How to improve the digital customer experience

How can companies improve the digital customer experience? Events in recent times have shown service providers the importance of not only embracing but also adapting and innovating digital solutions to optimize their services and stay ahead in the game. As many have started to offer digital solutions, improving the digital customer experience has become one of the main priorities for service providers.

Providing digital services that are accessible, integrated, and smooth has become essential in today's world. In this context, offering services in the digital sphere is not an option anymore but a necessity. This means that service providers must adapt and accommodate customers with digital solutions if they wish to keep them.

An efficient omnichannel customer journey management system becomes more important than ever when you aim to give a seamless customer experience across both digital and physical platforms.

An article by McKinsey, Elevating customer experience excellence in the next normal, states that the emerging trends are of increased traffic in online channels, and an increased focus on health and safety. What does this mean for service providers?

How to improve customer experience with digital solutions

Below are a few essential things to consider when optimizing digital solutions to improve customer experience. 

Provide digital services that are accessible, integrated, and seamless

Providing services that are accessible and integrated become essential in today's world. In this context, offering services in the digital sphere is not an option anymore but a necessity. This means that service providers must adapt and accommodate customers with digital solutions if they wish to keep them.

The need for omnichannel customer journey management becomes more important than ever when you aim to give a seamless customer experience across both digital and physical platforms.

Use virtual solutions to ensure health and safety requirements are met

Health and safety will likely remain as the top priority next year. But how do you ensure this when your business relies on remaining closely connected to your customers?

It all comes back to the previous point: provide options that would allow customers to get access to you even when it’s not physically feasible. Digital solutions are here to stay.

In the customer journey management area, here are a couple of examples of things you can do to ensure the health and safety for customers and staff:

• Use mobile tickets instead of physical ones – replace the physical with virtual queuing. This frees up your waiting area as customers can wait remotely and monitor their place in the queue with a mobile ticket
• Deliver your service remotely where possible – offer a virtual customer meeting for your appointment if you don’t need a face-to-face interaction for serve your customers

You can read this article to learn more about how to optimize virtual queuing solutions to aid social distancing.

Ask for customer feedback

Data collection with digital or virtual touchpoints is easier, but direct customer feedback is still the most valuable insight for your services you can get. Set up an online customer feedback questionnaire that customers automatically receive after the service is completed, and you can use it with other input to analyze for improvement.

Make the most of the data and insights to improve your services

The move to digital channels means that service providers have more customer data and insights, which is easily accessible for analysis, making decisions, and improving your services. Invest in technology with powerful analytical tools that allow you to harness data of your customer journey and day-to-day operations, for example, customer journey solutions with business intelligence tools that collect data from each touchpoint and give you key statistics and reports.

Here are 3 steps to leverage your data.

1. Identify patterns and trends

Utilizing data analytics enables businesses to find recurring patterns and trends in customer behavior, offering opportunities for enhancing the customer experience. For instance, when a service provider observes a longer than usual wait time, data analytics can help pinpoint the underlying cause. Subsequently, the service provider can initiate measures to fix the problem. Getting this data can be done with customer feedback, customer interactions, or business intelligence tools integrated into your customer experience management system.

2. Personalize the customer experience

Personalization is an important element of the customer experience in today's business landscape. It helps service providers build stronger relationships with customers, drive revenue, and gain a competitive advantage. As technology continues to advance and customer expectations evolve, investing in personalization is not just an option but a necessity for businesses looking to thrive in the long term.

Service providers can use data such as individual preferences, visit history, and customer feedback from previous visits to create personalized experiences for customers. Creating customer segments, personalizing visits and services, and even tailoring messages can all create such a huge impact in enhancing the customer experience.

3. Measure your customer experience efforts

After identifying patterns and personalizing customer experiences, you should measure how effective your customer experience initiatives are. You can look at the customer feedback, churn and retention rates, NPS scores, and performance metrics to assess the impact on your business performance.

Data analytics plays a pivotal role in the management of customer experiences. With customer data analysis, you can get valuable insights into customer experience, customize the customer journey, and measure the effectiveness of your customer experience management initiatives.

Tips to improve digital customer experience

Here are a few tips to ensure you don’t sacrifice customer experience when employing digital solutions.

Personalize your services

Digital solutions have many advantages, but it is harder to build connections online. Showing that you understand the customer's specific needs, knowing who they are from their customer history, and making them feel valued and in control will contribute a lot to increasing customer experience. Leverage the data you have to be well informed when a customer starts their journey.

Delivering personalized customer experiences helps create emotional appeal, which plays into customers’ decisions when choosing where they want to get their services. But the benefits stretch beyond that. Here’s how personalization helps enhance customer experience:

Tailored solutions: By understanding a customer's history, behavior, and preferences, companies can offer more relevant solutions, leading to increased satisfaction as customers feel that their specific needs are being met.

Enhanced customer loyalty: Personalization helps customers feel understood and valued, which in turn will build a sense of loyalty and trust because it shows that the company is invested in meeting the customer's needs.

Cross-selling and up-selling opportunities: Personalization allows businesses to identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. Service providers can recommend complementary products or services by analyzing customer data, increasing the average transaction value.

Adaptation to changing needs: Customer needs and preferences are not static. Personalization allows businesses to adapt and evolve with their customers. By continuously collecting and analyzing data, businesses can keep up with changing trends and strive to meet customer expectations.

Minimize customer effort

Customers are now used to quick services that don’t require much of their time and effort. That is why it’s important to reduce any obstacles in the customer journey. A few examples of what service providers can do to improve this are:

• Minimize waiting times
• Give regular and clear updates to customers
• Manage queues and service efficiently
• Provide several options to access your services so customers can choose the one that’s most convenient for them

Create seamless processes

There’s potential for gaps and friction when services are offered across physical and digital platforms. Missed or unsynchronized data and miscommunication are some of the common problems. Make sure you have omnichannel solutions that could accommodate customer journeys in physical, digital, or a mix of both channels, and allow preservation of information across their whole journey.

Learn more about how you can enhance your customer experience. Take a quick product tour of the Qmatic Experience Cloud platform and see how you can create seamless customer experiences and measure your operations, all in one place.