A Simple [But Complete] Guide To Digital Customer Experience

When you buy something, get a service, or do any kind of transaction, it’s not just a one-time thing. 

It’s a part of a bigger process that companies think about a lot! 

They spend tons of money to make sure you have a great experience. For example, think about Ikea. They’ve made it so easy to shop – if you use their app, you can even open your camera and see how a piece of furniture would look in your room. 

It’s like bringing the store right to your home!

On the flip side, 88% of users will blacklist your website after one poor experience – put yourself in customers’ shoes, and you will realize that options are countless.

Given the importance of exceptional digital experience, this blog will cover three things:

1. Explaining digital customer experience
2. Why it’s becoming increasingly important
3. Suggestions on how to improve digital customer experience

If you want to know everything related to digital experience and improve customer satisfaction scores, keep on reading!

What is Digital Customer Experience?

First things first: What is online customer experience?

Simply put, digital experience refers to how users engage with your online business via digital medium and what their perception of this interaction is afterward.

For example, some of the channels that the customers can interact with are:

• Social Media
• Email
• Online Customer Support
• Virtual Chatbots

While customer experience refers to users’ interaction with your brand via both online and offline channels, online customer experience is the sum of customer-brand interactions only via digital medium.

To check how people use a website, you can use online tools like Google Analytics, Clarity, and Hotjar. These tools help you see what users do on your website.

For example, when I look at the data from Clarity for HiredSupport, I see that there are thousands of JavaScript errors on our website.

This means the website might load slowly, crash sometimes, or not load at all for some users.

These are the first steps to check how users interact with your website. They help you understand the digital experience of your customers.

Importance of Digital Customer Experience

Great! Now you know what online customer experience is. 

But why is it so important for your online business? I have two reasons with me:

1. A Need for Modern-Day Buying Cycles

Buying things online isn’t as simple as it used to be. People don’t just see something and buy it right away. Instead, they check out different websites, social media, and even AI tools before making a decision.

For example, at HiredSupport, some of our customers found us on LinkedIn, some discovered us on Google, and a few even learned about us through ChatGPT!

What surprised us was that many people visited our website multiple times before finally deciding to buy from us. That’s why we create customer funnels in marketing – so we can guide potential buyers step by step until they’re ready to make a purchase:

Source: Wikipedia

2. Makes you Stand Out within the Competition

Starting a business is easier than ever because of technology. But since it’s easy to start, more people are doing it, which means more competition.

Low barrier to entry = high competition 

That’s why big companies spend a lot of money to build strong brands and improve customer experience. They want to stand out and keep their customers loyal.

So, even if a new brand appears with a similar product or service, most people will still talk about the well-known brand when making a purchase. Big companies make sure their brand stays in people’s minds, so they remain the top choice.

If you want your customers to return again and again to your website/mobile application, you need an exceptional digital experience customer strategy.

Given that customers have so many other options, now more than ever, your company should invest in and give importance to digital and customer experience.

There is a reason why clients love our services: we greatly focus on digital customer experience strategy.

Real Examples of Digital Customer Experience

Why does digital customer experience matter? It brings you more customers and enhances customer satisfaction. 

You got the idea, right?

Now let’s have a look at some companies that prioritize digital CX strategy:

1. HiredSupport

At HiredSupport, we believe that our customers’ time and online experience matter significantly. 

This is why our website emphasizes a great digital customer experience: to make our clients feel valued.

To understand this point, let’s have a look at these examples:

• The website has a clean, simplistic design, which means accessing any information related to our services is very straightforward.
• The contact information is prominently displayed on the home page, making it extremely simple to get in touch with our team and avail of our services.
• The customer representative team is available round-the-clock to answer any questions and help potential clients.

Giving importance to digital experience strategy is one of the reasons why HiredSupport has a rating of 4.9 on Clutch.

2. Netflix

As one of the leading streaming platforms, Netflix takes customer experience to the next level.

• The recommendations per each user’s profile based on their watch history are displayed prominently in the “Today’s Top Picks For You” section.

• The smooth multiplatform transition means you can enjoy the same experience across all devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Take this example: if you pause a movie on your laptop, you can resume it from the exact same point on your mobile later.

• Based on your geographic location and preferences, Netflix’s search bar shows personalized movies/seasons. This is another example of enhanced user experience.

3. Alibaba

Alibaba is a popular online marketplace that emphasizes digital customer experience with these steps:

• Based on the particular country selected by the customer, personalized items are displayed to make the user feel valued.

• The search history of every customer is stored, and each time the user taps on the search bar, the drop-down menu shows recommendations using that information.

• If there is an issue with your purchased item or the item has not yet been delivered, Alibaba’s customer support team is always available to resolve your complaints.

Practices To Improve Digital Experience

Imagine this scenario: an online business owner is struggling not only to get new customers, but the existing loyal customers are also shifting to other brands. 

After a comprehensive review by his team, the result is this: complaints of poor digital customer experience. 

Now, to turn the tide, the question is how can they ensure a better digital experience? 

Based on our research, we have highlighted the key methods that can help in this process:

1. Understand the Requirements of Users

First and foremost, you must understand the needs of your customers. 

Suppose that the majority of your customers avail of your web development services. Now, it doesn’t make sense to design a home page that doesn’t even mention the web services.

What do you think will be the result if you do this?

Your customers matter the most to your business, and you must provide a solution to address their pain points.

This is why, as a business owner, you must:

• Analyze the behavior of your customers
• Collect feedback from customers
• Understand their needs
• Highlight how you can resolve the query of customers

Now let’s see how HiredSupport achieves this objective.

At the end of each call with the client, we ask for feedback to understand how satisfied they were with this interaction. 

