Anywhere you contribute to the customer journey across digital channels, here are the best digital experience books to add to your reading list.
As a customer experience (CX) professional, there’s no question that your role involves digital experience (DX) as well. Digital experience itself also lives within several areas of a business outside of anything customer-facing. From web and app developers to demand generation, the digital channels put forth by a brand are a priority throughout an organization.
Digital channels — such as websites and mobile apps — are now the go-to channels customers use for the majority of their interactions with brands. There’s never been a more urgent need for organizations like yours to invest in a digital customer experience strategy that improves experiences. Now, it’s all about optimizing digital channels to convert customers in as few clicks or taps as possible at every touchpoint in the customer journey.
In order to do so successfully, it’s worth taking a look at what leaders from inside and outside your industry say about digital experience. Reading the best digital experience books — written by industry innovators and thought leaders with decades of expertise — provides a fresh perspective of things you may not already know. And you can implement what you learn in order to upgrade experiences across digital channels.
10 Must-Read Digital Experience Books to Add to Your Reading List
In our list of the best digital experience books to read, we’ve created a collection that covers topics relevant to DX professionals of various levels.
Here are the must-read DX books of 2023 to enhance your knowledge of digital experience.
The Digital Experience Company: Winning in the Digital Economy with Experience Insights
In Alfonso de la Nuez’s The Digital Experience Company, the author explores the premise that every company — regardless of industry or target consumer — is a digital experience company. Earning high praise from senior digital leaders at Zoom and McAfee, the book guides readers on the steps to create a digital presence designed to attract and retain customers.
De la Nuez, who co-founded UserZoom, makes the case for why investing in user experience (UX) along with CX is critical to driving business outcomes. He also examines how leaders in an organization can leverage UX as a competitive advantage and offers insight into designing digital experiences that win customers over.
If you pick up The Digital Experience Company, expect to gain the know-how for making digital experience data actionable for your entire organization.
Strategies for the Digital Customer Experience: Connecting Customers with Brands in the Phygital Age
Digital and physical experiences are often thought of and treated as separate, siloed channels within enterprises. But that’s not the case for customers — each should be treated as part of one holistic brand.
Looking to connect and strengthen both digital and physical experiences? Dr. Wided Batat, founder of the Experiential Marketing Mix, wrote Strategies for the Digital Customer Experience with her expertise on all things CX and digital transformation.
Her book explores a range of technologies and techniques, including artificial intelligence (AI) and gamification, that companies can use to create and enhance ”phygital” experiences. Batat also shares strategies for successful phygital customer experience design.
The Digital Seeker: A Guide for Digital Teams to Build Winning Experiences
When customers turn to digital channels, they’re looking for something more than products or services: They’re looking for solutions to their problems or to fulfill an unmet desire.
Raj De Datta’s The Digital Seeker is a must-read recommended by executives at Andreessen Horowitz, Ogilvy, Wayfair, the Khan Academy, and more. It aims to help leaders shift their thinking on the role of digital experiences, evolving beyond simply seeing the purpose as serving as online marketplaces and toward critical solutions solving customers’ pressing needs.
Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting UX Metrics
There’s a science to evaluating the overall UX, and here’s the guide for getting that science right. Bill Albert, an executive at accelerator Mach49, created Measuring the User Experience with Tom Tullis, a longtime UX expert with Fidelity Investments, as a comprehensive resource for all things user experience.
Measuring the User Experience helps readers define UX metrics, guides businesses on how to choose the right UX metrics, and offers a how-to for collecting UX measurements. It also includes case studies from Netflix and other industry-leading brands.
Customer Experience Analytics: How Customers Can Better Guide Your Web and App Decisions
Customer Experience Analytics, written by product marketing leader Akin Arikan, has drawn noteworthy reviews from senior leaders at organizations including Google, Wunderman Thompson, CustomerThink, and the Digital Analytics Association (DAA).
Arikan explains how to use UX analytics to optimize customer experience, with insights from dozens of case studies. His book reveals how leaders are capable of solving business challenges — such as customer acquisition, sales, conversion rates, and more — faster by measuring and analyzing experience analytics.
