Customers prefer to interact with their favorite brands through digital channels — here’s how to improve digital experience across websites and mobile apps.
Where do most of the interactions between your brand and its customers occur? Chances are it’s through a digital channel, such as a website or mobile application.
Whereas the customer journey of the past required time-consuming conversations in a physical location or over the phone, now it’s as easy as entering a URL or launching an app to engage with a brand. By 2024, digital channels will account for 54% of all commerce revenue generated.
That’s why your brand needs to improve digital channels as part of its digital customer experience strategy. Digital experience (DX) plays a major role in shaping customer experience (CX) and everything connected to it — including customer engagement, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and customer loyalty.
4 Ways to Improve Digital Channels & Make Customers Happy Online
When it comes to digital channels, you need to take a close look at the entire user experience (UX). Usability, navigation, design, content, and performance all influence digital experience to determine whether a customer converts with an action that drives sales and lifetime value for your brand.
Here’s what it takes to improve digital channels and deliver high-impact website and mobile app experiences that your customers will love.
#1. Customer journey mapping
Understand what digital experience looks like from the perspective of your customers, both throughout the customer journey and during the customer lifecycle. From research and consideration to the first point of conversation and repeat engagement, the interactions with your brand are vast and varied.
So, how do you understand what they experience? Customer journey mapping is a process that involves mapping out interactions from the initial touchpoint with a brand through the rest of the brand-customer relationship. It captures what content they view, how they engage with digital channels, and what actions they take.
Customer journey mapping may appear arduous, but your customer experience management (CEM) platform should be capable of handling this. CEM software should also offer journey orchestration to craft individualized experiences for each customer as soon as they open a website or mobile app.
Automatically taking action in the moment optimizes the customer journey to improve channel channels, removing points and friction and minimizing churn.
#2. Digital feedback
Figuring out why customers feel happy or unhappy about their experiences with digital channels is a challenge. But not if you have digital feedback.
Customer surveys deployed across websites and mobile apps shed light on where experiences excel and falter. Abandonment surveys, for example, can be triggered when customers try to leave a company’s website or mobile app without completing a transaction to understand why a customer isn’t choosing a brand’s products or services.
Findings from digital feedback surveys also uncover customer sentiment, or whether they’re satisfied or not with the digital channels.
Digital feedback solutions can be used to quickly launch simple-yet-effective surveys across digital channels, such as immediately following a live chat session or after a customer has completed a transaction. Data-driven brands use these real-time survey results to continuously improve the digital customer experience in the moment to strengthen retention and other important CX metrics.
#3. Social listening
As the customer journey progresses, customers often write reviews and social media posts about their experiences with brands. It’s important for brands to get visibility into what’s being said, respond to reviews and posts in a timely manner, and take the best actions to address customer issues that arise using social listening and online review management.
Doing so gives businesses the chance to make things right with angry customers who have written negative feedback online. This also gives companies the chance to sway readers who may come across these reviews and social media mentions in the future. The second part is crucial — nearly all customers (93%) say online reviews impact their purchasing decisions.
#4. Behavioral intelligence
For a long time, companies could only see what content users were engaging with on their websites and mobile apps. Now, thanks to behavior intelligence — consisting of tools like heatmaps, session replay, and form analytics — it’s possible to find out what customers are doing and why.
As a result, your brand can see when customers are clicking in frustration, scrolling in an engaged manner, and demonstrating confused movements.
Experience leaders are leveraging behavioral metrics to trigger real-time actions relevant to each customer’s individual experience, such as deploying a live chat session with an agent when a user encounters a form error or spends a long time on a page without completing a step.
Bring Everything Together in One Platform
Savvy brands are combining customer signals from digital feedback, social media, and online reviews with digital behavior analytics and customer journey mapping to get the full picture of the digital customer experience. Not only are they able to gain a better understanding of what the digital customer experience is like, they can also identify areas for improvement and experience-enhancing strategies, and then continuously iterate and optimize in real time.
Schedule a demo with Medallia — an expert will walk you through how our platform empowers you to deliver consistent, personalized experiences that keep customers coming back time and time again after a stellar first impression.
