With customer expectations rising and interactions with them increasingly happening online, companies need to move fast and do everything they can to provide an outstanding digital customer experience. 

According to a survey by Bloomberg Businessweek, delivering an excellent customer experience has become a top priority to companies and for a good reason: the brands that focus on customer experience tend to reduce churn and increase revenues.

But despite the many stats and studies confirming that customer experience impacts all areas of a business, many companies are failing to deliver a good digital customer experience.

So, how do you get started? In this post, we’re discussing how to create an effective digital customer experience strategy, what areas to focus on, and how NLP fits in. 

Obtaining an Effective Digital Customer Experience Strategy

Digital customer experience focuses specifically on the online or digital interactions between a brand and its customers. 

A study by Forrester found that back in 2018, nearly 55% of consumers contacted companies via email for customer support, making it the most favored channel for that year. Fast forward only a couple of years later, there’s been the emergence of “mobile-only” customers who give preference to mobile tools and expect faster response times via various tools such as NLP-powered systems. 

What does this mean for brands? It means that customers expect brands to follow them across multiple digital channels while providing a seamless and uniform experience.

Another thing to have in mind when creating your digital customer experience strategy is that online consumers are not very patient. They expect sites to load within no more than three seconds. According to Deloitte, just a 0.1-second change in page load time can impact every step of the user journey, and a 2-second delay in page speed can increase bounce rates by more than 100%!

And last but not the least, the key to creating a successful digital CX strategy is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. A survey by Bain & Company revealed that while 80% of companies believe they’re delivering a superior customer experience, only 8% of customers believe they’re receiving a great experience.

A good digital customer experience strategy is more than simply adding digital tools to your already existing customer experience plan. It requires companies to think differently, identify how digital fits into the overall customer engagement approach, and most importantly, take into account the customer perspective. 

Main Areas of Digital Customer Experience Strategy

A company’s digital CX strategy can be assessed through 6 main areas: 

• Channel flexibility - Ability for customers to switch channels seamlessly, consistency of information across multiple channels.
• Reachability - Existence and reliability of preferred channels.
• Service convenience - Ease of service and support, ability to ask for fast live support.
• Purchase convenience - Seamless online transaction processes, ability to subscribe to new products or services.
• Simplicity - Intuitive design, ease of use, simple navigation.
• Personalization - Recognizing each customer as an individual.
  

With this in mind, we explored ways how companies can incorporate a digital customer experience strategy by improving in these six key areas. 

1. Provide a Consistent CX Across Multiple Channels

Today’s consumers are communicating with companies from various channels and they expect brands to update their information as they move between these channels. Research has found that over 70% of consumers expect to continue talking with the same agent when they change a digital channel, and nearly 90% of them get frustrated if they need to repeat their queries to different customer service agents.

Providing a consistent customer experience can enhance brand reputation and build trust, whereas lack of it can contribute to decreased customer loyalty. 

Developing an omnichannel approach enables brands to provide a consistent and seamless experience to their customers across multiple channels such as social media, mobile app, email, and web. 

2. Ensure Convenience and Ease of Use

Options like customer self-service and NLP-powered customer support are gaining popularity. This is because customers prefer to find answers to their questions or solve their issues with minimum human interaction. In fact, according to Silver Cloud, more than 65% of consumers prefer self-service over speaking to a customer service representative, and 70% of them give preference to messaging over calling for customer support. 

A good digital CX strategy focuses on convenience and simplicity. Design interfaces with a lot of whitespace and strategically placed elements that users can quickly spot and navigate to easily are also an absolute must. 

3. Focus on Mobile

People nowadays turn to their mobile for more and more of the tasks they perform on a daily basis, from shopping online to booking a dentist’s appointment. For many, mobile is also their first interaction with a brand, whether they’re browsing the latest styles at a friend-recommended fashion store or booking a table at a local restaurant. 

So, it is understandable that they’ll have just as high expectations on mobile as they do online. Meeting or even exceeding customer expectations is a crucial part of the CX. Customers are loyal to brands that address their needs across the entire customer journey and leave those that cannot meet their demands. 

4. Add a Personal Touch

Customers want to know that brands actually care about them and not just about their wallets. In fact, nearly 80% of American consumers say that they only do business with brands they feel care about them. In addition, more than 90% of customers are likely to buy from brands that provide relevant recommendations and offers. 

The good news is that technology now makes it easy for companies to collect data and monitor customer behavior enabling them to get to know their customers and, as a result, provide personalized experiences for each of them. 

Automating Your Digital Customer Service with NLP 

Another way to ensure outstanding digital customer service and experience is by incorporating artificial intelligence into your strategy. 

Research by Hubspot has found that over 80% of consumers expect an immediate reply from brands on sales and marketing-related queries. In addition, 12% of American customers rate their number one service frustration as “lack of speed.” 

In addition, natural language processing is an effective solution for efficiently understanding and categorizing support tickets without too much manual analytics. By using cutting-edge categorization technology, NLP applies detailed and accurate tags to support tickets in real-time, helping customer support agents prioritize the most important ones and focus on resolving them. 

AI-powered solutions like Y Meadows’ software are able to understand emotion and intent through sentiment analysis. Thanks to machine learning, NLP technology has the capacity to learn more about each customer, allowing brands to make a personalized connection with each customer. 

In Conclusion

The best customer experiences don’t happen by chance. Brands with a successful digital customer experience strategy make an effort to align their business objectives with customer expectations. Having a good CX strategy will give you a significant competitive edge but you must make sure that digital is top of mind.