Customer Experience Analytics also predicts the future of experience analytics and how brands should harness emerging technologies to innovate.
Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers
Fred Reichheld is the creator of net promoter score (NPS®), so it’d be a mistake to not include Winning on Purpose in this list of the best digital experience books.
Winning on Purpose introduces the concept of treating customers as you would want a loved one to be treated. Reichheld makes the case that enriching the lives of consumers is crucial to yielding higher returns for shareholders across industries. C-suite executives from Nike, Peloton, and Warby Parker praise the book as a must-read for driving business success in the digital age.
The Swipe-Right Customer Experience: How to Attract, Engage, and Keep Customers in the Digital-First World
Sanna Eskelinen, Global B2B Marketing Lead at Adobe, and Belinda Gerdt, Global Head of Portfolio Marketing at Philips, uncover the ways that the world’s best companies have transformed their customer experiences by rethinking the role of digital within the business. With The Swipe-Right Customer Experience, the authors break down the fundamental steps organizations must take to overhaul their internal cultures, skills, processes, brands, and measurements to serve up next-level experiences and results.
The Digital-First Customer Experience: Seven Design Strategies from the World’s Leading Brands
Joe Wheeler’s consulting firm, CX/Digital, helps brands achieve a next-generation, digital-first customer experience — and now the best-selling author has written a book that guides readers through what steps to take to do the same, with case studies from brands that are first in their categories like Spotify, Starbucks, and Amazon.
The Digital-First Customer Experience details the seven design strategies companies need to use to deliver exceptional digital experiences at scale.
Digital Customer Service: Transforming Customer Experience for an On-Screen World
Rick DeLisi, a longtime Gartner fellow, and Glia CEO Dan Michaeli designed Digital Customer Service to provide the blueprint for achieving the new standard for 5-star experiences.
Digital Customer Service says it’s achieved through digital customer service, and the book is relevant for professionals from the front lines to the boardroom interested in discovering the specifics of boosting customer loyalty (and profits) while reducing the costs to serve customers.
Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics: Powerful Tools to Manage Creativity, OKRs, Product, and Business Success
Michael Lewrick, founder of advisory firm Lewrick & Company, started the Design Thinking series a few years ago. The latest installment covers the “simple and straightforward playbook to manage and measure innovation.”
Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics takes a deep dive into employing data metrics, deploying objectives and key results (OKRs), and using tools to create meaningful products, services, and experiences.
Why You Should Read the Best Digital Experience Books
Reading the best digital experience books provides several benefits in an era where digital interactions and transactions dominate most industries.
In 2023, read the best digital experience books for the following reasons:
1. Understand user behavior: Knowing how customers interact with digital channels indicates what’s working and where there’s friction, the latter of which is driving customers away from your brand.
2. Stay up-to-date: Digital trends are constantly evolving. In the books from this list, thought leaders in the field help you keep up with the latest trends, strategies, and technologies to be successful.
3. Improve UX across digital channels: Using the tips and best practices for designing seamless, intuitive digital experiences through websites and mobile apps, you’ll better meet (and exceed) expectations.
4. Develop strategic thinking: Tactical advice isn’t all you need. While reading the best DX books, you should be cultivating a strategic mindset and feel empowered to think about what may be beneficial for your organization as it executes a digital customer experience strategy.
5. Greater empathy: By focusing on customers’ experiences, you’ll gain an empathetic understanding of what they say, think, and feel in order to craft better experiences online.
6. Inspiration and creativity: Trust your gut, but also trust the real-world experiences of the experts behind the best digital experience books. Reading about innovative digital experiences might spark your own creativity and prompt you to think outside the box.
As with any resource, remember that you can (and should) critically analyze the material. You shouldn’t copy exactly what you read. Instead, take the perspectives and mold your own by adapting the information to fit with your company’s industry, target customers, products or services, and overall mission.
Schedule a demo with a Medallia expert — we’ll share where your digital experience program is today and what our award-winning platform does to accelerate its impact on the business.
