The digital customer experience encompasses every last touchpoint a customer has with your business online. When you ensure your digital channels are accessible, engaging, and quickly solve problems, you practically gift wrap the customer journey.

When a recent study showed companies are seeing a significant dip in customer satisfaction -- with 55% of customers reporting a worse experience than usual -- you have a fantastic opportunity to fill in the gap with memorable digital customer experiences. When you put customer satisfaction front and center, you ensure your business becomes a go-to resource for years to come.

There's always room for improvement when it comes to your digital channels and we want you to start reaping the rewards. Our guide will explore the ins and outs of a digital customer experience strategy and how it translates into repeat business for your brand. You'll even get first-hand insights from business owners across several industries that'll change the way you look at digital interactions.

Key Takeaways

• The digital customer experience refers to the result of a seamless and positive customer journey throughout a brand's digital channels. These channels include (but aren't limited to) a website, digital advertisements, social media platforms, and blogs.

• A digital customer experience strategy involves an intensive approach with the goal of ensuring customers are happy, satisfied, and eager to support your business in the future.

• Marketing firms can help fine-tune the entire customer journey to save businesses time. Rightpoint is a marketing firm that specializes in crafting great digital customer experiences for brands across industries like retail, hospitality, and more.

The Cost of Disconnected Experiences

According to McKinsey, businesses that invest in improving their customer experience report increased revenue between 2% to 7%. Meeting customer expectations isn't just practical -- it pays off handsomely.

The million-dollar question is: how do you fulfill such a daunting request? With so many digital channels to juggle, you need a digital customer experience strategy that unites them together. Let's take a look at how you can knit your digital touchpoints together in a way that delights -- not confuses -- your target audience.

The Evolution from Multichannel to Omnichannel

The definition of multichannel refers to 'several channels', meaning you could still leave a few of them out of the picture. The omnichannel approach ensures you bring all your digital channels together for a truly seamless approach.

Let's paint a picture to show the benefits of the omnichannel strategy. For example, a sports apparel brand with a multichannel approach may have a solid marketing strategy when it comes to promoting their active clothing line to customers. They could have an interesting email marketing newsletter and a regularly updated blog for generating trust in their brand.

However, let's say they have a few hiccups in other areas of the customer journey that gets in the way of a seamless experience. Maybe they've forgotten to promote their online help desk on their contact page, leaving many customers in the dark about diverse methods of contacting them. They could also have a disjointed sales campaign that only promotes coupons in their newsletter, but not on their website.

Do you see the flaws in this approach? The omnichannel method makes sure every single touchpoint offers customers a similar perspective on your business and delivers what they need to make an informed buying decision. If they feel like they're interacting with different businesses when they switch to another touchpoint, or find out they were missing information entirely, you could come off as insincere or out-of-touch.

This seamless digital customer experience is more than just pleasant -- it could make or break a future long-term customer.

Why Businesses Struggle with Integration

Why do some businesses struggle with digital customer experience management and others excel? The reason usually lies in two key factors: incorporating direct customer feedback and regularly using up-to-date tools.

No digital customer experience journey can be successful without hearing the thoughts of your target audience. Customers today aren't shy about sharing their needs with businesses and will leave plenty of valuable thoughts on social media, in forums, or in a dedicated feedback form on your website.

Other businesses lack the tools and expertise needed to craft an integrated digital customer experience strategy. Partnering with an experienced marketing firm is a tried-and-true method of bridging the gap where your current efforts aren't quite measuring up.

At Rightpoint, we provide a blend of content services, customer research, digital commerce, and sales experience to make sure every last touchpoint gives customers what they need to trust your brand.

Core Components of Digital Customer Experience

It's time to break down the digital customer experience so you can start building a strategy that holds up to your target audience's evolving standards.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is a process where you analyze how users move through your digital touch points. It's here you'll analyze both success and failure to get the bigger picture on what the average customer experience looks like for your brand.

Where do customers make key decision points when browsing your website? On the other hand, which pages do they tend to bounce from or spend little time on? Customer journey mapping is illuminating because it reveals customer activity at its most honest, exposing growth opportunities and flaws alike.

