3 things to know when designing digital customer experience

True product exclusivity is a rare thing nowadays.

For businesses this means customer experience is more important than ever. Experience is the one remaining sustainable differentiator, and a proven path to stronger competitive positioning. It’s therefore critical leaders stay in touch with their well-informed and often price sensitive customer base, which extend across multiple channels and digital touchpoints.

Digital channels are increasingly the starting point for the majority of key customer experiences. These form the foundation of the consumer’s relationships with brands and become a key pillar in establishing customer loyalty. In a number of industries, specifically aviation, financial services, and retail, it is not uncommon for over 90 percent of customer transactions to begin on digital platforms.

Organisations recognise this early influence is pivotal to the customer experience. It’s imperative to get it right in order to successfully lead consumers down the conversion funnel to capitalise on returns and boost loyalty and advocacy.

While there are seemingly endless streams of operational data that allude to consumer behaviour, underpinning consumers’ decision-making is the challenge. Business leaders are often left unsure about the ‘why’ of shopping cart abandonment rates, or ‘how’ to go about fixing an unexpected drop-off rate. This is where human feedback makes the difference for companies prioritising digital.

With the increased focus on creating a digital customer experience program that is successful at moving the needle where it matters most, Qualtrics has identified three pillars to build successful programs around:

Digital customer experience 

1. Be personal

Digital voices of customers and prospects are becoming louder and more pervasive. Therefore, organisations must always prioritise the human consumer on the other side of the data point. Organisations must learn what matters to their customers and think about the digital experience for their customer when interacting with their brand. This includes the first touch point and engaging in conversations that show the organisation cares, rather than simply striving for one-way feedback.

It is paramount to engage consumers on their own terms. This means integrating into the experience wherever possible and through whichever channel is used by the consumer - it is not simply layering on top and forcing consumers to engage in ways that are inconvenient. This is why we are seeing such a huge surge in feedback collection through new digital channels like voice and chat integrations. The challenge for organisations is to integrate the brand experience and messaging into customers’ lives in a meaningful and cohesive way that fosters a lasting relationship.

2. Be predictive

Organisations need to remove roadblocks to insight. Operational and experience data can combine to give business leaders a holistic view of consumers engaging through their digital platforms. These are the necessary foundations that pave the way for organisations to take advantage of predictive capabilities. When organisations can predict what their customers will want and when, they can begin to deliver customer experiences at the right moments of truth. It also enables them to detect customers and accounts likely to churn, and provide the visibility to know what is driving that behavior. By anticipating customer needs an organisation can create a true sense of loyalty and stronger relationships.

Read: Customer Experience Design Toolkit

3. Be embedded

Embedded activation requires a platform that can guide the organisation towards action that helps deliver a comprehensive digital customer experience.

Action is the key to improving the customer experience. It’s one thing to collect and analyse data, but to make a customer experience program come to life it’s essential to take the right actions based on those insights. A best in class closed loop feedback program is no longer optional. It is crucial to implement the infrastructure that can identify and facilitate those actions at scale for the business.

With these three pillars in mind, businesses can start to leverage the vast wealth of information and insights available to them via digital interactions. This can have highly lucrative returns, as organisations begin to deliver the type of truly individualised experiences that makes customers keep coming back for more.

Watch this webinar to learn how you can design a world-class digital customer experience program, including how to scale your feedback programs, design more personal experiences, remove roadblocks to insights, and drive action.

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ABOUT QUALTRICS

Qualtrics is the technology platform that organisations use to collect, manage, and act on experience data, also called X-data™. The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action, used by teams, departments, and entire organisations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee and brand—on one platform. Over 10,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools, rely on Qualtrics to consistently build products that people love, create more loyal customers, develop a phenomenal employee culture, and build iconic brands.

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