How to take digital customer experience to the next level

There’s been a foundational shift in how modern businesses interact and engage with customers. Digital technologies have leveled the playing field for many organizations. And today, digital customer experience management is the key differentiator shaping the market. 

If you haven’t paid attention to digital experience management (also called DEM), you could be leaking brand value and losing customers you never even knew you had. In fact, more than two-thirds of customers make buying decisions based on the customer experience (CX). Fail them once, and it’s likely you won’t have another opportunity to win them back.

Read on to find out how you can improve your brand’s performance by optimizing your customer experience management (CEM).

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management (sometimes also called CXM) is the continuous process of optimizing every interaction between your brand and the customer. It depends on using the latest marketing strategies and digital technologies to orchestrate personalized, engaging and frictionless experiences. 

The drive to understand consumer perceptions and deliver optimized experiences based on these insights has never been more important. Analysts expect the CEM market to grow by more than 17% GAGR over the next six years in the United States alone, reaching $7.5 billion by 2028.

Image Source: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/customer-experience-management-market

Both industry spending and the demand for CEM solutions are driving the growth of the market as more brands realize the digital potential these tools have to offer. Additionally, brands are realizing that investing in buyer retention instead of buyer acquisition provides the shortest runway to success. 

CEM challenges facing brands

However, brands that want to optimize their CEM for improved satisfaction, engagement, loyalty and increased revenues will need to overcome some challenges.

Some of the biggest hurdles to overcome are:

• Finding the customer's voice – You need access to large datasets about customer behavior and their current experience designs to know where you can improve.

• Insufficient omnichannel support – Modern buyers go through multiple different channels before making a decision and you’ll have to optimize each touchpoint for a harmonized experience.

• Failure to harness qualitative data – Customers who have specific pain points can guide you to issues better than using a standard service rating or survey approach.

• No clear roles and responsibilities – Even if you overcome the other challenges, CX leaders should clarify their roles and responsibilities and communicate effectively with stakeholders.

Three steps to take your digital CEM to the next level

To maximize the ROI from your experience design efforts, you’ll need to bring together three key facets to build out your strategy and optimize your digital customer experience management to keep up with the latest consumer trends across all digital channels. 

1. Embracing customer-centricity in each journey

Too often, marketers will have all the stats relating to click-through rates, cart abandonment and successful conversions. The problem with just having these insights is it doesn’t describe the journey each customer took before giving up or completing a transaction. 

Experiences come down to journey maps. You need a guided process that walks every customer through the journey before you can start optimizing the experience. By mapping out your customer journeys, you can identify where the friction points are that are frustrating your customers. 

When mapping your journeys, focus on these areas:

• Discovery – How do customers find out about the brand? Where did they come from? What content prompted them to visit your website or app?

• Competition – Where are your competitors getting their visitors from? How are they converting these clicks into loyal, buying customers?

• Conversion – What customers are buying from your site? How do they move through the process before making a buying decision?

• Service – When are customers satisfied? If they experience a friction point, are they able to access the necessary support or does it take too much effort?

Reviewing each of these focus areas across your digital channels with a customer-centric perspective will quickly show you where you can improve your digital transformation.

Image Source: https://pamdidner.com/support-sales-with-content/

2. Setting the digital customer experience management strategy

Experience management touches on every element of your business. You need buy-in from the entire team if you want to deliver optimal experiences across all your digital channels. You need to gather and analyze data about your journeys and identify where you aren’t reaching your goals. To ensure you can optimize the experience, track data from the following elements:

• Content reception – Find the content types that work and focus your effort on providing more of this across your digital ecosystem including social media, your mobile app, chatbots, etc.

• Customer sentiment – Today’s customers can change their minds quickly, and you need to stay on top of what is motivating their buying decisions from an ecommerce perspective.

• Regular experimentation – Changes should only happen if backed by actionable data based on experimenting with different experience designs that align with customer engagement.

The use of a digital experience platform (DXP) will help you to gather, analyze and optimize your experiences during each iteration of the journey design. 

3. Using the right technologies

To bring everything together and deploy changes quickly, you must choose the right technology to support the process. A DXP solution that provides you with intelligent analytics, customer data, experimentation features and streamlined content delivery is the best way to realize your strategy and continue to optimize customer expectations 

Your choice of DXP should enable you to work collaboratively while engaging with customers and extracting valuable insights simultaneously. To maximize your investment in CEM, choose a platform that provides you with all the tools you need to unlock your digital potential and increase customer loyalty. 

Streamline your entire CEM strategy with Optimizely

Optimizely provides you with all the tools you need to build a robust CEM strategy and implement these decisions quickly. With analytics, experimentation, content delivery and engagement tools, you can deploy optimized experiences and grow your brand along with the latest consumer trends and behaviors. 

If you want to see how Optimizely can help improve your customer experience management, get started today.