Digital Customer Experience: A Complete Guide [2024] (2024)

What is digital customer experience?

Digital customer experience or DCX is the sum total of interactions between a brand and a customer across different digital touchpoints. It involves all digital channels such as email, chat, messaging and social media a customer uses to reach out to a business. It differs from customer experience as it is the sum ofall customer interactions with a brand, both online and offline. This includes in-store visits, phone calls, mail correspondence and digital interactions.

Let’s understand digital customer experience with an example.

A CMO reads a product review on G2 and then, he visits the product's website, explores online resources and, impressed with his experience so far, schedules a demo.

During the demo, a knowledgeable representative addresses his specific needs. Post-demo, he gets a detailed email summary with a special discount. He purchases through a seamless online checkout process and receives tailored onboarding in-platform, access to a customer success manager and proactive customer support via chat. All of these digital interactionscome under the purview of DCX.

Why does understanding digital customer experience matter in 2024?

Customers have come to expect seamless, personalized and efficient digital interactions, thanks to brands like Amazon and Netflix. In fact, only 24.8% of consumers plan to shop in physical stores more frequently than they did in 2020.

When customers go digital, brands need to go digital too, and delivering superior digital CX is what will transcend companies to become the topmost brands in their niche. Below are four major reasons why understanding digital customer experience matters in 2024.

1. Competitive advantage

A superior digital CX differentiates brands in a crowded market. It drives customer loyalty, retention and positive word-of-mouth. For instance, Apple’s focus on user-friendly digital experiences contributes significantly to its strong brand loyalty and market position.

2. Data-driven insights

Digital CX provides valuable data and insights into customer behavior and preferences, enabling brands to refine strategies and improve offerings like Netflix does.

3. Unified brand experience

In 2024, customers interact with brands across multiple digital channels. An integrated digital CX ensures consistency and a unified brand experience. Retailers like Zara provide a cohesive experience across their website, app and social media, ensuring a smooth customer journey.

4. Enhanced customer support

Digital CX allows for always-on, convenient customer support through live chat, chatbots and self-service options, providing quick and effective resolutions. Companies like Sprinklr offer comprehensive support solutions that enhance customer satisfaction and reduce average handle times.

Traditional customer experience vs. digital customer experience

Traditional customer experience refers to the sum of all interactions between a brand and its customers through conventional channels such as face-to-face interactions, telephone calls, postal mail and physical stores. It often involves a more linear and time-consuming process compared to digital channels. When you talk about digital customer experience, it's like upgrading from a rotary phone to a smartphone — it’s more fun, accessible and personal!

Let’s understand the difference between bothexperiences in detail.

How to map an effective digital customer experience journey

Now that you understandthe significance of digital customer experience, let's delve into the real challenge — where to begin. Organizations are still undergoing digitization and above that mapping an effective digital customer experience does look like a daunting task. The good news is it all starts with the basics.

Though challenges like departmental siloes, data overload and disengaged employees exist, a straightforward step-by-step approach can help map an effective digital customer experience journey.

1. Start with customer research

Everything starts with customer research. Deploy audience analysis to create comprehensive customer profiles. Start by gathering data on customers' demographics and interactions across different digital channels. Leverage tactics like customer surveys and social media monitoring to get deeper insights. Understand your audience’s motivations, hesitations, and channel preferences to engage and buy and learn how to address their concerns effectively.

Understand your audience’s motivation to engage and buy, their hesitations due to potential concerns and channel preferences and what can be done to prevent them.

2. Segment your customers

Once you have enough customer data, start segmenting your customers. Create distinct customer groups based on demographics, preferences and purchase behavior to avoid the risk of offering generic solutions. Customer segmentation is also essential to help you craft personalized messages and experiences for each group. You can classify your consumers as: -

1. Window shoppers: These are consumers who land on your website or store without a specific intent to purchase. They are window shopping in offline terms and while they may not convert immediately, constant engagement with them can turn them into customers.

2. Impulsive customers: These customers are governed by their needs and make quick decisions to fulfill their requirements. They will typically respond to time-sensitive offers and discounts.

3. Discount seekers: These customers focus more on value for money, they do find your products valuable but are unwilling to pay full price. They actively seek discounts and special offers and convert immediately when presented with a significant price reduction.