Digital Touchpoint Management

Another important aspect of building the digital customer experience is putting yourselves in your customers' shoes as they interact with your digital channels. From website to mobile, you need to ensure customers get an honest and consistent view of your brand.

In a recent survey, at least 57% of smartphone users regularly use their device to buy products. If your website isn't optimized for mobile devices like phones and tablets, you'll fall behind businesses with more seamless digital experiences.

Other digital touchpoints you'll need to analyze for clear copy or smooth browsing capabilities include:

• Email and messaging platforms

• Social media interactions

• App notifications and alerts

• Chat and support interfaces

Data Analytics & Measurement

Once you have all of your digital touchpoints under the same strategic banner, it's time to start analyzing how effective each one is. Customer data analytics will regularly tell you what you need to know through crucial metrics such as conversion, engagement, and ROI.

Conversion metrics

Conversion metrics refer to how many -- or how few -- customers are taking a desired action on a given channel. From purchasing a product to signing up for your newsletter, this metric is one of the most straightforward when it comes to gauging success.

Customer satisfaction scores

Often shortened to CSAT, the customer satisfaction score directly tells you how happy or dissatisfied a customer is with your business. Customers are usually able to share their score on a scale of one out of three, one out of five, or one out of ten.

You can calculate this score by gathering up all the positive responses you received and dividing them by all the responses you collected. Once you multiply by one hundred, you'll receive a percentage that sums up your overall digital customer journey.

For example, let's say you received fifty positive responses out of two hundred responses. If you divide these, then multiply by one hundred, you'll receive a score of 25% satisfaction.

Engagement rates

How often are customers coming back to check out your blog or open your newsletter? Do they often leave comments on your social media or reviews about a recent product? Engagement rates are a reliable foundation of a satisfying digital customer experience because they keep coming back for more.

Calculating your engagement rate can be done a few different ways. The most popular is by dividing the amount of daily active users on a social media platform by the amount of monthly active users. After multiplying this number by one hundred, you'll have a good idea on how 'sticky' your business is. Stickiness is a term referring to how often customers stick around or come back.

For example, if your channel has eight hundred daily users and eighty monthly users, you can divide these to get 0.1. After multiplying by one hundred, you'll get a percentage of 10% stickiness.

Drop-off points

Sometimes customers don't stick around, leading to common drop-off points on certain parts of your website, social media platform, or blog. Whether or not this is due to customer satisfaction will depend on how well you analyze other areas of your strategy.

Dane NK, the founder of game and tech review site That Videogame Blog, believes drop-off points to be a major source of opportunity for businesses who need deeper insight into customer behavior.

"Here’s the overlooked gamechanger: most marketers ignore silent users. The ones who don’t complain or engage are often your best mirror of hidden flaws. Study their drop-offs, not just your loudest fans. The quiet ones reveal the truths you need to face for real growth."

A key detail about the digital customer experience is how there is no single element that results in a positive experience. Your customer's journey involves all of your digital channels working together as one.

Customer Psychology and Behavior

Customer data isn't just numbers and percentages. It's also listening to what your customers enjoy or dislike about your business and using that as fuel to create an unparalleled digital customer experience.

Your strategy should prioritize gathering up information about user needs and motivations, which you can find through surveys, customer reviews, or sentiment analysis. You also need to analyze decision-making patterns throughout your touchpoints, like drop-off rates or emotional triggers based on copy.

Personalization and Context

There's no doubt about it: customers want personalized experiences. According to McKinsey, 71% of customers today expect a personalized shopping experience, so you'll need to adjust your strategy to match.

That means using valuable tools like user preference tracking, behavioral targeting, and content customization to meet customers where they are.

You can use customer data platforms and social media analytic tools to save time and create predictive recommendations for future strategies. According to recent research, retailers that use predictive analytics increase their profit margins by up to 60%.

Service Design and Support

Despite your best efforts, sometimes your customer experience won't be up to par. Being proactive about problem resolution and ensuring your customers have access to helpful solutions will go a long way in preventing customer churn.

