Customer experience is a key differentiator for businesses across every industry today. In fact, studies have shown that customer experience leaders outpace their competition in terms of business growth and revenue.
The digital customer journey covers all virtual contact points. It includes everything from accessing a mobile app to moving to the website and from following the company on social media to receiving a purchase confirmation email.
For many modern businesses, most customer interactions with the company are online. In such a scenario, it becomes even more important to optimize their digital journey to boost customer satisfaction and enhance customer loyalty—and that requires investing in the right technologies to support a seamless customer experience across channels. Companies like Argano can help improve your digital customer experience by identifying and integrating technologies to create a strong digital foundation for your business. But that’s not all you should do. Here’s a look at a few ways you can optimize the digital customer experience.
1. Identify your audience
You probably already have an idea of your target audience and details about their demographics. However, general data like age and sex of your audience isn’t enough. To really identify your audience, you should understand their buying behavior and what triggers their emotions.
Customer feedback provides valuable insights into your audience. It’s a good idea to encourage your customers to provide feedback after making a purchase so you can learn what made them buy your product. And if they didn’t make a purchase, ask for feedback to find out why they didn’t.
Artificial intelligence can help you by deriving patterns in customer behavior so you can better understand your customers and what drives their buying behavior.
2. Make changes according to new findings
As you receive customer feedback, try to make changes in your digital processes and see how they impact customer behavior. Detailed information about consumer behavior will give you many important insights such as their expectations and pain points.
Experiment with various calls-to-action to discover what resonates most with your audience. Is the checkout process easy? Sometimes a seemingly smooth checkout process might have one bottleneck that drives away customers.
Split testing can be a good option here to see which processes are preferred by your customers and what copy they find most compelling. A design audit can also be helpful.
3. Use data analytics
Many software solutions offer analytics features. Even the most basic analytics will provide deeper insights into your audience. They will also help you identify the contact points you need to work on. For example, if you find that many customers visit a page and then leave quickly, you can implement a chatbot that can help them find what they are looking for.
Also, a chatbot can help you record visitor questions to learn what they expect from your website. There are several other ways in which you can use analytics and uncover the holdups in the digital customer journey. Understanding what customers see as shortcomings is the first step to optimizing their journey.
4. Build and maintain a robust knowledge base
Your customers or prospects might have questions about your business. Without a good knowledge base, they will depend on your customer success team for every small inquiry, which also puts additional stress on your team. With a good knowledge base, they can learn more about the company and get answers to common questions about your company, tutorials on using various product features, and more.
Having an FAQ section on the website is a good idea, but a detailed knowledge base is even better. Depending on your company, you can even have blogs, infographics, webinars, ebooks, training sessions, and a lot more.
5. Streamline the experience across all channels
Your customers may digitally connect with your brand through your desktop website, mobile website, or app. No matter how they connect with you, they should get the same experience. If your mobile website doesn’t perform as smoothly as your desktop website or vice versa, you’re going to lose customers.
Also, it’s important to remember a customer whether they come from the website or through the app so they can have a seamless experience across channels. If their digital journey is disjointed, your customers might get frustrated.
6. Keep regulatory compliance in mind
There are several regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that businesses operating in the digital world must keep in mind. These regulations require businesses to take steps to protect consumer data, get consumers’ consent before collecting it, and allow your consumers to view, download, edit, or delete the data that’s collected by your website.
There are many major privacy laws around the world. They help in securing privacy and ensuring that consumers are in control of their data. It’s important to keep these regulations in mind when optimizing the digital customer journey.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing the digital customer journey isn’t a one-step process. You need to follow a customer-centric approach to optimize every interaction. Customer experience should be an important focus whenever your company makes a decision. Make sure you review your processes regularly to ensure you’re consistently meeting your customers’ expectations.
