Digital technology has drastically changed the way companies offer their services and products. But to be more precise it is not the companies that have adopted this way. It is the customers that have brought this change because of the evolving consumer behaviour. Digital customer experience management has become the new norm for companies to interact with their customers.
Although digital transformation has impacted almost every aspect of a business, customer experience is one of those areas that is not left untouched. With leveraging the power of digital transformation, companies are trying out new ways to enhance their customer experience. They are thinking in the direction of how they can personalize the experience for each customer.
Customers don’t think of their experience in terms of digital or non-digital ways. They just want the most convenient way to interact with the company, be it digital or non-digital. But to cater to the large number of customers companies have to resort to digital means to interact with their customers.
To make this point more clear and to stick to the topic of this article, let us see ten examples that companies use for their digital customer experience management.
#1 Creating customer online account
Asking your customers to create their account on your company’s online portal is one of the most common examples of digital customer experience. This way you can store your customer details all in one place for them to not repeat the same procedure every time they login. This is most helpful for e-commerce businesses like Amazon where the customer purchases products from them regularly.
Having a customer account helps them retrieve the customer address or their order history. This way customers can change or cancel their order by themselves without interacting with a service agent. This saves both the customer’s as well as the company’s time in making changes to the purchase order.
#2 Make use of chatbots
Chatbots are one of the most widely spreading features being adopted by companies. The most beneficial aspect of this is its 24/7 availability. Most of the customers who visit your website for the first time have common questions in their mind. After examining those questions and finding a pattern in those, companies have designed their chatbots that can at least answer their initial queries. In comparison to manual conversations, customers believe that chatbots are more polite and precise in their responses.
#3 Automate follow ups
Once the customer has made an enquiry on your website and you have responded to them, you need to get an acknowledgement of customer’s satisfaction. What is their satisfaction level with your response? Did they find the right answer they were looking for? These are some of the major questions that belong to customer experience. It is your responsibility to make sure that the customer returns happily after every interaction with your company. Hence, following up with an automated email or just a short questionnaire is a good way to tap their response.
#4 Prioritize their tickets
When customers face some issues with your product and raise a ticket on your support system then you can leverage technology as a part of digital customer experience management. Based on the customer’s history which you can pull from your database along with the severity of the issue you can prioritize your customers in giving them the service. The service could be either an automated response or manual support depending upon the nature of the issue.
#5 Customize content
When you have the customer data in your storage, then making the best use of it becomes easier and most beneficial. Based on the user’s personal details like their interests or behaviours, you can choose what kind of offers you are going to show them. The best example of this is when Amazon shows recommended products on the side window of its customer’s shopping window. They don’t just randomly show any product but only those that are most relevant to the customer’s choices they have made earlier.
Collecting your website visitors’ information has become quite common for online businesses. Companies collect these information to give a more personalized experience to their customers. So, it is always better to inform your customers upfront that you are collecting their information like browsing history for tailoring a more personalized experience for them.
Most of the customers don’t mind sharing their information when you tell them upfront that you are going to use their data only for internal purposes and will not share them with third parties. Moreover there are many regulatory guidelines companies follow like GDPR or SOC 2 to keep their customer data safe.
#7 Add value through your product
The most important aspect of digital customer experience services is that the core product you are offering to your customers should add immense value to them. Make sure that you haven’t launched your product just to have one more item in your business catalog. The app or any online product you have launched should be able to solve the problem quite effectively for which you have made it. It should demonstrate quite precisely how the customers would face difficulties if they don’t use this product.
#8 Remind your customers digitally
Sending timely reminders to your customers for their due tasks is one easy way to keep them engaged digitally. For example if you are an automotive company then you can send your customers the reminders about when their servicing of their car is due. You can also send them their automated diagnostic reports of the car which will display on the dashboard of your app. Likewise in a banking app you can receive reminders for your pending EMIs, the statements of payment made so far and your balance.
#9 E-learning portals
One of the areas where digital customer experience services are best demonstrated is e-learning portals. This is managed in a well structured way where a student can learn a course module at their own pace. They can see what all modules have been covered and what others are pending. They can take the test online which runs through an online timer and sometimes also bars your background usage of any other website. All this is done in a state-of-the-art digital manner for a seamless experience of a student.
#10 Online forums
Online forums are one of the best ways to form a community of your users online. You can keep a check on their pulse with respect to any changes your organization implements. For example, Google community is the best platform for the users to discuss their issues with Google products. Through these, companies can also address any commonly faced issues by the customers presented in the form of communication threads.
Final Take
Digital transformation has totally changed the face of the business in the modern era. And along with it digital customer experience management has evolved in its own way. Companies are able to get awareness of every challenge their customers face and implement new ways to deal with them. Along with providing solutions, companies are held more accountable for their offerings. With the features like online reviews they have to be extra careful in giving services to their customers. Their online reputation means everything to them. They have realized that without customer success their own success can not be achieved.
Rohan has over 11 years of experience in client services, marketing and hospitality field. Previously, he was head of digital marketing for a hi-tech mobile application. Rohan is driven by new challenges and the possibility of making an impact on individuals and businesses.
Published June 22, 2020, Updated March 01, 2023
