6 digital business strategies to improve customer experience 

How can digital business strategies improve customer experience?

Digital customer experience business strategies focus solely on customers’ interactions with a brand in an online setting. Accelerated digital migration and the use of technology tools in businesses have made digital channels crucial in reinforcing a company’s overall customer experience strategy.

In addition, customers have also become more comfortable in engaging brands through digital platforms. They expect brands to satisfactorily serve them across multiple channels at their convenience while providing a seamless experience. This article explores some marketing techniques, particularly digital business strategies to improve customer experience.  

What is a digital customer experience strategy?

A digital customer experience strategy ensures your customers feel engaged, valued, and understood when interacting with your brand on any digital insights community platform. It involves developing an approach that identifies how your digital platforms and tools fit into the overall customer journey.

Every customer interaction with your brand needs to be convenient and smooth. There are different ways you can evaluate your brand’s digital customer experience. Here are six areas to focus on: 

• Reachability: Assess the existence and reliability of the channels your customers prefer. This may be through email, social platforms, newsletters, or other means. 
• Convenience: See how easily your customers can engage with your brand on different channels and the level of support they get. 
• Flexibility: Check how smooth customers can switch between channels. 
• Checkout convenience: Know how easily customers can complete purchases. 
• Simplicity: Assess the complexity of the learning curve for customers to understand how to use your platforms and communication channels. 
• Personalisation: Know how to recognise individual customer journeys to give them a personalised digital experience.  

The main goal for the assessment should be to identify gaps in the digital customer journey and optimise interactions for a better customer experience. Once identified, look into some digital business strategies that can help boost your customers’ experience across all your digital platforms.  

1. Website optimisation 

Your website is a place to meet, engage with, and convert visitors to customers. It’s essentially one of your best digital marketing strategies to grow your business. However, it can also be the area that drives your customers away due to unsatisfactory experiences. 

Slow loading times, unclear call to action, problems with navigation, accessibility design issues, and low-quality content can degrade customer experience, resulting in significant revenue loss. This is why you have to develop a strategy for optimising your site’s design. To ensure your customers’ journey improves when interacting with your website, here are a few things to remember: 

• Assess your Core Web Vitals to ascertain their scores are within recommended benchmarks.  
• Focus on the design aspect. Many visitors will leave a website with an unattractive design. 
• Make navigation easy and intuitive. 
• Create engaging, clear, and valuable content. 
• Simplify your checkout process. Complicated checkout processes will cause customers to abandon their carts, which consequently increases your checkout page bounce rates.  

By taking these simple steps, you’ll be in the right direction of improving your customers’ experience on your site. That way, you would ensure consumer happiness when interacting with your brand.

2. Mobile optimisation

Global mobile usage has been growing steadily, even exceeding desktop usage. Mobile is no longer a secondary experience but at the core of every digital interaction. This means your digital business strategies must include mobile devices. That is, you need to take a mobile-first approach to customer experience.

It’s much easier for customers to pick up their smartphones and use them to search for solutions, products, or services rather than do the same on their computers. It’s because mobile devices offer convenience that desktops or laptops can’t. There’s a high chance the first interaction your customers will have with your brand is through their mobile devices.  

Therefore, ensuring your website is optimised for mobiles is the best way to go. This includes making it easier for customers to register for services, log in to accounts, or fill forms using their mobile devices. The two requirements that are most prominent when it comes to mobile optimisation are ease of navigation and speed. If you meet these goals, you’ll ensure to create an experience that meets customer expectations. 

3. Unified and seamless omnichannel support

Another business digital strategy you want to develop for improved customer experience is omnichannel support. Research studies show that customers expect brands to be aware of their purchase histories, regardless of the channel they’re using. Similarly, customers expect to talk to the same agent each time they engage with your business.

Thus, your strategy should focus on optimising engagement across all your channels. Customers wouldn’t want to keep repeating themselves every time they reach out. So no matter what channel they’re using to reach you, they expect you to provide a seamless experience and understand where they’re coming from. 

When a customer starts a conversation using a chatbot, a live agent can take over and resolve the issue. Omnichannel support is crucial in ensuring your customers’ journey and interactions with your brand through different channels are recorded and available on a single platform. This would allow your customer support agents to attend to customer needs promptly without hassling them for information they’ve already shared with other agents or on other channels. 

4. Customer support optimisation

Aside from waiting for ages for a web page to load, waiting for hours to receive a response to their queries is also something your customers would dislike. Providing a satisfactory digital customer experience can’t happen without having well-equipped and motivated digital customer support agents. So to give your customers a better experience, you need to adopt appropriate tools and technologies. 

Tools to enhance service delivery on customer touchpoints support engagement processes and add great value to customer experience. These tools simplify processes, enable cross-team collaborations, and improve agent productivity and efficiency. They empower your agents to make valuable decisions when engaging customers, thus improving customer satisfaction and experience in the process. 

Here are some of the tools you can include in your digital customer experience strategy: 

• Help desk: This is a customer service tool to help you manage customer interactions. Managing customer interactions helps you provide personalised support, resolve issues promptly, and become proactive in meeting customer expectations.

• Chatbots: This tool provides automated answers to basic and common queries. They help reduce agent workload and significantly reduce response times. Besides, chatbots operate 24/7 and are your standby agents when live agents are unavailable. 

• Live chats: Adding live chat features to your website by deploying messaging platforms is one of the most hassle-free methods of providing customer service because of the asynchronous nature of these conversations.  

• Self-service: This involves creating a knowledge base to help customers access the information they need without reaching out to your support agents. This includes an elaborate Frequently Asked Questions section, community forums, and solution articles.  

These portals are an extension of your service desk, so they’re meant to enhance customer experience. However, to accomplish this aim, they shouldn’t be in a complex language or difficult to navigate.   

5. Customer support automation

If you’ve not automated your customer journey, there’s no better time to start than now. Automation allows you to improve customer engagement and interaction at a faster scale. As your business grows its customer base, keeping a personal touch can become increasingly difficult. Without a proper way to track customer growth and to meet the growing customer expectations, providing a good experience for them would be difficult.  

Thus, employ customer management tools (CRM) to ensure that none of your customers’ data are slipping through the gaps. While an omnichannel strategy ensures that customers have a smooth experience across different channels, a CRM makes managing that data a breeze. It’s also crucial for analysing data and gaining actionable insights to drive better customer engagement.  

You can also use digital customer management (DXM) platforms, which work similarly to CRMs, to eliminate laborious and time-consuming manual data collection and analyses. For this, a myriad of robust and reliable DXM tools exist to enable you to accelerate and enhance the digital customer experience. 

6. Customer feedback optimisation

It’s a good practice to listen to what customers have to say about your brand offering and services. The goal of customer feedback is to know what your business is doing right and what it’s failing to do. That’s why you need to find a way to close customer feedback loops. It’s a crucial part of ensuring you deliver an excellent digital customer experience. 

Listening to customers who’ve had bad experiences with your brand is crucial to improving your digital business strategies. While it would be excellent if you were able to convince these customers to return, the more important goal is to fix what you haven’t been doing right. This would help make the experience better for your existing and future customers alike.  

Final thoughts

Customer experience is a crucial differentiator between businesses, with customers opting to engage with brands that care about meeting their expectations at their convenience. But providing an excellent digital customer experience doesn’t happen by accident. It requires the development of digital business strategies and deliberate efforts to implement them. Also, it’s important to align your business goals while keeping these digital business strategies in mind.