4. Early adopters: These are basically fans of the tech, product, or service you offer and not your brand. They are curious about what you bring next. They value innovation and often pay a premium for the latest offerings.

5. Brand Loyalists: They are fans of your brands and stick with your brand despite the availability of similar options. They appreciate your brand's consistent quality and service and often become brand advocates over time.

Once the customers are segmented into different categories and demographics, the next step is optimizing customer touchpoints.

3. Optimize customer touchpoints

Segmenting customers lays the foundation to optimize digital touchpoints by tailoring interactions to specific needs.

Map every conceivable digital interaction a customer has with your brand. Ensure every customer touchpoint is mapped, from awareness to purchase and beyond. Make a list of all the digital touchpoints where customers interact with your brand such as website, mobile app, social media channels, live chat and customer support.

Delve into users' pain points, emotions and intents across each journey stage. Analyze each touchpoint to find out areas of customer engagements that couldencounter friction or dissatisfaction.

4. Customer journey mapping

Once you have identified different touchpoints, draft a visual map of your consumer connecting those touchpoints. A customer experience map will help you answer targeted questions at each stage of a customer's journey.

• Initial awareness: Did the customer subscribe to the product email? Were they able to easily understand what you do and how you can help them?

• Ease of use: Was the website intuitive and easy to use? Did the website load within three seconds? How was the mobile experience?

• Purchase/delivery: Were the payment options clear and convenient or did they feel overwhelming? Was the delivery process smooth and timely?

• Account management: Did the customer receive proactive and contextual support or were they bombarded with irrelevant promotional spam?

By systematic customer journey mapping, you can ensure that every interaction is designed to meet customer needs and exceed expectations, ultimately leading to positive digital customer experiences.

5. Optimize the CX

Establish what action you want your customer to take at each stage of the customer journey map. Use the following steps to optimize your customer’s digital journey: -

• Use a tool like Google Analytics to focus on drop-off points, high bounce rate areas and low engagement pages.

• Collect and address feedback through customer surveys and feedback forms.

• Simplify website or app navigation to make it easy for customers to find what they need using A/B testing tools.

• Optimize your website or app to load faster by compressing images and minimizing the use of heavy scripts.

• Ensure your digital platforms are fully optimized for mobile devices with responsive design, optimized media and fast loading times.

• Reduce the number of steps in the checkout process and offer multiple payment options.

• Ensure customers can easily access support through live chat support, customer service chatbots and searchable knowledge bases.

6. Monitor and measure performance

Once you deploy the right measures to optimize your digital customer experience, you need to know if what you are doing is working. Keep a track of customer experience (CX) metrics ike net promoter score (NPS) and customer effort scores (CES) to evaluate the impact of your efforts. Engage with your customers regularly and monitor ongoing feedback to find areas of improvement. Use feedback to further optimize your strategies and build a culture of improvement.

Things to be considered for an effective digital CX strategy

As you get busy crafting a great digital customer experience, keep these six things in mind to build an effective digital CX strategy.

📲 Channel Flexibility: Make sure customers can switch between channels seamlessly without losing context. Implement an omnichannel approach for integrated touchpoints, maintain consistent information to prevent confusion and use customer history for context-aware support.

📞 Reachability: Ensure that customers are aware of and can reliably use their preferred communication channels. Promote clear availability of support channels on the website and app, ensuring reliability and uptime of preferred channels.

📧 Service Convenience: Implement robust self-serve support, including a comprehensive knowledge base, live chat tools and community forums, covering the entire customer journey for quick, end-to-end assistance.

💵 Purchase Convenience: Facilitate end-to-end transactions with clear, up-to-date information, ensuring smooth, secure purchases, offering subscription options, and maintaining updated product information and availability.

🔧 Simplicity and Ease of Use: Design intuitive, simple, and guided customer journeys with easy navigation, focusing on user-friendly interfaces and implementing guided journeys for assistance.

🛒 Personalization: Customize the experience for each customer based on their data and preferences by using customer data for personalized recommendations and interactions, recognizing and addressing customers individually.

By excelling in these six areas, you can significantly enhance your digital customer experience, making it more effective and satisfying for your customers.

Digital CX trends in 2024

In 2024, the digital customer experience (CX) landscape continues to evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements and changing consumer expectations. Below are five trends to look out for in 2024 and beyond.

