How digital enhances the customer experience (and how to optimise it)
Customer experience and digital are no longer mutually exclusive, as they are undeniable drivers of customer knowledge and satisfaction, on a web channel that has become inescapable.
Indeed, while customer experience in general is a major concern for any organisation wishing to last, the digital transformation of companies, and also of consumer behaviour, means that an online customer experience strategy (or digital CXM for digital Customer eXperience Management) needs to be put in place.
Take a guided tour of the online customer experience and how it fits in with today's challenges.
What is digital customer experience?
Definition of digital customer experience
Customer experience is the result of the customer's contacts and interactions with your company.
It is the customer's experience and perception, good or bad, of your brand and your offering, throughout the customer journey, from the first contact to the last.
For some time now, the customer experience has been going digital, whether for :
- making contact with brands
- making a purchase
- comparing product or service offers
- make a complaint to customer services;
- read blog articles;
- report a problem or ask for advice from the after-sales service;
- comment on news on social networks, etc.
The 5 key phases of the digital customer experience
The key phases of the customer experience, both online and offline, are as follows:
- pre-purchase: the emergence of a need, brand awareness and the user's search for information;
- consideration of the offer: additional research, comparisons, opinions, etc;
- conversion, i.e. the purchase;
- evaluation: use or consumption of the product and feedback from the customer;
- loyalty, or even recommendation.
The pillars of a successful digital customer experience
To be successful, digital CX must include :
- personalisation, to create a unique experience;
- integrity and transparency, to reassure and inspire trust over the long term;
- problem solving, to remove obstacles to a satisfactory customer experience;
- fluidity, to eliminate any source of potential frustration;
- responsiveness, or even proactivity, to meet expectations and needs,
- empathy, to adapt to customers and understand them better.
Digital customer experience: examples
Here are a few examples of digital customer experiences:
- in a clothing shop: connected mirrors that advise on the size or colour to choose ;
- when visiting an online cosmetics shop: a chatbot that asks questions about the person's skin type, age, preferences and tastes to make recommendations;
- when you buy online, you can create an account in just a few clicks to start collecting loyalty points;
- when a technical problem occurs and is reported online, a dynamic FAQ is displayed, followed by the option of speaking to an adviser by chat if no satisfactory answer has been found.
How does digital improve the customer experience?
Customer experience is one of the levers of any effective CRM and marketing strategy.
And a good digital customer experience has become essential. It's not just digital natives and millennials who are hungry for new technologies, interactivity and responsiveness from brands.
Increased customer satisfaction
The web channel has made it possible to develop commercial opportunities and touch points in customer relations, all opportunities for the brand to allow potential customers to try it out and form a positive opinion.
But if your web media are not well thought-out, they can also be a source of frustration.
Two statistics illustrate this phenomenon:
- 79% of consumers have made a purchase on a mobile device in the last six months (source Qualtrics).
- If customers can't find what they're looking for in just a few clicks, they give up and leave your page. This probability increases by 32% if a customer has to wait just one to three seconds for your page to load (source Freshdesk).
What's more, the customer experience in the digital age involves managing a multiplicity of channels: chatbot, emailing, website, blog, social networks, etc.
To avoid a fragmented customer experience, it is essential to opt for an omnichannel customer relationship, the only guarantee of a fluid customer experience.
More efficient and responsive customer service
Digitalisation also has a positive impact on the organisation and efficiency of your support and marketing teams.
- Online customer journey analysis,
- the collection and centralisation of customer data,
- the history of all interactions,
make it possible to contextualise each request and respond in the most personalised way possible.
Everything is just a click away:
- customer preferences (payment, delivery, etc.),
- previous frustrations
- current complaints,
- their average basket,
- favourite products,
- recurring questions.
Data is the key to improving the digital customer experience.
How can we digitise and optimise the customer experience?
As you can see, to improve the customer experience, you need to understand how your personas interact with your brand online.
1. Mapping the customer journey
Mapping the digital customer journey allows you to visualise all the digital touchpoints and understand the impact of each of them on the overall customer experience.
- What are the different phases that the customer goes through? Research phase over a longer or shorter period, number of pages consulted before making a choice, etc.
- Which channels do they use? Which social networks? Blogs? The website? The mobile application?
- What are the breaking points and decisive moments? What are their motivations and behaviours? Are they more likely to buy when offered a special offer or loyalty scheme ? Do they abandon their shopping baskets when told about payment options?
