Digital Customer Experience and it’s Importance to Your Business

Digital customer experience to modern business is what a racket is to tennis: essential. But before we get all super metaphorical, a little introduction…

Just as television (and radio before it) did, the digitisation of commerce via digital technology has created new processes and aspects in how brands approach customer satisfaction. With digital technology opening up so many platforms for businesses to target their audiences on and interact with customers with, the scale and touchpoints involved in winning the custom, repeat business, and loyalty of consumers has exploded.

Quick side note: I will be using the terms customer, consumer, and user more or less interchangeably in this article because digital marketing has blurred the lines between them somewhat.

Because of the aforementioned influence of digital, brands have to make it a priority to provide experiences that satisfy customers no matter the digital space or digital device consumers interact with them on. But the emergence of digital is not the final nail that closes the coffin on nondigital experiences.

A person doesn’t buy an art piece because they like a square quarter of it: they purchase it because they enjoy the experience of the whole artwork. The modern, demanding consumer wholly considers every aspect of their experiences, both digital and nondigital (more on this in a bit) interactions with a company before they purchase or take whatever paramount action signifies success for a company. This is the essence of what digital customer experience is, but for the sake of conciseness, let’s define it.

What is digital customer experience?

Digital customer experience can be defined as a total of all the digital interactions a customer has with a company, made possible by digital technology. It is the sum of digital interchanges between a user and a company that take place on digital interfaces like tablets, mobile phones, and desktops via the internet, but also platforms like digital billboards.

This differs from digital experience, which is a singular digital interaction between a user and a company. To refer back to the art piece analogy, think of a digital experience as a quarter square of the artwork whereas digital customer experience is what you get when all quarter pieces come together to form the whole piece.

Why is digital customer experience important?

As alluded to in the introduction, the emergence of digital technology has really changed the game in terms of how commerce works and how marketing is done in the 21st century. Any brand worth its salt has some sort of digital marketing strategy in place. It’s no exaggeration to say it would be business suicide for a company not to.

Digital as a concept does not exist in a vacuum: it was brought into existence by certain technological breakthroughs (the internet, desktop computers, smartphones, tablets) and their advancements. With these new marketing tools come the evolution and increase of consumer expectation.

When television went colour, black and white adverts didn’t cut it any more: consumers expected brands to shoot their commercials in colour. “Go on, impress me,” they said. Now times that by a hundred for the average 21st century, digitally savvy, low-attention having, branded communication-flooded user and you have a situation where providing great digital customer experience — which can almost be used interchangeably with customer experience in general, so impactful has been digital to customer interactions — simply has to be a top priority for companies.

Digital customer experience can be viewed as customer service…but on steroids. Think about a digital experience such as using a chatbot, for example. Say user Lisa has had great individual interactions (digital experiences) with your brand thus far. She digs (might be showing my age here) your brand but has other options too. Lisa is well along the way on her customer journey and just needs one more interaction to push her over the purchase line. She needs a question answered quickly so she decides to use your website’s chatbot.

Now, although Lisa is aware it’s artificial intelligence she will be interacting with, she still has the expectation that this “customer service representative” will do its job properly. Given how digital technology has reduced the average consumer’s attention span, decreased room for error, and increased exposure to alternative brands, the chatbot answering Lisa’s question straight away or taking a few seconds too long to respond can be the difference between Lisa going ahead with a purchase or Lisa deciding to look elsewhere because of what she perceives as a bad digital experience.

That’s how finicky (sorry Lisa…it applies to most of us too anyway) digital technology has made consumers. That’s why it’s a must that companies provide an overall digital customer experience that is exceptional. One bad quarter square can ruin the masterpiece and put off potential purchasers.

What makes a great digital experience?

It solves the user’s problems — Customer satisfaction over channels

As much as they are aware of the devices and platforms they have digital interactions on, the concept of digital experience is abstract to the average customer. What this means is that customers don’t consciously think of their interactions on digital devices as a “digital experience.” They simply want to interact or have access to a company, and the channels that happen to be the most convenient to use (because of modern day technological advancements) are digital devices.

Phrases and concepts like “digital customer experience” are marketing speak and back-end stuff for companies and their marketing teams to worry over. The user, to be blunt, doesn’t care about that; they just want to interact.

People don’t view or think about using a tap to access water as a “citizen experience”…but they still want a satisfactory experience accessing that water.

