Over the years, it has been proven many times that customer experience is one of the prime factors in influencing brand loyalty, buying patterns and overall consumer life cycle.
In the past couple of years, especially after the pandemic, there has been a sharp rise in digital interactions across segments. Right from shopping to grievance redressal, more and more consumers are looking at digital avenues. Because of accelerated growth, it has become imperative for every brand or service provider to ensure a superior digital experience for their client base.
Here are the basics everyone needs to know about Digital Customer Experience
What is Digital Customer experience?
Every time a customer interacts with an organization or a brand, it can be termed as a customer experience(CX). Therefore, any interaction with a customer over a digital platform can be defined as a digital customer experience(DCX). In other words, Digital customer experience is the sum of all online interactions, which include website, social media, chat bots etc.
What is Digital customer experience management?
Initially, it was believed that a digital customer experience is limited to online shopping. However, there are many other areas like customer service, grievance redressal etc which are an equally important part of creating a better digital customer experience. In fact in industries like Banking, education and entertainment, digital experience management is integral for generating better revenues. From the customer point of view, a brand represent certain values, which should remain consistent. Therefore, user interface, ease of accessibility, response time on digital platforms should be similar to the level of service which is offered on offline channels.
Key factors to ensure better digital customer experience
With every customer interaction, digital or otherwise, data is procured. It is important for brands to use this data to understand their consumer characteristics, preferences and sentiment.
Taking customer feedback into account to address gaps, creating a more personalized and targeted interface are one of the most important aspects of creating a better digital customer experience. These insights can also be used for mapping customer journey, which brings into focus, digital experience platforms.
Understanding digital experience platforms
In technical terms, as defined by Gartner, Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an integrated software framework used for engaging a large audience base across an extensive range of digital touchpoints.
In simpler words, digital experience platform collects data every time a customer interacts with a brand digitally. This includes use of website, apps, social media across devices like desktop, mobile, augmented reality devices, in store kiosks or a tab. Apart from data collection, digital experience platforms (DXPs) are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), which helps in analysing data which has been collected during consumer interactions.
DXPs offer companies integrated set of tools and programs which can be listen and interact with customer across channels to build a better, more meaningful digital experience.
Evolution from CMS to WEP to DXP
Couple of decades ago, organizations started building Content Management Systems (CMS) to collate customer data, images etc to collect all information around their digital presence. This comprised of mainly data collection forms and other static content.
Over the years, as digital platforms gained popularity, WEP (web experience management) systems started gaining popularity. WEPs not only collected data but also aimed at creating customer profiles and creating personalized interactions.
WEPs were mostly designed and worked in sync with marketing and sales. But in the past few years, with the extreme gain in popularity of digital interactions, and customers gaining more control, the need of the hour was a platform which integrated all aspects of a brand across devices and channels of interaction.
Benefits of a Digital Experience platform
Digital Experience platforms offer a host of benefits for both organization and end user like a seamless integrated control centre, to flexibility of content and ability to adapt to future innovations.
DXPs address customer queries in multiple ways like sharing actionable insights, creating a customer centric experience, use of technology to identify the best solution and optimal utilization of content available.
Due to its importance in every business, DXPs are not only gaining massive popularity but also evolving constantly. To keep up with the updates, there are many blogs like Digital Experience, CMSWire etc which regularly share updates on what’s latest development in the digital world.