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While there are many important aspects of selling a product or service, one that can easily be overlooked is the digital customer experience (DCX). There are a number of reasons it is important to ensure you provide customers with a good digital customer experience, and in the end, this will drive the ultimate goal of making sales and growing your business!
Digital customer experience is the sum of digital interactions between a customer and a company and the resulting impression that a customer walks away with.
Source: Liferay
As you can see from the above quote, DCX is a mixture of a customer’s interaction with your digital infrastructure (e.g., a website or web app) and the way that interaction affects them in order to create the overall experience. It is a subset of the overall customer experience, which is often simply referred to as CX.
Just like direct interaction with people in your company, a good digital customer experience can be the difference between making a sale (potentially acquiring a repeat customer or good recommendations) and a customer walking away and not spreading the word about your company to others.
There are many things you can do to provide a good customer experience, but here are a few things that you can look at to see where you stand and look for potential improvements.
You will want your website or web app to provide consistency, both with user interactions and with the visual look and feel.
Having multiple, consistent ways for users to navigate your website can help improve DCX. Source: Web Style Guide
Providing a consistency with user interactions involves making it as easy as possible for users to know what to do to perform particular tasks, such as signing up for an account or making a purchase. This often involves having good user experience (UX) personnel to ensure that elements are designed to provide the easiest and most intuitive methods for users to interact with them to get the desired result.
Visual consistency is also important, and web designers can work with UX designers to help ensure that your site has both consistencies in look and feel as well as with the way in which users interact with the various elements provided for them on your website or web app.
While good technology and good digital elements such as websites and apps are important, a customer can still have a bad experience if they do need to contact you and either cannot make contact or have a negative interaction when doing so.
For example, a customer may place an order for a few products easily but then decide to cancel one of the products. If the person cannot find a way to get in touch with you, this will become quite frustrating. If someone does find out how to contact you but this goes poorly (e.g., a phone conversation that doesn’t resolve the issue or a digital message that does not get answered for a long period of time), then all of the good work you did to get the digital sale could be destroyed by the bad customer experience when a human response was needed.
Ensuring that both your digital and human interactions are positive can go a long way in providing a great overall experience for your customers!
A customer’s experience in a physical setting is determined by a large group of factors… Consumers recognize that some of these factors lie outside a business’s direct control, so they naturally set a lower bar for what passes as a satisfactory experience. For example, they don’t mind waiting a few minutes for service. Online, consumers are far less patient.
Source: Harvard Business Review
The quote above helps to explain why taking a close look at your DCX can be very important, especially if you don’t also have a physical storefront somewhere. When shopping online, it is very easy to simply go to another site or use another app if a customer doesn’t like how things are going!
One great way to find out where you currently stand with your DCX is to get feedback from your customers. Providing a survey or some other opportunity for them to share their experiences with you can be very valuable, as you can then very easily identify where your strengths and weaknesses are. Once you know what you need to focus on, you can implement a targeted strategy to improve your DCX so that you can provide an even better experience.
If you need to move quickly to add services, update your digital services such as your websites and web apps, or scale up at a moment’s notice, a good cloud service provider could be very helpful to fulfill those needs and provide a better DCX for your customers.
For example, you don’t want your website or web app to become unavailable or extremely slow during a high-traffic period. This will result in many negative customer experiences and a large loss of sales. With a cloud service, you can easily scale up to add additional servers and resources to meet the high demand, and just as quickly scale down once the high-traffic period is over. This can be an extremely valuable asset to maximize sales and minimize customer frustration!
