“Customer is king.”
Whether it’s a digital or a physical platform, this adage stands true to the test of evolving times. Even today, as the world has moved to the digital space, making sure that customers are happy is the only way for a business to survive. This is why most companies invest in ensuring that the customer experience is exceptionally delightful.
What is a Digital Customer Experience?
Digital customer experiences refer to any interaction a customer has with an online platform. Businesses install chatbots, applications, social media channels and other channels which allow virtual interaction and engagement between them and their customers.
From food aggregators to e-commerce platforms, customers are continually making purchases online. U/I and U/X have become words that are thrown around loosely today because every application and website’s end goal is to make sure it allows people to browse and convert aimless browsing into making purchases seamlessly. To keep your business afloat and relevant, you need to ensure that your customer’s experience when visiting your website or app is top-notch.
Online Reputation Management (ORM) is where the focus is on improving the status and perception of the brand, which is a more brand-centric approach. However, with digital media coming to the forefront and customer experience becoming a differentiator, using a more customer-centric approach is extremely essential. ORM is necessary for all brands but if done by having the customers at the epicentre of this strategy, it can lead to a better customer relationship management and thereby enable brand’s to offer a great digital customer experience, that will ultimately reflect in your brand’s online reputation.
How can a Digital Customer Experience be Considered Excellent?
The best customer experiences online are those that are fast, frictionless and responsive. Brands that work well online offer single-click support to customers in every step of their digital journey.
Rethinking customer experience in the digital era
To ensure seamless customer experiences, you need to rethink how your business interacts and engages with customers. When done correctly, digital experiences offered to customers allow businesses to thrive.
Social Selling
Social media is the latest platform to share information about your business. Gone are the days when you can cold-call customers or send them text messages to give them brand recall. In fact, most users get annoyed if they receive calls or messages from brands about products and services. The primary way to pique customer interest is by providing relevant content on social media platforms. Use videos, copy text and other forms of visuals to educate customers about your products and services.
Customer Support
Grievances and complaints are supported differently in the digital era. From waiting endlessly to have queries resolved, following up with emails pointlessly and not having questions answered with correct information by calling call-centres manually, customers now prefer quick problem-solving mechanisms. Businesses achieve this by offering customers innovative ways of support – from chatbots, automated responses and FAQs; businesses are continually endeavouring to ensure that their customer support channels are on top of the game, and don’t leave customers feeling drained.
Personalised Experiences
Who doesn’t like personalised experiences! Today, most websites and applications personalise the entire customer experience. According to Accenture’s report, almost 75% users are more likely to purchase products from a business that recognises them on a first-name basis, knows information based on past purchases, and offers relevant recommendations based on purchase history. Most users are happy to provide personal information to applications and websites, especially the ones they frequent. This enables customers to have a more efficient experience. Businesses can offer customers personalised experiences by investing in CRM tools.
How can you Improve the Digital Customer Experience?
A few ways in which businesses can improve digital customer experience are –
– Understanding customer behaviour and using this insight to generate better predictive behaviour.
– Focusing on the concept of self-service.
– Providing multi-channel interactions and engagement with customers.
– Ensuring complete mobile optimisation of the business.
– Ensuring proper customer satisfaction by having a great customer service team, both artificially and manually.
– Having an effective ORM strategy in place and executing it in a way that ensures the brand’s values are reflected in the communication.
Conclusion
The digital customer experience is continuously changing – be it the food, logistics or technology sector, today, every form of interaction with people is digital. Keeping this in mind, businesses need to ensure that every interface they have with a customer digitally needs to be at par. Businesses need to continually improve a customer’s journey right from an impression stage to conversion and post-sales stage.
Exceptional customer experience effectively means higher sales and growth. The more a brand invests in making customers happy, the happier it will be. Businesses need to budget this aspect well into their marketing, advertising and revenue strategies to scale better.
Tags: Brand Marketing, customer engagement, customer experience, Customer Service, Digital Marketing, Digital marketing strategy, digital marketing tips, Marketing strategy, marketing trends, Social Media Marketing