Once our team collects this feedback, we introduce certain changes to significantly improve the process of client-agent communication. We make sure that clients’ feedback is given importance.

Another example of this is reflected by the “Contact Us” page. This page prominently displays a form to collect a user’s requirements. 

With the help of this information (name, selected services, message typed), we enhance the digital customer experience by ensuring each user receives the most relevant support or service recommendations.

2. Ensure User Friendly Design

In many cases, a user-friendly interface ensuring a smooth user journey proves to be the difference between a customer who decides to buy your product and an unhappy customer who moves on to another site.

When it comes to user-friendly design, Quickbooks website stands out as a prime example

With this design as a reference, these are the points to keep in mind for creating a user-friendly design

• Pleasing color combinations
• Give importance to typography (see how the text has been arranged)
• Show the most important element where it is most visible (in this case, “Get more done in less time”)
• The website should load in less than 3 seconds, otherwise, visitors will leave
• Catchy CTA
• GRID based layout

By incorporating these methods, you can ensure a user-friendly digital experience (just like Quickbooks does!)

3. Offer Accessible Customer Service

Imagine this scenario: An online business owner provides a number of services via his website. 

He has addressed all the issues related to website design, and he even understands his customer’s needs. Still, he is not able to convert website visitors into customers.

That’s when he realizes that despite covering most cases, his business doesn’t have a customer service team to address the customer queries!

Does this example seem familiar to you?

Keep in mind that to enhance customer experience, offering support via multiple channels is paramount.

The following techniques can help you in this regard:

• Offer customer support via multiple channels
• Ensure your customer support is available 24/7
• Chat support option
• Make sure that customers are being heard and their issues are resolved

Now, we will give you an overview of some of the methods incorporated by HiredSupport to offer customer support services.

• The customer support representatives are available 24/7 to resolve customer issues and to answer their queries

• Clients also contact us via email (email address clearly mentioned on the home page) and our team responds as soon as possible.

• Customers can also take advantage of our “Live Chat Support” option to avail of the services by getting in touch with our customer support team to discuss their requirements.

This is how HiredSupport improves digital customer experience by providing exceptional customer service. 

After all, the customers matter the most for any business!

4. Offer Personalized User Experience

Have you wondered what makes Netflix such a popular streaming platform? 

One of the reasons is they provide unique recommendations and personalized user experience based on each customer’s viewing history.

There’s a common factor that combines the top-performing digital platforms: they offer personalized user experience.

Let’s understand this point with an example you can relate to.

Amazon is a world-famous E-commerce company that emphasizes understanding the requirements of its users.

The first thing you will notice is that Amazon’s home page is highly personalized. What does this mean?

By keeping track of a customer’s purchase history and browsing history, Amazon analyzes each customer’s behavior. 

Then, by using this information, the home page is tailored to match their preferences in order to keep users engaged. 

Highlighting their emphasis on personalization, Amazon’s website even allows you to select the language, region, and currency of your choice.

This way, any non-English speaking user can easily log in, and change the language accordingly.

Makes life easier for you, doesn’t it?

5. Provide a Mobile-Friendly Experience

Have you wondered why every large-scale organization emphasizes responsive and mobile-friendly design?

The reason is there are predicted to be more than 320 million smartphone users by the end of 2025 in the USA alone!

So, what does this mean for your business?

You must ensure a smooth digital experience for all customers irrespective of the medium used. 

Let’s take the example of HiredSupport and try to understand how they emphasize mobile-friendliness:

​As a mobile user, here’s how the website appears to you:

Users immediately understand the company’s identity – because that’s what matters, right?

Now, if a user wants to avail of our services, he needs to contact us and get in touch with our team.

The options to get a free trial or directly fill out a form explaining the requirements are prominently displayed as well.

By removing any unnecessary information, they have made sure that a mobile phone user, without too much tapping, can contact their customer service team and discuss his requirements.

This is how HiredSupport ensures a top-notch digital customer experience for all Windows, Android, and iOS users.

6. Be Transparent about Data Privacy

No customer will trust your online business if it fails to protect sensitive customer data, right?

This is why it is important to invest in cybersecurity to prevent such a scenario.

More importantly, make sure that the customers are fully aware of any data collected by the website will remain confidential and not be distributed to any 3rd party.

If your website collects user data (debit card information, name, email, passwords, etc, you need to create a dedicated page outlining the Privacy Policies which mentions how you will use that data, and how it will be protected.

Revealing your privacy policy goes a long way in earning the trust of customers – it’s also a legal requirement in some countries

Just to give you an example, this is how Netflix highlights its privacy policy:

7. Use of Artificial Intelligence 

We are living in an age where AI is integrated into almost every aspect of our lives.

Does this mean you can utilize AI to enhance digital customer experience? The answer is YES!

As an online business owner, here are some of the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence when it comes to improving customer experience:

• Provide rapid customer support
• Predict customer’s behavior
• Anticipate customer’s needs
• AI-powered chatbots

Intelligent chatbots are the most common examples of companies using AI to enhance digital customer experience.

Such chatbots can communicate with potential customers, and respond to their queries using the power of AI. Sound interesting, right?

To illustrate this point, this is how Casper – a platform that sells sleep-related items – has integrated an AI-powered chatbot into their website:

Conclusion

It’s no secret that customer satisfaction is one of the most important aspects of any business. right?

By offering an exceptional online customer experience, you can enhance the customer satisfaction score and gain the attention of every new visitor.

If you are seeking an outsourcing team to help your business improve customer experience at an affordable rate, HiredSupport is the best option.

Fill out this form today, and get in touch with our pre-vetted team of customer service representatives.