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Editor’s note: ScienceSoft’s 20-year-long expertise in ecommerce implementation has shown that catering to the customers and ensuring high quality of their digital experience is what significantly raises customer loyalty and greatly boosts sales. To effectively improve the customer experience of your web store, reach out to our professional CX consultants.
The quality of digital customer experience (DCX) directly influences customers’ satisfaction as well as their willingness and readiness to spend more. Oracle’s survey shows that 77% of customers go as far as stating that lacking digital customer experience impairs their lives.
Below, ScienceSoft breaks down the term DCX, explains the difference between DCX and UX, and gives you a list of DCX best practices.
What exactly is Digital Customer Experience?
The umbrella-term ‘digital customer experience’ covers all the points of interaction between a customer and a retail company via digital media. Throughout this multifaceted interaction, a solid image of a certain brand is unconsciously built in the customers’ heads, influencing their current and future purchasing choices.
Unlike user experience, which is mainly about the impression of interacting with your ecommerce website or a mobile app, digital customer experience is a broader term that defines the impact of your brand’s digital presence on the customer base in general. In fact, ScienceSoft believes that user experience is only a small (yet significant) fraction of digital customer experience, since your webstore and app are parts of your online presence. Other than them, the channels that constitute your DCX are:
- Ads.
- Support services.
- Email advertising.
- Blog and/or community.
- Social media presence.
In its ecommerce practice, ScienceSoft has seen that a positive DCX is just as powerful as it is fragile: just a minor dissatisfaction can refocus the most loyal clients to your competitors. That’s why it’s important to continuously maintain and improve the digital experience and make sure you meet the ever-changing needs and expectations of your customers.
DCX trends and best practices
To help you improve the digital experience, ScienceSoft introduces the most influential DCX trends that we take into account in our projects and explains how you can use them to tailor your digital presence to your customers.
Chatbots
ScienceSoft’s experience proved that about half of the customer audience is more willing to do business with a company, which invites them to a live text conversation. And more than half of these people don’t mind having such conversation with a chatbot under a sole condition: a customer can request to redirect them to a human customer service manager at any chosen time.
Practice shows that many customers’ queries are very simple, repetitive, and don’t need professional assistance to be resolved, so chatbots are a great way to offer 24/7 customer support service with the minimum cost. You can choose to implement a chatbot on your website as well as via Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM, or WhatsApp messenger.
Email marketing
Email-based communication has been a part of online customer experience management from the very inception of ecommerce. It allows retail businesses to get in direct contact with their clients not only with service emails (such as order/payment confirmation, shipping notifications, etc.) but also newsletters.
Even though some consumers dismiss newsletters as unwanted clutter in their inbox, some find them useful. 19% of consumers today read all the newsletters they receive because they don’t want to miss a bargain.
In order to satisfy all customer groups – those who are pro, against, or neutral toward newsletters – ScienceSoft recommends you to follow the next tips:
- Let your customers easily control the newsletters they receive.
Create different groups for all the kinds of emails you send out (special offers, new stock items, blog entries, etc.) and make it possible to choose what content your subscribers would like to receive. Offering an easy opting out of your emails is basic courtesy too.
- Automate your newsletters to make them regular (but not too frequent).
Be sure to use email automation tools, like Mailchimp, and consider integrating them with your ecommerce solution for even more convenience. When choosing the days for a send out, target Tuesday and Thursday first, as, from our experience, they prove to be the most effective days for newsletters.
- Offer exclusive bonuses for your subscribers.
Offer those who opt in for your newsletters newsletter-only discount coupons or links to VIP sale categories in your catalog.
ScienceSoft is convinced that reaching out to consumers via social networks is indispensable to creating a successful digital brand image. Even though the more social network platforms you cover, the better, we recommend making a wise choice of 1 or 2 major ones and focusing on them first. As soon as you see your efforts pay off on a few platforms, you can expand further.
We highly recommend you to focus on Instagram and Facebook, since Instagram Shopping and Facebook Catalog are social network-based marketplaces that can be integrated with your existing ecommerce solution, letting you easily manage your product items from one admin panel.
Once you’ve got the platforms to target, you should have a solid social media communication strategy. ScienceSoft’s advice is to keep to the personable approach and position yourself as someone equal to your consumers. Here’re some more tips on this:
- Follow your customers or potential customers with a large follower base (aka ‘influencers’).
- Engage in the mentions of your brand by other users, if you feel like you can help and bring some use into the conversation.
- Try to reply to as many of the comments to your account’s postings as possible.
- Make your content illustrate the use of your product other than merely its purchase. Consumers don’t want to be told to buy something, they want to see how they’ll benefit from it in practice.
Drive Your DCX to Drive Your Sales
As new digital channels emerge and change at an enormous pace, digital customer experience should be continuously nurtured and adapted to the consumers’ needs. ScienceSoft builds vast ecommerce ecosystems to help you tailor your digital-based services to the customers’ expectations.
Make the most of customer experience management – after all, that’s what drives the success of your business.