Now that you're using your data to adapt your digital strategy, you can start thinking about your added-value proposition for your customers' experience.
2. Test customer journeys and the customer experience
Once you've clearly defined the customer journeys on your site, it's essential to make sure that everything works perfectly.
All it takes is one small difficulty in the customer journey, whether it's an anomaly on a button, a feature or a product sheet, to spoil your marketing efforts and cause you to lose sales.
To ensure effective monitoring of user journeys, you need to deploy tests on a regular basis. To do this, using a representative test automation platform such as Alfred Monitoring is a very good strategy. No technical skills or installation required! Once the tests have been launched, you'll receive alerts in the event of a malfunction and you'll know exactly what you need to correct to ensure a smooth customer journey.
3. Take care with UX design
Paying attention to UX design means you can fine-tune online customer journeys down to the last detail.Inseparable from UI design, which refers to the creation of a pleasant and intuitive interface, UX design is about creating a fluid experience, whether using a mobile application or browsing a website:
- information is easy to find
- call-to-action buttons are clearly visible and attractive,
- making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter is simple and straightforward.
4. Include phygital in your strategy
Digital does not exclude human contact and visits to physical shops.
To offer a fluid and consistent experience whatever the channel, you can offer a phygital experience, a contraction of physical + digital.
While some customers appreciate a 100% online experience, others prefer to combine the best of both experiences:
- finding and reserving a product online,
- trying it out and buying it in-store.
Hence the birth of click and collect, long before health measures!
5. Putting tools in place
Customers love to try out new technologies, but they only have a positive impact on your brand if they serve their research and experience:
- virtual reality or augmented reality (3D), to discover a product or service virtually and in a fun way;
- self-care tools, such as chatbots , for engaging in conversation with a friendly, efficient robot without having to pick up the phone;
- interactive tablets and kiosks, to revitalise and modernise your physical points of sale, etc.
It's up to you to find the tool that will appeal to your target audience and enhance your offer 😉
6. Solicit customer opinions
Give your customers the opportunity to give you feedback on their experience.
Here are a few digital customer experience indicators, and the question to ask to obtain them:
- NPS, Net Promoter Score:
"On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend brand X to a friend? - CSAT - Customer Satisfaction:
"Were you satisfied with your shopping experience on our site? - CES - Customer Effort Score:
"On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate the effort you made to...?
The compilation of the results obtained, by means of a satisfaction questionnaire on the site or sent by email at the right time (usually just after the purchase), enables you to identify your strengths, but above all your weaknesses.
The simple fact of asking the question already proves that the customer experience is at the heart of your concerns, an attention that the customer will appreciate.
The essential omnichannel customer relations software
There's no secret about it: for an optimal customer experience, your company needs to digitalise its processes, culture and tools, making customer satisfaction a top priority.
Equip all your teams who are directly or indirectly involved in customer relations with a tool... and train them in the new uses and different functionalities.
CRM software, helpdesk software, customer relations software are real tools for :
- analyse the customer journey ;
- collect and centralise customer data
- monitor customer relations;
- automate low added-value tasks
- personalise the customer experience;
- encourage collaboration and better information sharing within your company.
🛠 easiware is a customer relationship management and personalisation platform . It enables you to centralise customer requests, prioritise them and allocate them by processing them within a single interface, for all your web channels (social networks, LiveChat, WhatsApp, email, web form, telephone, dynamic FAQs, customer reviews, etc.).
Mobile Service Cloud is an all-in-one customer service platform. Thanks to its omnichannel dashboard, all your conversations are in one place. Communicate with your customers across all conversational channels (SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, etc.).
Bonus: you can integrate a chatbot to be available 24/7!
No more duplication, hesitation or wasted time: every customer is recognised, regardless of their contact channel. Thanks to the information in the customer file, advisers can respond in a contextualised and personalised way, which is a source of satisfaction. Customers benefit from a single, unified digital experience.
🛠 Create your bespoke contact platform with Twilio Flex to deliver personalised, efficient and memorable experiences to your customers. It connects via APIs to all your tools to centralise interactions in its interface, whether they come from a call, instant messaging, social networks, SMS or email.
An intelligent shared queue automatically distributes each request to the most appropriate contact person, so you can respond quickly and efficiently. Each agent has rapid access to the customer's history and information from several sources, so that they can provide complete satisfaction without having to repeat information that has already been communicated.
What have you done to digitalise the customer experience?
Article translated from French