Identifying and responding to a digital experience after it occurs doesn’t accomplish much — but building your digital experience program around real-time interactions keeps your customers engaged in the moment and, ultimately, happier as a result.

Every visit, click, and tap is an opportunity for your business to offer an engaging, impactful digital experience. But there’s a catch: you need to act quickly.

If you wait until after a customer has already left your website, app, or other digital channel, chances are you’ve lost them to the competition for good — and this is why leaders in every industry are turning their attention to real-time interactions. By engaging with customers in the moment and responding proactively, you’ll serve the right information at the right time and earn conversions, loyalty, and revenue. (Note: Below, the widget displaying behaviors and scores is not available for purchase, but for demonstration purposes only.)

Here’s why you need to invest in real-time interactions, how to make these touchpoints an integral part of your digital experience program, and what the future of digital experience management looks like.

Why You Need to Invest in Real-Time Interactions

In a digital-first world, building successful and engaging customer journeys is essential for businesses to acquire, activate, and retain customers. Without a deep understanding of what drives great digital experiences, businesses find themselves at a disadvantage in the market.

Establishing and maintaining customer lifetime value is a key challenge which often determines the fate of digital businesses — whether they survive, thrive, or fail. Intervening in the critical moments when customers need it most can make or break the relationship between a customer and the brand. Just one bad experience can turn a promoter into a detractor. 

In turbulent times, when cost control and business inefficiencies are top of mind for every executive, proactively addressing digital experience issues before they make a substantial impact is vital. This should involve saving an experience so it ends in conversation rather than abandonment, or addressing confusion before a customer calls the contact center.

Not only should your digital solution provide the analytics and insights to identify the right moments to intervene in an experience, but it also needs to provide an out-of-the-box tool to orchestrate these interventions, positively impacting customer experiences before they end.

Without Analyzing Real-Time Interactions, You’ll Fall Behind Competitors

Real-time actioning is quickly becoming essential in the digital-first world. Studies show that over 80% of consumers expect immediate responses when they have a question, and brands who are able to meet that expectation will thrive. In the Customer Service Trends for 2022 report from Stella Connect by Medallia, research also found that response time is what matters most to consumers.

But there are other, more tangible reasons to invest in real-time interactions as well. Decreased operational costs, especially a reduction in calls to a contact center, is a significant way this helps the bottom line. Using real-time data also assists teams in proactively improving experiences, rather than allowing issues to persist and affect customer satisfaction negatively.

Real-time data also allows brands to take advantage of more conversion opportunities by identifying highly engaged customers in the moment. For brands that are more advanced in their digital program, that’s a huge value-add.

Ask yourself: How much more money could I be making if I capitalized on every opportunity across my digital properties? Improved digital experiences create less friction, and in turn, customers are more likely to return again and again.

How to Make Real-Time Actioning Impactful for Digital Experiences

To get the biggest impact out of real-time interactions, your use case needs to align with your digital experience program and overall strategy. Think about real-time interactions as a proactive extension to engage your customers in the moment.

Within the digital maturity model, any company is able to unlock new potential with the right approach to digital experience management. Companies in the early stage of digital maturity should look for a no-code solution for digital feedback survey targeting that leverages both an overall real-time score of digital experiences, as well as pillar scores to understand every aspect of an experience, in addition to dozens of behaviors that act as a trigger for interactions.

Mature companies, which often have several third-party partners, should look for a customized solution to fit their exact needs. Some of the more advanced ways real-time interactions are used by well-established brands include pushing live chats in moments of confusion, or personalized offers to customers who are highly engaged and about to buy.

As your digital experience program evolves, you may decide to incorporate built-in real-time interaction management (RTIM) to further connect and personalize real-time experiences across the entire customer journey.

What the Future of Digital Experience Management Looks Like

The future of digital experience management is using comprehensive intelligence — including feedback, behavioral analytics, and omnichannel journey insights — to meet customer needs at the moment and at scale.

Delivering truly differentiated digital experiences requires rich, contextual insights that help executives and other leaders throughout an organization prioritize high-impact initiatives. It involves a combination of aggregated reporting insights that have the ability to power those one-to-one real-time interactions that are key to orchestrating the best actions at the perfect time.

Get Started with Medallia Digital Suite

Medallia’s world-class data science and machine-learning algorithms set the industry bar in terms of behavioral pattern recognition and multi-dimensional digital experience scoring — and our ability to leverage those real-time signals and drive intelligent actions at critical moments in the customer journey is unmatched in the market.

Customer feedback grounds and informs strategy, right? The fact that Medallia provides a solution that combines the intelligence of verbatim feedback with behavioral analytics, then uses that intelligence to drive action across the digital channel, is something that brands from fast-growing startups to longtime industry leaders are embracing in full force.

Other solutions in the market either emit signals to drive triggering of interactions, or they offer the capability to target users and intervene. Medallia Digital Suite offers both in an integrated, no-code package empowering brands to self-service and quickly ramp up their real-time interaction efforts.

Interested in learning more about Medallia Digital Suite? Schedule a demo with a digital experience expert today and learn how your business can start tapping into real-time interactions to secure customer loyalty and bolster revenue.