According to a 2018 study, 43% of customers struggled with self-service capabilities because there wasn't enough information available. Another 18% stated the information presented was too disorganized for them to search for. These are just a few issues you should keep in mind, as you could stand out from other businesses by simply being one of the most helpful brands in the industry.

User Interface and Interaction

Your user interface can make or break a customer's experience. If your website isn't optimized for mobile or isn't accessible to people with less knowledge about your product, some people will leave without another glance.

Oliver Morrissey, the director and owner of the legal firm Empower Wills & Estate Lawyers, found the user interface to be one of the most illuminating tools for crafting positive digital customer experiences.

"A few years back, we found that many clients were having trouble fully understanding their wills and estate documents, which led to confusion and a lack of engagement. To address this, we introduced a simplified summary document along with the legal paperwork. This document explained key aspects of the will in plain language and was easy to reference. We also made sure our clients had direct access to their documents through a secure online portal.

Since making these changes, we’ve noticed that our client retention rate has improved. Clients feel more informed and in control of their estate plans, which reduces anxiety and builds trust. The takeaway here is simple: when you simplify complex information and make it more accessible, clients are more likely to engage and return."

Content Strategy and Communication

Much of the customer experience begins with learning about your business through a steady stream of helpful, entertaining content. As such, spend some time studying how your digital customer learns about your brand through your blog, social media, or video channel.

Do you have a consistent message linking all your videos, blog posts, and social media together? Are you maintaining a consistent brand voice alongside a dynamic tone for different subjects? Asking these questions is the beginning of crafting your information architecture, a term referring to how multiple forms of content create a comprehensive experience for the user.

Technical Foundation

The customer experience won't be enjoyable without cutting-edge technology to support every purchase and every browsing session. As you study the digital customer journey, ask yourself questions about your platform reliability and integration capabilities.

Is your marketing team agile and able to scale their performance based on successful or unsuccessful marketing campaigns? For example, if you need to create more social media posts in response to increased customer engagement, you may need different tools or another platform to match.

What about security measures? The best digital customer experience should prioritize keeping customer data as safe as possible. This means looking into important data privacy laws, such as first-party data management or opt-in protocols.

Mapping Digital Experience to The Customer Journey

Understanding digital customer experiences is easier when you start from the beginning. Below we'll break down the average journey your customer takes when discovering your brand and how it eventually leads to a useful insight.

Pre-Purchase Phase

From reading online reviews to browsing through your blog, the pre-purchase phase is one of the most precious steps in the customer journey. Even a little bit of doubt could get in the way of a sale or a sign-up.

Discovery touchpoints

What's the first way customers find out about your business? Also known as the awareness phase, this first interaction could be a social media ad, a brochure, or a billboard. Whichever it is, you'll need to make sure your digital experience presents a similar brand identity and message.

Research Interactions

Research is crucial for customers to feel confident in their purchase. Also known as the consideration phase, popular forms of research include customer reviews, videos, blog posts, social media posts, product reviews.

According to a 2018 survey by Statista, 25% of customers trust multiple customer reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

Decision Support

Once a customer is ready to purchase -- also known as the decision phase -- you need to make it easy for them. This can look like product pages with easy-to-find purchase buttons or a simple website design without videos or pop-ups getting in the way.

Purchase Phase

Once a customer is in the middle of buying a product or investing in a service, your work isn't done. Between 22% to 48% of people will abandon their cart for reasons such as high delivery fees and a complicated checkout process.

Cart Experience

Your customer experience should prioritize having a smooth and unhurried cart experience. Make sure people are given everything they need to know before buying, such as tax information or potential shipping delays.

Payment Process

Your payment process should make it easy for customers to punch in their information and complete a sale within seconds. Convoluted instructions or long loading times will reduce your chances of a sale significantly.

Configuration and Follow-Up

User friendly digital experiences take a proactive approach. A common method many businesses take today is sending a digital receipt email with next steps, so customers feel secure in their purchase. These next steps could be to leave a review on their product once it arrives or contact a help desk with questions.

Post-Purchase Phase

What are other ways you can increase your chances of a good digital customer experience? Ask yourself just how convenient and thoughtful you can be: you'd be amazed by the ideas you come up with.

