Superior Digital Customer Experience

The easier you make it for your target audience to interact with your business online, the more likely you’ll convert leads, build strong customer relationships, and boost your brand’s reputation. That’s how vital an exceptional digital customer experience is.

With an increasing portion of customer interactions happening online, organizations need to focus on ensuring a superior experience in the digital world – through email, online chat, and a high-quality online presence.

Let’s explore what a great digital customer experience (DCX) is, why it matters, and what your organization can do to improve your customers’ experiences.

What Is an Exceptional Digital Customer Experience?

Your business’s digital CX includes all the ways your prospects and buyers interact with your brand online. These interactions can happen through your:

• Website
• Social media pages
• Mobile or desktop apps
• Online chat
• SMS messaging
• Email

To provide a high-quality experience, you want to be able to deliver the advantages that people value most in their customer experience. Things like speed, convenience, knowledgeable service, and up-to-date technology. These are the factors that consumers are willing to pay more for, according to research by PwC.

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When you have all the tools in place for great DCX, your customers should be able to:

• Easily shift from one channel to another. To achieve this, empower your employees with a communications platform that lets them meet the customer where they are.
• Quickly access the information or action they’re searching for. Whether they want to make a purchase or get an answer to their question, it should be easy for them to solve their problem swiftly. There are many types of technology and features that can be helpful here, including online chat, IVR (interactive voice response), and digital assets (website, apps) with user-friendly design.
• Have a consistent experience across the board. With integrated data across your communications and customer relationship management software, your employees always have the most up-to-date information about each customer, enabling them to offer efficient, personalized service when they reach out for help.

Why Is a Great Online CX So Important?

Providing a superior digital customer experience is vital because more interactions happen online. This is a trend that’s been building up for a decade – as early as 2012, the majority of consumers were asking for high-quality multichannel experiences.

From online purchases to customer service, most people are accustomed to communicating and engaging with businesses online today. And so, the numbers keep going up.

• In 2022, online sales growth is expected to rise by 11 percent to 13 percent.
• Even more telling of how critical the digital customer experience is: a recent Pew Research Center survey found that nearly one-third of Americans are online “almost constantly.”
• The pandemic drove this digital shift even further. In a 2021 survey on evolving customer expectations since COVID-19, nearly half of respondents said the pandemic has shown them that nearly everything can be done online.

Even if your company has customers who like to engage over the phone or in person, it’s still important to offer a seamless experience across all channels. Providing a convenient, consistent multichannel experience lets your customers decide how they want to communicate and engage with your business. It’s this flexibility that’s at the heart of providing a great digital customer experience.

3 Ways to Offer a High-Quality Digital Customer Experience

Here are the steps your organization can take to improve your online CX.

1. Use Technology that Enables Multichannel Communications with Customers

With contact center software that offers options for voice, chat, and email, agents can interact on each customer’s preferred channel. They can also easily move from one channel to another to better serve a customer’s needs at the moment. For example, if someone calls in about a problem but wants to switch to email to send or receive a related message, they can do that and all their information will be intact through every touchpoint.

Your agents can also follow up with customers when you have outreach capabilities. And with reporting that lets you see detailed analytics on your agent-customer interactions, you can improve digital customer experience even more by using the channels your reports show are the most effective for customer outreach.

2. Integrate Your Communications and Customer-Related Business Apps

Another step that will help your company improve the customer experience is data integration. With cloud communications platforms that are designed to integrate with common business applications, your users will always have access to real-time customer data. They can see information such as call history, personal data, interaction notes, and more. This will help them provide quick solutions rather than making the customer repeat all their information every time they reach out for help.

3. Provide Personalized Messaging

With integrated data across your contact center software, unified communications, and customer relationship management (CRM) system, your customer service agents will have a 360-degree view of the customer. This unified view lets them anticipate needs and offer more personalized service, both at the moment during customer interactions and proactively with outreach such as email offers and promotional text messages.

Technology that Lets Your Business Offer a Superior Online CX Right Now

With more people interacting with brands online, refining your digital customer experience is more important than ever. But with more ways to communicate and engage, offering this streamlined, connected, ultra-convenient experience isn’t always easy.

That’s where the right cloud technology can help. With advanced unified communications (UCaaS) and contact center software (CCaaS), you can start improving your digital CX today. Intermedia’s cloud platforms are easy to use, feature-rich, and are a good fit for businesses of all sizes, including SMBs. Contact us today to learn more.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.