Providing an excellent digital customer experience strategy has never been more critical. Gartner reports that 81% of executives believe they compete on customer experience above price and quality. With large corporations investing in and acknowledging the effectiveness of a stellar customer experience, it’s never been more important to understand how to deliver digital customer experience with channels including social media, messaging apps, mobile apps, text messaging, chatbots, and messenger bots.
In the past, companies primarily focused on customer service as a single piece of the customer journey. Customer experience is much broader now, looking at the entire journey from start to finish.
WHAT IS DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE?
Digital customer experience is the experience you provide to your customers over modern digital channels of communications. Companies strive to provide a better experience over digital channels and mobile device channels as more consumers utilize these channels to talk with their favorite brands.
Consumers are constantly on the move, and the need to communicate over mobile and digital channels has increased. With the new change in customer expectations, companies are looking to begin their digital transformation to support a digital customer experience.
THE NEW DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
As millennials are entering the workforce and now form the main consumer group for many companies, the need to communicate and offer support on channels they use is critical for earning and keeping their business. In the last 10 years, new channels have been added into the channel mix to include digital channels.
DIGITAL ALSO MEANS MOBILE
There are many digital channels, but mobile is a big piece of the digital transformation movement. Mobile and tablet Internet usage exceeded desktop Internet usage for the first time in 2016, and the likelihood that mobile usage slows down is slim to none. Consumers also tend to use mobile devices more often than desktops for product purchases and support, with web and mobile self-service support usage outranking speaking with an agent over the phone (Forrester, 2016).
ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION
With the growth of digital channels, there also has been a growth of asynchronous communication. Asynchronous communication is the relay of information with a time lag. Email was always the traditional asynchronous communications channel, but when text messaging, social messengers, and other digital channels emerged, digital customers began interacting with these channels over a greater length of time, lagging throughout the conversation. Consumers are busier than ever and constantly on the move. By providing access to instant communications via IVR, phone, email, web chat, and more, as well as asynchronous channels that allow customers to leave conversations when busy and pick them up at a more convenient time, businesses are seeing improvements for overall customer satisfaction.
Discover other omnichannel experience tips in our latest e-book!
DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
Here are our top five best practices for providing an excellent omnichannel digital customer experience.
- Use contact center technology that allows agents and supervisors to see the entire customer journey from start to finish regardless of channel.
- Allow agents to utilize real-time customer journey analytics to personalize interactions and act in the moment if an interaction is going poorly.
- Avoid creating new silos as you add additional channels to your channel mix. Make sure to create seamless conversations with omnichannel contact center technology that allows customer service agents to see customer data from all prior interactions in the journey.
- Focus on getting your top two channels working together seamlessly. For example, allow online customers on web chat to easily escalate to a voice call with the same agent.
- Innovate with modern channels, including social messengers, messenger bots, chatbots, and mobile apps.
Digital customer experience is necessary for meeting your customers on the channels they prefer. Make sure you offer a digital customer experience that is seamless and personalized. See how Bright Pattern has helped companies like Overstock, American Girl, and Mercedes Benz with their digital transformation.
Provide a better experience today! Click here to see a demo of Bright Pattern’s omnichannel contact center software.
About the author:
Having spent over 20 years selling technology and services to companies like Goldman Sachs, Dell EMC, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and more, he is passionate about helping organizations achieve desired business outcomes with cutting-edge technology and strategy. Certified in Cloud Economics and ROI through AWS and having successful stints at Interactive Intelligence and Genesys, Peter brings a unique perspective to service-based companies that are striving to move away from legacy technology infrastructure and processes toward a true omnichannel CX model.