Order tracking

Customers want to know their order is safe and will arrive without complications. Implementing an order tracking feature in your business will generate the peace-of-mind they need to trust your brand.

Support access

When customers have questions, make it easy for them to contact you. Make sure your digital touchpoints have easy-to-access information to make a call, send an email, or open up a live chat.

Just be mindful not to rely too much on automation. While AI-assisted chatbots can be helpful for answering simple questions, losing the human element could cost you in the long run. According to a 2023 study, 60% of customers still prefer to speak to a human when contacting a company directly.

Loyalty building

Keep customers around is cheaper than finding new ones. Try to encourage customer loyalty by offering a steady stream of content in a free newsletter or offering a discount in exchange for an online review.

Building Your Digital Experience Strategy

Now that you're loaded up on digital customer experience examples and have deeper insight into the working cogs of the customer lifecycle, let's start building your strategy.

Step 1: Assessment

First things first: how is your current strategy working? Honing in on your immediate shortcomings is a great place to start since you'll already have results in mind with your new strategy.

Current state analysis

Take a moment to review the sections in this article and see where your experience strategy could be coming up short. Do you have an active blog that customers can read when learning about your business? When's the last time you reviewed your web copy for clarity or spelling errors?

Customer feedback gathering

After you've done a little reviewing, turn to your customers for your next steps. Loyal customers are some of the most helpful when it comes to insights on business improvement. Since they've bought from you multiple times or interacted with your customer service, you may have several answers ready to go just from their comments or customer reviews.

Competition benchmarking

Not only should you study your past performance, check out other brands in your industry and niche for inspiration. Be mindful not to copy what they do exactly: you may also notice areas they can improve, too, and give yourself an edge.

Step 2: Design

Now it's time to take a look at your digital platforms' design. As we explored above, your customer needs to enjoy a smooth, informative, and unhurried experience from research to purchase.

Journey mapping

Go through multiple channels and study how customers interact with each one in turn. Look for issues such as cart abandonment, drop-off points, or confused scrolling to hone in on pain points and areas for improvement.

Touchpoint optimization

Once you've got a clearer idea how customers are interacting with your business, start improving touchpoints one-by-one. This could mean changing the color of CTA buttons, reducing page load times, or updating your blog with new posts.

Channel integration planning

If you've noticed any of your channels are poorly integrated into your overall digital experience, consider spending a little extra time getting them up to speed. This action could look like promoting these channels more frequently on more popular channels or giving them a technical upgrade.

Step 3: Implementation

Implementing improved technology can be time-consuming, but it's worth it. A faster running website or a helpful customer relationship management platform can do wonders for saving time and creating happier customers.

Technology selection

Once you've identified areas for improvement, ask yourself how technology can fill the gap. Do you need help organizing customer data to create helpful profiles? How about accurately tracking customer journeys across touchpoints?

Teaming up with a marketing firm can do wonders for saving time building up a technological toolset that gathers up valuable customer experience analytics and delivers on satisfaction.

Team training

Simply adding in some new mobile apps or features won't be enough: you need to make sure your team is up to speed. Take some time to train your team so they're not confused as to any new features or expectations in your improved experienced strategy.

Step 4: Optimization

Once all the working pieces are in place, it's time to start improving. There's no such thing as perfect when it comes to the customer experience: changing technology and evolving expectations will always create areas for improvement.

Implementing a measurement framework, seeking out continuous feedback from customers, and maintaining a philosophy for improvement are key for staying ahead of the curve.

How Rightpoint Will Help You Create an Unforgettable Digital Customer Experience

All the twists and turns of the customer's journey doesn't have to be a mystery. When you partner with a seasoned marketing firm with a background in the customer experience, you give yourself a beacon to success.

We specialize in helping B2B, B2C, and D2C businesses create online customer experiences that attract and delight at every point and turn. Our suite covers essentials such as customer research, customer lifecycle management, digital experience, digital commerce, and content services to ensure none of your touchpoints are lacking.

Are you ready to create a digital customer experience strategy that exceeds expectations for both your brand and your target audience? Contact us today to start narrowing down areas of improvement and building the customer journey you've always needed to thrive.