This final part is the point being made here (these paragraphs above will be important for contextualising a point further down this section). At its core, great digital customer experience focuses on interactions that satisfy user intent, solve a user’s problem, or helps the user to progress along their customer journey. This should be prioritised over worrying about the labels given to such a process or focusing too much on the differences between digital and nondigital from a customer’s point of view.

A company’s website may look fantastic on a surface level, but when the “Add to basket” button doesn’t work like it should or a page loads too slowly, beauty starts to look a lot like the beast to the user.

It focuses on the user — Customer before technology

A level of reverse engineering has to be done to create great customer experience. The device a digital experience takes place on should not be what companies put all of their energy into. The specific problem the customer needs solving should be the priority. Once that is analysed in depth and a solution discovered, then the technology that best allows the application of the solution should be brought into the process.

That is to say, great digital customer experiences are driven by a customer-centric outlook, not necessarily a device-driven outlook. It’s pointless adding a customer experience feature that no one will likely use or isn’t really fit for purpose just because the technology of a digital device allows it, or a digital platform accommodates it.

It prioritises the user — Customer ahead of sales

This next bit might come across as the antithesis of what companies exist to do, but a great digital customer experience is not sales driven.

I know, I know…but hear me out.

It’s almost unfathomable now to think that both Facebook and Google were not monotised platforms from the get-go. It’s not far-fetched to say that had they been, they might not be as huge as they are today.

Instead of focusing on raking prophets in right away, both companies put all of their efforts into providing the best digital experiences possible to users.

For Facebook, it was ensuring the process of building a social network and interacting with other members was unparalleled.

For Google, it was making sure it blew the competition out of the water by providing search results that meet users’ intent while ranking websites that adhered to its best practice directives higher than those that didn’t, which in turn provided access to the best sites to users. In those early years of establishment, Google constantly (and still does) used emerging AI technology to improve the overall digital experience for customers before making a single penny.

This user-first viewpoint is what led to financial success when both platforms were eventually monotised. Both Google and Facebook are still so customer-centric, the user barely notices the sales aspect of their interactions with them. Great customer experience places customers above all else because doing so leads to sales as well as customer retention, loyalty, and brand advocacy.

I can’t recall the entrepreneur who said something like the following, but the statement always stood out to me because it’s applicable to many aspects of life: “If you focus on being the best at what you do, be it a sport, a field of study, or providing solutions to customers, the money will eventually come. People know greatness when they see it (or experience it) and they will reward you for it.” It was with this outlook SMACK worked on improving one of our client’s websites. Although increasing sales was the eventual goal, we made sure we created a digital experience that still put the customer’s needs first.

It integrates digital and nondigital — Customer service over everything

As crucial as digital has become to customer experience, non-digital customer experience or traditional customer service are not to be overlooked. What great digital customer experience does is complement these traditional interactions that are still a part of the wider customer journey, especially for brick-and-mortar businesses.

Remember when I said the first couple of paragraphs in this section will help contextualise a point to come further down? Well, here is that point: Because customers themselves don’t view their digital interactions with companies as “digital experiences,” they don’t really consciously separate interactions into digital and non-digital.

That is to say, both digital and non-digital are viewed as one and the same in the overall experience a customer/user/consumer has with a company. Therefore, a holistic approach must be taken in order to provide great digital customer experience. Isolating digital customer experience strategy from traditional customer experience will do nothing but lead to unsatisfactory digital interactions. In fact, what has made some companies thrive online is their ability to recapture or replicate familiar non-digital experiences on digital platforms.

At SMACK, when we develop a digital customer solution for a client — no matter how specific or small the solution might be in the larger campaign they may have going on — our approach is to look at all aspects, both online and offline, of how customers interact with the client. It allows us to have a greater understanding of what the customer expects and the overall relationship they have with the company. This then allows us to create digital solutions that are streamlined and come across as intuitive, new yet familiar to the customer. Integrating digital and nondigital experiences leads to great digital customer experience.

Now let’s take a look at two detailed examples of great digital customer experiences.

Examples of great customer digital experience

McDonald’s

It goes without saying that COVID-19 has had a major impact on how brands approach customer experience. We are living in a time where it feels like we’ve constantly got one foot in the door and the other outside and we aren’t sure which one to lift to cross which line because not even the government knows the best way to protect people from the virus without citizens feeling completely isolated and the economy hitting rock bottom.

