As the shift towards a fully digital world accelerates, the majority of customer experiences will be provided via online channels, where evaluating sentiments and interpreting reactions is more challenging. Currently, the best digital customer experiences are those that evoke strong emotions and build lasting relationships. Understanding your audience, learning to serve them better, and improving your reflexes should be among the top priorities for any brand looking to stand out from the competition through excellent customer experience.

The importance of customer experience in digital marketing is not merely intuitive. Indeed, several surveys have led to some surprising statistics in this regard:

• 67% of customers are willing to pay more for an excellent experience.

• With an emotional connection to a brand, consumers are retained by 306% and are more likely to recommend that brand to others, at 71% versus 45%.
• If a service or customer experience issue arises, customers are 4 times more likely to turn to a competitor than if the problem stemmed from the product or price.

What is customer experience?

Before delving into the heart of the matter and addressing the current challenges of customer experience in a digital environment, it is important to start by defining the terms of our subject. The notion of customer experience refers to the total sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand, whether it’s viewing advertisements, visiting the store, interacting with staff, making a complaint, receiving a package, etc. The digital aspect of this experience comes into play when these interactions occur online, via your company’s website, mobile apps, chatbots, social networks, digital kiosks, or any other virtual channel. What matters then is the perception customers derive from these interactions. Is the experience smooth, memorable, and enjoyable? Thus, we move from a transactional dimension to a relational one.

If overall customer experience (CX) involves empathy, trust-building, and enhancing human connection, digital customer experience (DCX) is the online expression of these efforts. Whether the interaction is physical or virtual, offline or online, people expect consistency across all channels and throughout their journey with your brand. To them, everything is an experience with your brand.

What challenges does customer experience present in the digital age?

• Customer Journey

The evolution of the customer journey is one of the most delicate yet fascinating marketing issues. It involves the specific progression of users through touchpoints. In the era of customer centricity, understanding and anticipating consumer expectations matter most. For a long time, this understanding was dominated by the linear, logical, and simplified marketing funnel model before shifting to a more complex, emotional-guided, and irrational model.

Identifying a customer journey allows for its analysis to uncover critical obstacles and opportunities. By capturing each step of the customer journey, businesses create an accurate representation of their customers’ desires and needs, enabling them to respond to these needs in real-time. This information leads to customer journey mapping aimed at planning future investments and improvements. Such insights are crucial for better understanding and enhancing interaction with your target audience, capturing sales and marketing efforts through open and integrated data, and creating alerts to identify problems before they impact the overall customer experience.

• Touchpoints

Touchpoints are key to understanding your customer’s journey. They refer to the various moments and ways during which a customer directly or indirectly comes into contact with your brand. Typically, this interaction is divided into three main phases of the customer lifecycle: awareness, evaluation, and post-purchase. On average, the number of interactions required before making a purchase is estimated at 7. Based on such interactions, customers often form their first impression of a brand and develop an opinion about the product or service.

If you aim to improve interactions with your customers, the key starting point is understanding what these interactions are and where they occur. Without this awareness, it would be impossible to anticipate and measure improvements or even see if certain changes have had a negative rather than positive effect. Each consumer touchpoint, whether digital or traditional, holds its own importance, and mapping them helps evaluate their experience and make improvements at each step. By identifying and mapping touchpoints, it’s possible to enhance the customer experience. Mapping your customer journey across multiple channels and connecting them helps you better understand customers and their needs.

As a result, you will be better able to boost customer retention. Having a good understanding of consumer touchpoints helps provide instant assistance, enhancing customer satisfaction. When customers are happy and satisfied, retention rates increase. It also helps increase sales conversions. Effective touchpoint mapping and management can help customers make quick purchasing decisions, increasing sales conversion rates.

• Mobile

Referring to the past, platforms were first designed for desktops before being adapted for mobile. While this worked quite well, today the logic is reversed. Platforms must first be designed to be mobile-friendly before being adapted to other devices. And for good reason! In 2020, 68.1% of website visits worldwide were made from mobile devices, a figure that has been increasing since 2019. Additionally, global mobile penetration rates reached 67% during the same period.

The reality is that mobile devices are far more powerful than other devices could ever hope to be when it comes to providing a seamless customer experience. Moreover, the first distinction of mobile is its permanent presence with users. The mobile platform offers many more features and is by far more appealing, flexible, and powerful. It continues to grow in scope, scale, and capability.

Furthermore, mobile provides you with access to excellent quantitative analytics regarding your app’s usage, installation and uninstallation rates, session duration, pages visited, geographical location, concurrently used apps, etc. Such bulk data enables you to uncover the “why” behind the “what”—going beyond statistics to decipher user behaviors.

• Data & Artificial Intelligence

Some leading companies are at the forefront of a better approach that fully leverages the wealth of data now available. Today, companies can regularly, legally, and transparently collect smartphone and interaction data, giving them deep insights into their customers. Those looking to the future are strengthening their data and analytics capabilities and leveraging predictive insights to connect more closely with their customers, anticipate behaviors, and identify real-time customer experience issues and opportunities.

Customer data offers crucial insights, making it essential to have solutions such as a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) capable of collecting and connecting data across various touchpoints. Machine learning and AI are increasingly capable of helping you understand data. However, unless you have a powerful AI system, it’s up to your team to collect, analyze, explain, and understand the data. Connecting customer journeys in a useful, exciting, and delightfully surprising way can make all the difference, and creating these journeys depends on your team.

Why should you prioritize digital customer experience?

An exceptional digital customer experience is no longer seen as the cherry on top—it’s the cake itself! It makes all the difference in an extremely competitive digital environment. Brands that combine the three essential elements of excellent products, powerful digital experiences, and memorable human relationships have more engaged, satisfied, and loyal customers.