While physical stores are still hanging on, more and more people are flocking online due to the covid-19 pandemic. For this reason, this is the best time to review your business’s digital customer experience to see whether it’s working as planned. Otherwise, you may be inadvertently turning off prospective customers.
What Exactly is Digital Customer Experience?
In a nutshell, digital customer experience pertains to how customers interact with your business’s mobile app or website. It is, however, so much more than that. Digital customer experiences might also extend to customer interactions with your business through social media, smartwatches, smart TV, IoT devices, and other tools and places where customers can conduct interactions with you digitally.
It may even extend to package tracking, appointment scheduling, omnichannel support, as well as follow-ups through text messaging or email. Even video calls or phone calls play a significant role in digital customer experiences if these originate from your business’s digital platforms.
It’s also crucial to keep in mind that customers do not have several digital customer experiences with your brand, just one. Not just one experience with your website or app, or experience with your Facebook page, etc. All of these channels should integrate with just one experience. This means that if one channel fails, the entire digital customer experience fails too.
How Can You Provide a Stellar Digital Customer Experience?
Digital customers have very high, sometimes unreasonable, expectations when they shop online for goods and services. Failing to meet their expectations could mean losing them forever. In this light, here are key elements to help you deliver the best possible digital customer experience for your customers:
Omnichannel
Your customers should have access to your business and its offerings anywhere in the digital world. They don’t like to be funneled to your mobile app, social media, or website to have access to what they need.
Quick
Most customers expect their digital experience to be locked and loaded in under three seconds, whether it’s on mobile, desktop, watch, or other devices. Likewise, most customers will readily abandon what they’re doing if you don’t deliver in less than 10 seconds.
Seamless
Besides being omnichannel, all your channels should also integrate seamlessly. People want easy access to your brand account on all their devices, with all their details synced, including shopping cart details, stored account details, chat support conversations, and payment methods, among others. No one, including you, likes to enter the same details twice so that they can switch from mobile to desktop or vice-versa.
Customized
Nobody likes to be treated like a cog or robot in a business’s profit strategy. Customers need to know that you care about them as individuals, so you need to customize the content that they come across in your digital customer experience.
User-Friendly
For people to spend time on a digital experience, it needs to be as user-friendly as possible. This means no confusing or overwhelming navigation, links that are difficult to find, and no displaying desktop version websites on mobile, ever. Design is important, yes, but clean and simple will work as long as things are getting done.
Emotional
While function and value are vital, customers are also looking for brands to emotionally appeal to them, whether empathizing with their various pain points, solving their problems, sharing the brand’s values, or making their digital customer experiences fun.
In this digital age, customers expect fast responses to issues or queries about your brand and proactive improvement of their digital experiences across various channels. Whether you run an oxygen bar franchise, café, marketing agency, or some other kind of business, focus on the elements above to provide loyal and prospective customers the best possible digital experience you can deliver.
