Digital Customer Experience Strategy: Why and How to Create One

For many brands, their digital customer experience strategy begins and ends with their website. Yes, ensuring that your website provides visitors with a seamless, satisfying experience certainly is important. But a successful digital CX strategy needs to include all other digital customer touchpoints as well, from mobile apps to push notifications, social media platforms to customer service chatbots.

An effective digital customer experience strategy must also consider how all these channels work together to create a brand ecosystem that consistently meets customers’ needs, exceeds their expectations and keeps them coming back. The digital CX strategy should also ensure that the channels integrate with their offline counterparts as well.

Given a digital customer experience strategy’s myriad components, brands might be tempted to deprioritize the task of creating one, or opt for a simplified, far-from-comprehensive version. Organizations that downplay the importance of a digital CX strategy, however, do so at their own risk. A recent Salesforce study found that when making a purchasing decision, 80% of consumers give their experience with a brand the same weight as the brand’s products and services. In this age of increasing commoditization, CX is often an organization’s most important unique selling proposition.

Below, we’ll look at the key elements of a digital customer experience strategy and how you can build one that will increase sales and customer loyalty as well as elevate your brand above the competition.

Key considerations of a digital customer experience strategy

Before planning a digital CX strategy, your organization needs to look at the criteria of an effective digital customer experience. Specifics will vary depending on the brand’s audience and offering, but the core elements are consistent.

• User-friendliness and convenience. Intuitive navigation and accessible interfaces are cornerstones of a satisfying customer experience. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your product is if consumers can’t easily get to it or if completing a purchase is a labyrinthine task.

• More than three-quarters of consumers take a negative view of brands that market to them inaccurately – for instance, serving them a page of women’s apparel when they’ve only purchased men’s clothing in the past, suggesting books they’ve already purchased or failing to automatically provide them with loyalty program benefits. A digital customer experience strategy needs to address these and other types of personalization issues, while balancing those with data privacy and transparency considerations.

• Whether they’re sending an email to customer service, asking a question on a brand’s Instagram feed or interacting with a chatbot, consumers want a response sooner – much sooner – than later. Guidance around acceptable digital response times and resolutions should be part of the digital CX strategy.

• Omnichannel integration. Customers don’t consider a brand’s retail presence separate from its online presence, or its social media siloed from its mobile app or website. A digital customer experience strategy should ensure that consumers can seamlessly browse in one channel, seek information in another, and purchase in a third without receiving inconsistent messaging or offers.

How to develop your digital customer experience strategy

Creating a digital CX strategy is much less overwhelming when you break it down into manageable steps.

• Step 1. Assess your current digital customer experience. Map your existing digital CX journey through all the major stages: awareness, consideration, decision, post-purchase and advocacy. Then conduct both qualitative and quantitative research to gauge how effective the key touchpoints of each stage are.

• Step 2. Conceptualize an ideal digital customer experience. This ideal should be based on your customers’ needs and wants, which may differ from your own. Again, qualitative and quantitative research can help you pinpoint the priorities for each of your customer segments.

• Step 3. Align your digital CX strategy concept with your brand’s business goals. If increasing customer retention is of primary importance, the priorities of your digital customer experience strategy might be different than if your priorities are improving profitability or expanding into a new customer segment is the top goal.

• Step 4. Define key performance indicators. Determine which metrics you’ll use to assess the success of your digital CX strategy and guide continual improvement.

• Step 5. Establish feedback loops. Quantitative metrics such as chatbot resolution rates, website bounce rates and average email response times aren’t the only way to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital customer experience strategy. Qualitative customer feedback via surveys and other methods can ensure a culture of customer-centricity.

How material can help with your digital customer experience strategy

At Material, we’ve enabled brands worldwide to establish, activate and hone their digital CX strategies. Our expertise ranges from CX journey mapping and determining the optimal CX infrastructure to educating employees and measuring digital experiences over time. Contact us today to discover how our integrated team of customer experience researchers, consultants and technologists can transform your brand’s digital customer experience and increase both customer retention and share of wallet.

FAQs

How have new technologies and platforms affected the digital customer experience?

AI-powered chatbots, improved ML personalization algorithms, increasingly sophisticated analytics tools and enhanced omnichannel platforms are among the technologies that enable brands to offer a more efficient and effective customer experience. At the same time, these tools have led consumers to expect, if not demand, faster, more-customized experiences. Customers might be disappointed now with a CX that exceeded their expectations just last year. As a result, brands might need to review and revise their digital customer experience strategy more frequently than in the past.

What are the key benefits of a digital customer experience strategy?

An effective digital CX strategy ensures that the brand experience is consistent across all digital touchpoints. It can also help maintain consistency with offline channels. Beyond consistency, a digital customer experience strategy optimizes the user-friendliness, convenience, personalization and responsiveness of channels to best meet the needs of the brand’s audience. This improves customer loyalty and advocacy, reduces churn and boosts sales.

What are common challenges in creating a digital customer experience strategy?

Aligning the digital CX strategy to an organization’s business goals is a significant challenge that affects resource allocation and tactical implementation as well as conceptualization. Gaining a robust, current understanding of customer requirements and preferences is another common challenge, as many organizations rely solely on either qualitative or quantitative research rather than both.