Does Your Digital Customer Experience Need a Makeover?

Do your customers feel valued? Do they know that you understand their needs?

Most companies know that the answers to those questions are closely linked to the eventual success or failure of their business. But few companies have a digital customer experience strategy that ensures the answers to those questions will be a loud and resounding, "Yes!"

In our current environment, most business interactions are taking place online. This is true even for companies that have traditionally traded their goods or services in person.

This makes the digital customer experience more important than ever. Every digital interaction with your customers must be smooth and convenient, regardless of the channel they are using.

Providing an excellent experience can be a game-changer, especially for companies operating in a very competitive landscape. Customers give their business and loyalty to the company that provides the most streamlined and user-friendly experience.

To stay ahead in today's remote world, a digital customer experience makeover may be necessary to keep your business afloat. 

How To Know If You Need an Experience Makeover

It's often a challenge just to determine whether or not your digital customer experience needs a makeover. Singling out flaws in your current system is not easy, and indicators can be hard to find.

Here are a few common pain points that clearly indicate your business has issues to address. 

Negative Feedback

Negative customer feedback takes an immediate toll on your customer acquisition and can place a burden on your business at large.

There are dozens of third-party platforms where customers can leave feedback regarding your services. Monitoring these platforms and social media can provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your customer service strategy.

Your Customers Are on Hold

Today's consumer expects a lightning-fast response whether they're chatting on your website, direct messaging on social media, or calling on the phone.

If you leave your customers on hold, don't be surprised if they consider engaging one of your competitors. You need to show them that their time is valuable to you. 

Trouble Managing Multiple Channels

As more and more business communication moves online, businesses find themselves managing multiple channels to handle customer interactions and inquiries.

Combing through these channels can be overwhelming, especially for customer service agents who are not good at multitasking. If you find that some queries are going unanswered on any platform, it may be time for a makeover.

Insufficient Customer Satisfaction Metrics

The best way to determine if your customers are satisfied is to establish and track relevant metrics. 

Two good examples are conversion rates and post-purchase survey completions. Such metrics can help your business map out areas that need improvement.

If you don't have access to measuring tools like these, you need to rethink your digital customer experience. 

Giving Your Digital Customer Experience a Makeover

Carrying out a customer experience makeover largely depends on the type of business you operate and the channels your customer base prefers.

The following are some critical best practices that can get you started on your transformation regardless of your industry.

Automate Existing Inquiries

You probably already have a pretty good picture of your clients' most common inquiries. With modern customer experience tools, handling those inquiries should not be restricted to personal voice or email interactions alone.

Gather up your most frequently asked questions from various channels like voice, webchat, email, and SMS. It's also a great idea to build forms and surveys to ask your clients directly what information would be most helpful for them.

With this knowledge, you can begin to separate the queries that can be automated from those that require personal service. Some can be handled using the basic automation features of your email, webchat, and SMS systems. Others may require custom development. A few will always require human interaction. 

Tools like headless CMS allow you to manage your FAQs and automated responses in a convenient dashboard and distribute those standardized responses over multiple channels. Headless CMS supports the localization of content for specific regions and even personalization of content based on an individual's attributes in your system.

Automation of common inquiries can significantly reduce costs and save time, which are critical aspects of the digital customer experience. However, automation can sometimes result in customer frustration. Map out any areas of frequent frustration and focus your direct personal interactions on those areas.

Omnichannel Support Systems

Adopting omnichannel support enhances customer experience as it gives clients more options to interact with your business.

Studies show that customers want their interactions to be seamless, regardless of the initial support channel they chose to use. In an omnichannel approach, if a customer begins a conversation, for example with a chatbot, they can quickly be handed over to a live agent if the issue is not easily resolved.

An omnichannel setting allows the agent to view the customer's conversation history with the chatbot and continue the interaction without explaining the same information again.

Seamless interactions like this can improve customer retention and also improve the volume and quality of customer data collection. It also lightens the load on service agents, allowing them to focus their efforts on the interactions where their expertise is truly needed.

Headless CMS systems like ButterCMS can be a powerful component of an omnichannel support system. Headless CMS enables consistent content delivery across different channels, including web, mobile apps, digital assistants, chatbots, and IoT devices, among others. With headless CMS, you can model content centrally and use an API to publish it across many platforms.

Leverage Mobile Penetration

Most people live on their mobile devices, and taking advantage of this channel is a must for a modern digital customer experience.

Page load speed and ease of navigation are critical for mobile. Many customers simply will not interact with your product or service if the load time is too long on mobile devices.

It is ideal to go beyond optimizing for responsiveness and page load speed and craft a truly mobile first user experience that meets the expectations of your clients.

Focus on Customer Needs

Customers will be drawn to your brand if you focus on their needs. As you create content around your product or service, put yourself in the shoes of your customer. This is the first step of elevating your digital customer experience.

Ask yourself, when customers visit your online platforms, are you solving their problems? Establish a path for addressing their pain points, and evaluate how your competitors are doing the same. Addressing your customers' needs is vital to ensuring that you're mapping out accurate customer journeys that drive business results.

Practice Iterative Improvement with Your Business Model

Initiating a digital customer experience makeover will improve your future interactions with existing and potential clients.

Bear in mind that when you boil it down, this is really a business model improvement activity. Therefore, gather all available relevant data to help establish an innovation-driven and customer-centric operating model. Ongoing access to this data will allow you to periodically review gains and losses and make the best decisions for continued improvement in the future.

Conclusion

The digital customer experience you provide is a journey that needs careful planning. However, kick-starting this process can be a daunting task and many businesses don't know where to start. Take your time to evaluate your current customer experience and design a way forward that enhances customer acquisition and retention.

Remember, this will be an iterative process. If you leverage existing tools like headless CMS to create effective omnichannel support systems, you can rise to meet the challenge of your organization's new digital reality.

ButterCMS has helped many companies harness their content to create powerful customer experiences. Read on to learn more about our Customers and some of the Industries we serve.