What is digital customer experience management?

Customer experience is one of the most important facets of a company's performance. Great experiences keep customers coming back for more, but bad experiences can cause customer churn, negatively impact your organization’s reputation and more. To prioritize positive customer experiences, you have to use effective management techniques and the right technology tools. Digital customer experience management deals with modern, online portions of the customer experience and offers an effective means of optimizing these to match your best efforts at other critical points of the customer journey.

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People that interact with your brand over the internet, as opposed to in a brick and mortar store, are essentially "experiencing" it digitally and those experiences must be managed to make sure customers come away with the positive outcomes that they’d expect from any other in-person interaction.

A closer look at digital customer experience management

If digital customer experience refers to the experience your customers have with your brand while online, then digital customer experience management can be understood as streamlining and improving said experience through the use of purpose-built tools and techniques. There are numerous tools to choose from, such as:

• Outreach and follow-up automation - Automating outreach and routine follow ups via email, SMS, etc. can prove to be a highly effective tactic for sales teams everywhere. Automation introduced in the customer communication process frees up time for agents to handle more complex tasks than pressing "send" on hundreds of outbound emails every day.
• Chatbots - Chatbots are a powerful option for companies to try out if they are accustomed to handling vast numbers of similar questions, etc. Instead of patching calls and chats in to real live agents, customers can instead have common issues resolved through an automated, interactive bot conversation, driven by AI. This yields better results for both customers and agents, reducing wait times and pent-up frustration on both sides of the aisle.
• Knowledge bases, forums and FAQs - Companies looking to keep up with customers' concerns without overwhelming their support staff can make effective use of knowledge bases and frequently asked question (FAQ) sections to do so. When implemented effectively and made known to customers at the right times, these solutions can improve their experiences considerably, allowing them to solve problems in less time than it would take to call in or interact via chat.

Why you should prioritize digital customer experience management

Getting digital experience management right is more important than most business leaders know. As much as 84% of all companies that put effort into improving the customer experience soon see a marked increase in revenue, but the benefits of cultivating a better digital experience extend well beyond your business's bottom line. Here are a few key reasons for you to take digital experience management more seriously:

• Cultivating consistency - As companies grow and subdivide their internal operations, the ease with which service cohesion can be maintained from the customer's perspective dwindles significantly. Customers can come into contact with any number of representatives across all manner of divisions within your organization. When they inevitably find themselves interacting with yet another agent, they may consider reintroducing themselves to be more than a nuisance. No nonsense types will simply take their business elsewhere. Digital customer experience management solutions face issues such as this head on by shattering so-called data silos within your organization and erecting data highways between them for a seamless omnichannel customer experience.
• Customizing delivery - Just as customers appreciate consistency from the businesses they interact with, they also prefer for products and services to be personalized and adapted to suit their needs whenever possible. This is never as simple as it seems for businesses to accomplish without the right tools, but it is nearly impossible to pull off at scale without a solid digital customer experience management platform and strategy. AI assessments of your customers' data in real-time can help power this kind of customization, making adaptive alterations to each customer's journey possible.

Optimizing your digital customer experience management

Knowing who your customers are and endeavoring to truly understand what they need from your company can help tremendously in optimizing the customer experience online through strategic management. Once you are fully aware of what it is that your customers expect from your company, you can mold their experience at every available touchpoint to match (or exceed) their expectations.

Even as your services expand and additional channels are introduced, spawning new touchpoints to boot, a strong digital customer experience management foundation can help tie all of these loose ends together. Omnichannel customer interactions depend on digital customer experience management solutions to be successful.