Trend #1: Generative AI will redefine the digital CX

Generative AI in customer service is reshaping the way businesses interact with customers and deliver tailored experiences.It enablesbusinesses to provide personalized interactions across multiple touchpoints and create dynamic content tailored to customer preferences.

Trend #2: Data security and trust will be paramount

Digital customer experiences are always haunted by security breaches and due to this very reason, organizations need to embrace secure customer service channels. Take stringent measures to protect sensitive customer information by implementing encryption technologies for data transfer and storage.

Trend #3: Hyper-personalization will be at a pinnacle

Hyper-personalization isreshaping the industry by enabling you to customize experiences based on individual preferences and behaviors.

71% of B2C and 86% of B2B customers expect companies to know them better during brand conversations. Imagine your business software platform recommending specific tools and features based on your client's industry, previous usage patterns and current business needs.

Trend #4: Predictive analytics will be the gamechanger

Predictive analytics will play a vital role in delivering better customer experience, as organizations can utilize it to anticipate customer behavior and proactively engage customers to address their rising needs.

Digital customer experience examples & use cases

You know what digital customer experience is, the latest trends and how to implement it. What else is left? Inspiration, perhaps!To create the perfect digital customer service plan for your company, here are three of the most incredible companies doing it right.

1. Netflix: Data-driven viewing experience

Netflix excels in digital customer experience through extensive personalization, seamless multi-device support and intuitive design. They use algorithms to recommend content based on user preferences, making the platform highly personalized. Their key features include custom content recommendations, a user-friendly interface and resume viewing after device switch. Netflix also allows users to download episodes for offline viewing.

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Their multi-channel customer support, including live chat and exit surveys, ensures that user feedback is constantly gathered and acted upon, maintaining high satisfaction levels.

2. Duolingo: Tailored learning paths

Duolingo stands out with its gamified approach to language learning, personalized lessons and user-friendly app. Gamification elements such as points, levels and badges make learning engaging and fun. The app adapts its content based on user progress, offering new topics or revisions as needed.

Push notifications remind users to complete lessons, encouraging consistent engagement. This personalized, engaging experience keeps users motivated and enhances their learning journey.

3. Marico: Innovation on the back of data

With a market capitalization of $7.8 billion, Marico is one of India’s leading, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies. Marico’s products are found in 25 countries across Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Their challenge:Maricoidentified Digital as one of the pillars of its 4D framework — along with Diversification, Diversity and Distribution.

With approximately 100 brands globally, they wanted to standardize KPIs and success metrics for digital campaigns as well as to objectively evaluate the quality of their digital content.They also wanted to monitor social channels, news, media, blogs, e-commerce reviews and other relevant digital touchpoints to get better insights to drive more business.

The solution: Juhi Singh, head of the company’s global digital center of excellence and international e-commerce worked with Sprinklr deploying its Unified-CXM platform. The objective was to develop a holistic digital measurement framework called DQ (Digital Quotient*), which not only assesses performance across multiple channels — e-commerce, social, paid, influencer, organic and direct-to-consumer — but also helps brand teams make data-driven decisions. Marico’s DQ aims to optimize performance analysis and competitive benchmarking across 1,250 data points.

The result: Within three years, DQ became an integral part of the CEO’s and CMO’s KPIs. Marico's leadership looks at DQ scores as an indicator of their organization’s digital maturity.

Overall, as per Marico Sprinklr helped them achieve the following objectives: -

• Customer centricity:Sprinklr helped Marico redesign the overall product and marketing strategy from a customer-centric perspective.

• Team transparency:Sprinklr helped promote transparency across teams with dashboards that assess and share a team’s performance across the company.

• Excellence:Sprinklr helps Marico spot product or content issues and drive continuous improvement in delivering consumer delight.

Want to optimize your digital customer experience with Sprinklr?

Delivering incredible digital customer experiences is integral to building a brand. Though the challenges of siloed data, data overload and disengaged customers are an issue but deploying Sprinklr, built on the world’s first Unified-CXM platform seamlessly integrates customer data, personalizes interactions and drives meaningful engagement at every touchpoint.It in turn helps you draft memorable digital customer experiences and take a step towards building a powerful brand.