In a recent study by Qualtrics, 65% of respondents expressed that their experience on a website or app is an important factor in their willingness to recommend the brand.
Enterprises need to offer exceptional experience and put the consumer more at the center to create a connection and foster it to win loyalty.
With more than 82% of consumers turning to their cell phones to help make a product decision, how should enterprises strategize to craft a great experience for them?
Why is Digital Experience Important?
The digital experience is the resulting impression of a company in a customer’s mind after an overall digital interaction. Even the smallest businesses are realizing the importance of digital channels in customer relationships and are focussing on their digital journey. Consumers prefer digital self-service support rather than getting assistance from a support person over the phone.
It is clear that these digital moments are shaping essential KPIs that will ultimately inform the path to purchase and retention, resulting in the need for a mobile-first mindset as important than ever.
A digital experience consists of many different journeys that determine if the overall customer experience was positive. It depends upon whether a consumer visited the website to buy something that caused the positive interaction, or a consumer came to get support? Did the brand interaction educate them for the purchase decision, or did they do their own competitive comparison or price shopping exercise?
Game Plan for a Successful Digital Experience
To lessen frustrating customers and refrain them to move towards to competitors due to poor digital experiences, businesses should focus on the following 5 goals for an effective digital experience strategy.
Functionality
According to Forrester, 61% of U.S. online adults are unlikely to return to a website that does not provide a satisfactory experience.
The functionality of the website or application plays a pivotal role in improving usability and accessibility in your user experience. The web experience created is the greatest competitive differentiator in the digital age.
A great way to explore functionality is to build a plan for “moments of truth” to map customer journey, to track positive interactions or touchpoints where frustrations exist.
It’s fundamental to understand that great user experience doesn’t come with flawless design, but comes with impeccable functionality.
Omnichannel
To create a seamless digital experience, the web app should be designed in line with other channels.
Customers are not restricted to using a single channel and rather prefer multiple channels to interact with your brand. So when you ensure users to experience omnichannel seamless journey across all interactions, you build trust.
The key features of the web app should be uniform across all channels and a conscious decision should be made to add additional functions specific to each channel. Also, the actions users take using one channel should affect all other channels. The user experience should be optimized as per the context of your channel, with a fair promotion strategy to ensure that the omnichannel customer experience is channel-neutral. An integrated approach should be followed to allow customers to choose their touchpoints without losing out on features or content.
Convenience
Users prefer interacting and seeking support through digital means with little human interaction and prefer to solve their own issues and find their own answers. Self-service is more common than ever as customers use their smartphones to conveniently access information, make payments, schedule appointments, book travel, and find answers to support questions.
As per Global State of multichannel customer service report, 90% of people now expect brands to offer self-service options.
The key for brands to be rated highest in terms of customer satisfaction is to offer them a choice of self-service options, along with offering a seamless connected experience when moving between channels.
By flagging reported repetitive cases and using surveys and metrics such as Customer Effort Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score to discover key issues can help in enhancing the overall process of self service.-2.png?width=1700&name=90%25%20(1)-2.png)
Personalization
It’s a known fact that a huge number of options can make it more difficult for customers to make a decision and turn them away from choosing a suitable product or service.
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.
Enterprises have been able to leverage the power of machine learning and deep learning technology to have powerful technological capabilities at their fingertips to help them create personalised web experiences. By producing rich insights into an individual’s wants and needs by aggregating customer’s data and learning from it in real time, these insights help businesses deliver the right consumer interactions that become a powerful differentiator for their brand.
Deliverability
Deliverability defines the effort and enjoyment that users perceive when navigating through the experience.
Both empathy and friction are two critical agents in achieving deliverability. It involves learning about the difficulties people face, as well as uncovering their latent needs and desires in order to explain their behaviors.
Guarantee smooth deliverability to users by understanding their pain points, their likes and dislikes and reason for buying your product in order to provide them with delightful experiences. Gain insights about customers by asking the right questions to get to know where they are getting stuck. They are the real brand promoters of your business and you would want to keep them happy by taking into account their feedback for improving their experience.
Customer feedback plays a critical role in improving deliverability and needs to be solicited at various stages in the experience, rather than simply at the end of the journey. This will allow you to map their emotional journey throughout their experience and identify where negative emotions occur.
As customer experience begins to claim the title of key brand differentiator, businesses cannot afford to make the fatal mistake of ignoring the importance of digital experience strategies.
