What Is the Digital Customer Experience?

The digital customer experience encompasses every digital touchpoint your company possesses and utilizes. In other words, from your social media and SMS text marketing to your eCommerce site and online advertising, the digital customer experience is the totality of your customer's experience with your company on the digital landscape.

Brands that successfully provide digital customer experiences that exceed those experienced in the store tend to experience increased profits, consistent customer retention growth, and excitement about their brand, products, and services.

Five Ways To Implement the Digital Customer Experience

In this article, we will look at five ways you can implement a successful digital customer experience strategy guaranteed to produce consistent growth and profitability.

Social Media

The digital customer experience encompasses all your digital touchpoints, but none are more important than your social media touchpoints. An excellent digital customer experience strategy capitalizes on current social media trends, which can change without warning.

For example, just a few months ago, consumers used Instagram as the leading social media app. Today that platform is TikTok. Tomorrow it may be an app that you don’t even know exists.

The critical lesson to learn here is that the social media landscape is constantly changing and evolving, similar to the topography of Earth.

A successful social media customer experience requires a social media strategy that focuses on current trends and adapting to what consumers prefer. Neglecting to develop a social media presence will seriously dampen the digital customer experience for your customers and should not be an option.

eCommerce Site

Your eCommerce site is your physical store online. You should replicate every experience your customers can have inside your physical locations on your eCommerce site to ensure those who cannot visit you in person get the same experience as those that can.

If you want to enhance digital customer service, your eCommerce site should offer memorable experiences that cannot be experienced in-store or features that complement that in-store. More on that later.

One of the consumers' biggest complaints about eCommerce sites is difficulty navigating or locating specific products or services. Your site should be designed in a modern style that makes finding information, help, and products accessible.

Additionally, your site needs to be able to accommodate site traffic. When Apple launched the new iPhone 14 devices in September of 2022, the Apple Store and T-Mobile websites crashed due to traffic.

Customers could not place orders due to the crash and lost their place in line resulting in them receiving their devices long after the release date. These are two of the biggest, most recognizable names in business today, and their websites crashed. Don’t let this happen to your company. Doing so significantly impacts your customers’ digital customer experience.

Cross-Platform Uniformity

Now that we’ve discussed two of the most significant digital touchpoints you should utilize in your digital customer experience strategy, let’s discuss how to ensure the two touchpoints complement each other.

Cross-platform consistency is necessary to provide an enhanced digital customer experience. Your social media pages and eCommerce site should work in tandem with one another.

For example, everything from color schemes to language style, multimedia, and tone should be consistent on both touchpoints. Additionally, your social media pages should encourage consumers to visit your website, and your website should encourage consumers to follow you on your social media pages.

When you successfully get cross-platform uniformity, you increase your access to your customers. In other words, you are giving yourself more opportunities to connect with your customers and collect data for your marketing strategies.

When your eCommerce site and social media platforms work similarly, you provide an enhanced digital customer experience that exceeds what most competitors offer. Your customers will be drawn to you versus the competition because of your commitment to delivering the desired experience.

Physical and Digital Unity

Cross-platform unity doesn’t stop at just the online experience. If you want to implement a digital customer experience that blows the competition out of the water, ensure unity and uniformity between your digital and physical touchpoints.

What does this encompass and look like in real life? We just mentioned that everything from your color schemes and fonts to your tone and styling should be uniform across your social media and eCommerce site. That should also overflow into your physical marketing and physical locations.

For instance, if you advertise in local newspapers, on television, and with direct mail, your marketing should be uniform with what you do in the digital landscape. Your physical locations should also match what you’re doing online and with physical marketing.

Additionally, your physical locations should promote your digital touchpoints. Customers in your stores should be encouraged to follow you on your social media pages and visit your eCommerce site.

You can accomplish this by offering special discounts exclusive to social media followers and ensuring you provide an experience that your customers are excited to participate in. Get creative with your cross-platform marketing and be unique.

Outsourcing To Gain Creative Advantage

Many of the tips in this article to help enhance and implement your digital customer experience depend on utilizing advanced skills and talents that your company may not already possess in-house. Outsourcing is the quickest and most affordable way to retain these necessary skills.

Outsourcing is a business tactic used by nearly all successful businesses, and particular Information Technology (IT) services are some of the most commonly outsourced services. Part of this is due to the high price tag that comes with IT, and the other is access to global talent.

When you choose an outsourcing partner, you offload the responsibility for acquiring the talent you need for that partner. Your outsourcing partner is better positioned to provide those services than you are if you haven’t developed them already in-house.

The remote work revolution has created a perfect storm for companies that provide creative talents, such as social media strategists, marketing experts, website developers, and uniform marketing experts. Instead of being limited by location, remote work has created the ability to recruit experts worldwide to perform services and functions.

The number one reason companies choose to outsource is cost. The cost to outsource usually is a fraction of the cost to develop in-house. Your team should consider outsourcing some or all of your digital experience functions to achieve tremendous success for the lowest price.

Bringing It All Together

The theme of this article should be apparent at this point. Uniformity and a commitment to the digital landscape are necessary to guarantee an enhanced digital customer experience. We cannot stress the importance of ensuring all your digital and physical touchpoints complement one another.

Your marketing strategy should be laser-focused on this uniformity, and the results will be off the charts.

How We Can Help

Enhancing the digital customer experience is one of our top skills at Awesome CX. You could even say we’re pretty awesome at it. Too cheesy? Sorry, we had to.

Seriously, though, we have a proven track record of enhancing the digital customer experience for some of the fastest hyper-growth eCommerce companies in the world. Our partnership with Netomi has also allowed us to utilize the power of AI to further optimize customer experience strategies. We would love the opportunity to connect with you and your team and show you how we can make a difference in your digital marketing strategy.

Sources:

Weekly Usage Of TikTok Surpasses Instagram Among US Gen Z Youth | Forbes

High demand for iPhone 14 Pro line crashed Chinese servers | AppleInsider

Cutting Costs: Outsourcing Tips | Thomas Reuters Practical Law

What a Great Digital Customer Experience Actually Looks Like | Harvard Business Review