The majority of companies believe that they comprehend digital experience. They're wrong. And it is costing them millions.
I have seen the companies burn money on a cool web site and pricey software to discover that their clients are grabbing up by their rivals. The issue is not the technology, it is the strategy that goes behind it.
This is what no one says about digital experience optimization it is not about the most coolest features. It is all about establishing a system that gives your customers a feeling that someone understands them and wants to dance with them and spend some more money with you.
The Truth Behind Bad Digital Experience
To be blunt about it. In case you have a digital experience stack that sucks, you are also bleeding money in three ways:
To begin with, you are losing the customers even before they even purchase. Research indicates that 88 percent of online customers will never use a site after a poor experience. It is not so much lost sales; it is lost lifetime value.
Second, you are paying too much to get customers. When customer experience in your digital economy breaks, it takes more money in terms of marketing spend to keep you even with the number of customers you lose due to poor interactions.
Third, you are not doing upsells and cross-sells. The best customer experience personalization system is capable of generating 10-30% more revenue per customer. Majority of businesses avail this money on the table.
What Digital Experience Does Mean
Digital experience optimization is not so much about making things pretty. It is about putting in place smooth channels that steer the customers towards lucrative behaviors.
Consider this; all the online touchpoints you have are either getting your customer more into the zone of spending more, or drifting towards your competitor. The neutral ground is not available.
Companies which succeed know this. Their DX stack is premised on a single tenet: get rid of friction, add value and make it personal.
These Four Pillars of Profitable Digital Experience
Pillar 1: Know Your Customer Before they know themselves
Effective digital experience optimization is based on data. The correct data, not just data will do, but the data will have to be done in the right manner.
The important thing is that you must have an idea:
- What your customers desire prior to its being requested by them
- Where they are bogged down in what you do today
- Why do they want to spend more money
Customer engagement driven by AI enables smart businesses to carry out actions on anticipating the needs of customers by drawing on their behavior patterns. This is no stalking, creepy stuff, this is convenience at just the right moment a customer requires that help.
Pillar 2: Personalization Which Really Personalizes
This is where the majority of the firms make the mistakes: they believe that personalization is simply inserting the name of the individual into an email. talk of personalization isn t personalization that s mail merge.
The true customer experience personalization is:
- Displaying other products of interest not only on the basis of visits
- Changing the style of communication to suit the customer
- Knowing the next need and anticipating it and making it convenient to acquire
The companies earning the highest amount of money operate machine learning to comprehend more about the customer and give individually personal experiences that seem to be individualized to that one single individual.
Pillar 3: Smooth integration of all the touchpoints
Your customers are not interested about your internal systems. They are concerned about having a similar experience when they are looking on your site or your mobile app or when they are chatting with customer service.
This demands a digital transformation strategy to interlink all the tools and platforms at your disposal. Each system must communicate with any other system. Your marketing automation should be driven by your customer data within your CRM which should all be referencing your support tickets that then feed back to your analytics.
When properly implemented, this forms a single perspective of every customer that would allow you to serve them better every single time you interact with them.
Pillar 4 Security and Compliance as Competitive Advantages
The security and compliance issue is viewed by most businesses as an evil necessity. Intelligent business make them as differentiators.
Customers are more prone to use your data when they know that they can trust you:
- Exchange extra information (improves personalization)
- Buy bigger things
- Recommendation to others about your business
The DX stack you put in place must be like armor to a customer but like invisibility to them. This develops the trust that keeps all other digital experiences enhancements to work.
The Stack of Technology Which Works
To create a proper digital experience stack one should use tools that can be combined correctly:
Foundation Layer: Customer relationship management software and enterprise resource planning software that retains and stores complete customer information.
Intelligence Layer: Analytics tools and process automation platform that converts data to insights that are actionable.
Engagement Layer: Customer engagement tools that are AI driven and can provide a custom experience such as conversational agents and engines to personalize.
Security Layer: Data governance and privacy product that secures customer data, at the same time allowing it to be personalized.
The trick is to select tools which can fit together and have a capacity to grow with your business. Avoid being lured by features that you do not need, rather be attracted by functionality that would generate revenue.
How to Implement This Without Breaking Your Business
Start small. Select a single customer journey that is directly focused on revenue, such as your process of checking out or onboarding. Use the principles of digital experience optimization on that particular journey and see the outcome.
When you feel the progress, extend to the second most important journey. This strategy allows you to demonstrate ROI prior to engaging in bigger investments.
Work on the three fields as follows:
1. Ease the friction of high-value relations
2. Add a personalization to your most profitable customer segments
3. Network your key systems
Measures of What Counts
Page views and time on site are not the metrics that are important with regard to the digital experience optimization. They are business measures:
- Customer Lifetime value
- Customer revenue
- Cost of customer acquisition
- Retention rates
- Upsell and cross sell rates
Measure these before and after you can make changes to your DX stack. The information will lead your actions and is worth re-investment.
The Bottom Line
The need to optimize digital experience is not a desirable thing, but it is a survival need. Mastering this will make the businesses take over their markets. The unresponsive ones will be irrelevant.
Expectations amongst your customers are not in reverse. Technology will just facilitate them to easier find some alternatives which are better. This isn\t the question of whether you should optimize your digital experience, but when you join the race before your competitors do.
The modern-day winners are companies that have decided to view their digital transformation strategy as investments in relationships with customers but not the technology itself. They know that the most effective digital experience will not only make customers feel appreciated but also will lead to profitable behavior.
Design your DX stack based on this principle and you not only make it through the digital revolution, you also come out ahead.