For businesses operating in the food services industry, it’s crucial they help consumers navigate through this confusion, since travel and staff contact with products customers will ingest is a part of their operation. Restaurants and take-away businesses must provide digital customer experiences that make it easier for customers to get information on how they can still have access to their services safely and streamline the process that is required to do so.

That’s exactly what McDonald’s has done.

Combining digital and nondigital

It starts with television, radio, and billboard adverts (and signs posted around its branches) informing customers they can still get McDonald’s foods by going to the company’s website. Aside from being simple but beautifully designed, the site has excellent navigation and presentation. Right from the top of the homepage, it offers COVID-19 information as it relates to the company (branches still open, opening hours, precautions taken to ensure products are not contaminated with the virus etc.).

A little further down there’s a link to the brand’s app where users can place orders (a digital experience similar to the big touchscreen pads they have in-branch, including the option of removing unwanted ingredients), choose how they’d like to collect (Drive Thru or in-restaurant), and the option to save their favourite meals for future orders.

McDelivery

There’s also information on McDelivery, a partnership with Just Eat and Uber Eats that allows users to order via those digital platforms. Clicking on the McDelivery link takes you to a page with simple, clear instructions on how to use this option for delivery.

If you choose to go in-person to order food in a branch that’s open, there’s a friendly staff member at the entrance who: limits the number of customers in the restaurant at the same time; ensures people are wearing masks; offers hand sanitizer and directs customers to which pad is available for them to use to place an order. Some branches make customers register their details through a McDonald’s portal so that NHS Test and Trace is possible. This can be done on the customer’s own digital device or using an iPad provided by the branch.

This digital customer experience example is brilliant because it incorporates all facets of customer experience: physical and non-physical; digital and non-digital. The brand communicates with customers through traditional means (print, radio and television) as well as on digital platforms.

Each interaction is a reflection of another (in-store pad ordering and app ordering; practicing in the physical what is preached virtually online about safety). Each experience is a link in a chain that leads to providing an all-round great customer experience, which is what digital customer experience is all about.

Cineworld

As a lover of film, I take delight in almost every aspect (almost because there’s always that one person who — bad enough they don’t have their phone on silent — answers their phone like Don Jolly at the most quiet parts of Silence or A Quiet Place or Silence of the Lambs) of visiting a movie theatre. From watching or reading reviews to booking tickets and choosing my favourite seat to watching trailers before the main feature.

Helpful, optimised website

Earlier on in this article, I mentioned how having a beautiful website design means nothing if it doesn’t satisfy user intent. Cineworld’s website isn’t the greatest in the world (SMACK would love to help them improve this and their digital customer experience like we did for this client). But in terms of providing great customer experience as part of the whole package, it’s not too wide off the mark.

I usually purchase movie vouchers on a third-party digital platform where I’m given a code to use. From that platform I can follow a link to Cineworld’s site where I can view trailers for the latest films, read previews for those coming out soon, access a film blog, and more. The branch I usually attend offers up to six different screen types and movie-watching experiences and these are explained and showcased via entertaining videos and text.

On the occasions where I don’t book tickets for a showing right away, I sometimes search Google using the title of a movie I’m considering. Because Cineworld has enabled certain digital technology features on the backend of its website and has worked on its SEO (search engine optimisation), these searches usually bring up results displayed right there on Google that include the showing times, rating, screening options, ticket prices etc. extracted from Cineworld’s site. I can also begin my booking process from this platform.

The actual booking process itself is pretty straightforward. Choosing my preferred screen-type, showing time and seat and applying my voucher code to the basket is a smooth process.

Customer service and in-branch experience

I’ve had times when I’ve had to cancel bookings for whatever reason. This can be done on a digital device or over the phone. Having used both options, I can honestly say my experiences have been very positive, with the great customer service of the phone reps edging it.

When I do eventually end up going for a showing, I can either collect my ticket at a counter the old school way or by scanning a barcode at one of the branch’s digital touchscreen displays or — for special screens like IMAX — I can get my barcode scanned at the screen’s entrance and go right in.

Again, this digital customer experience example highlights how digital and nondigital should work as an ecosystem that provides a great, rounded experience for customers in their interactions with a brand. Although it takes me much longer to reach the nearest branch, my positive online and offline interactions with Cineworld is why it’s my go-to cinema chain even though I have an Odeon just around the corner.

SMACK has helped clients across various industries provide wonderful digital customer experiences that lead to measurable results. Contact our creative digital agency today to discover how we can do the same for your brand.