time it takes from when the data comes in to when you act on it. AI can help you sort your data into categories, show you the sentiment of the feedback you receive, and, based on this, help you prioritise your task list. 

4. Involve your customers when developing your product 

When developing a new feature or solution, it’s important to include your customers in the process. This can be done in different ways and in different phases. 

For example, many find it useful to include fake door tests at the discovery stage. These are essentially services that appear to be live, but aren’t. When a customer clicks them, a survey opens explaining the situation and asking how interested they would be in a service like this if it actually existed. This helps teams realise which services and features are needed, before they spend time developing them, ensuring that the customer only get functionalities they want and need.  

Another typical example of involving customers to create an optimal digital experience is conducting follow-up surveys after a new product or service has been launched, asking the customer to rate it and for improvement suggestions.  

Involving the customer from start to finish when developing your product, website, app, or service allows you to understand what your users want from their digital experience and how to deliver it. 

Growing your company through excellent DX 

In a digital-first world, online channels are more important than ever. That’s why optimising the experiences your customers have on your digital platforms leads to customer retention, improved conversion rates, and revenue.  

One bad experience is all it takes for a customer to choose a competitor. By prioritising your digital experience, you make sure that: 

• Customer journeys are frictionless 

• The options you provide (like payment and delivery methods) match up with customer needs 

• You can catch the people who are having a bad experience and rectify the situation 

To build a solid digital experience, you must be in touch with all the aspects of your online channels. From technical issues like bugs and loading times, to more practical examples like design and product availability. Taking the first step means connecting with your users and building a customer-centric digital strategy.