Today’s world is digitally driven as customers are on the continuous lookout for the easiest ways to connect with their favorite brands. However, these rapidly exceeding customer expectations challenge businesses to uphold their positions in the dynamic market. As innovation and digital technology continue to advance, many businesses are adopting a customer-focused business strategy. They are transforming their presence with seamless digital customer experiences. To achieve this, they are implementing one of the most opted solutions for enhancing their customer engagement and experience, which is Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs).
A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an integrated framework that combines an array of Enterprise software, ranging from contextualized digital experiences, Content management, analytics, and personalization, to optimization and automation of operations. The solution is gaining popularity with the exponential rise in digitalization. According to a Gartner report, over 80% of B2B and B2C organizations will shift to digital-first business models by 2025, creating a need for DXP solutions. In such a scenario, it’s not a matter of if but when your business is ready to adopt a digital experience platform to improve its customer experience.
Table of Contents
- Understanding Customer Experience
- But is Customer Experience Really Important?
- How to measure customer experience?
- Define Customer Experience Management (CXM)
- Implementing DXPs to improve customer experience
- Drive revenue growth with DXP’s key features
- Your Roadmap to Implementing DXPs
- Take your Customer Experience to the next level with DXPs
Understanding Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) refers to brand-customer interactions and the overall impression left on a customer’s mind regarding a company’s products, services, and processes. It is evaluated by following the entire customer journey, including the pre-sale, purchase, and post-sale stages. It considers all the touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a business.
Understand customer experience with a simplified example. Let’s say a customer leaves with a positive experience during the purchase and post-use of a product. This experience will then lead them to come back to the same brand, to increase customer loyalty and effortless word-of-mouth marketing. Contrarily, if a customer exits due to a bad experience, it will result in lost customer trust and damaged brand reputation.
But is Customer Experience Really Important?
Customer experience is the journey of a customer from pre-sales to post-purchase of a product. Every interaction with your customers leaves them with a perception of your brand. These feelings and thoughts then decide the growth and success of your business. When done right, customer experience can bring you the following business benefits:
Customer Retention
Customer experience is capable of impacting the retention rate of your business. To begin with, customer retention is the percentage of customers choosing your products and services over a given timeframe. By analyzing customer experiences, businesses can identify ways to improve the customer journey. This step brings personalized customer experiences, ensuring customer loyalty and driving a higher retention rate. It also reduces customer churn and associated costs.
Positive word-of-mouth Marketing
Superior customer experiences encourage your customers to become your brand advocates. The authenticity of these experiences makes them believable, attracting new customers and building a strong reputation. For instance, a restaurant consistently delivering delicious food is more likely to receive positive reviews and recommendations from satisfied customers.
Increased Revenue
According to a report by Bain & Company, businesses with optimized customer experience (CX) flows experience about a 4-8% increase in their revenue growth. Exceptional customer experience increases the likelihood of your customers recommending your services and products to others, resulting in enhanced brand reputation. It also leads to repeat purchases, eventually an increase in revenue.
Competitive Advantage
Meeting customer expectations to deliver a better customer experience helps businesses differentiate themselves from competitors, thus, gaining a competitive advantage and increasing market share.
For example, a clothing store offering personalized styling services or a seamless checkout experience unlike its competitors has more chances of outshining in the cutthroat market.
Brand Loyalty
A consistent customer experience gives your customers a sense of trust. This helps your business build brand loyalty and reduce the risk of customers switching to competitors. For example, a tech company that provides 24/7 customer support and resolves issues quickly will retain more customers and gain continuous brand loyalty.
How to measure customer experience?
From surveys to feedback forms, today businesses can adopt tens of ways to measure customer experiences. Here are guaranteed ways to gauge your existing customer experience:
Customer satisfaction survey results
With the help of customer satisfaction surveys, you can get a detailed report on how your customers feel about your brand. The right questions on your surveys can get your users to share their experiences with your products, services, and processes, underlining the challenges and your real strengths. This analysis then can be put into action to improve the identified areas. For instance, if most of your customers share their dissatisfaction with the checkout process, then it’s time to make it efficient.
Customer feedback/suggestions on the product or feature requests
Interact with your customers to understand their product or feature requests. This process will give you an idea of your customer’s needs and preferences. By utilizing these insights, you can deliver personalized services to meet your customers’ unique expectations. This will eventually help in enhancing your customer experience. For instance, if a high percentage of customers are showing interest in a certain product feature, then considering their requests will make them feel significant, ultimately leaving them satisfied with your services.
Customer churn
Customer churn (or customer attrition) refers to the number of customers who stopped doing business with a brand over an observed period. Identifying the reasons behind this customer churn will help you measure your customer experience. For instance, if customers are leaving because of poor customer service, your customer service representatives need training to deliver a better experience.
Observe customer support ticket trends
Analyzing customer support ticket trends help you identify common issues and pain points customers usually experience. Take proactive steps to address these issues before they become widespread and negatively impact customer experience. For example, if customers are frequently contacting support about a particular issue, prioritize the problem before other operations.
Define Customer Experience Management (CXM)
CXM responsibly handles the entire customer journey – the initial customer interaction, purchase experience, and post-purchase support. It gives you a clear understanding of customer needs and preferences. By improving your customer experience management, you can improve your personalized customer experience delivery, build customer loyalty, and create brand advocates.
In short, CXM is a multifaceted approach that helps you design, build and improve your complete customer experience. The three key components of CXM include:
1. Mobile Experience
Mobile experience refers to the journey of a user when interacting with a business’s products and services using mobile devices. Consider the retail industry – the majority of its customers rely on mobile devices for their purchases, which makes delivering a seamless mobile experience essential for the success of a retail business. For every such consumer-facing business, users expect a seamless experience through dedicated mobile apps, mobile-optimized websites, or a responsive design.
2. Usability
Usability evaluates the ease of use with which a customer interacts with a business or its products/services. A well-designed usability experience ensures a high customer engagement rate. With usability testing, businesses can identify areas where customers may encounter difficulties, helping them to work on inefficient processes. For instance, a company may use heat mapping software to identify the most frequently visited areas of its website and make these areas more prominent. Prioritizing usability can reduce customer frustration, increase satisfaction, and ultimately drive revenue growth.
3. User Onboarding
User onboarding refers to the process of introducing new users to the potential of products and services. A good onboarding experience enables users to feel more comfortable when using a service or product. To deliver this experience, businesses can start by producing detailed manuals, creating video tutorials, providing demos, or offering customer support during the onboarding process. By investing in a robust user onboarding experience, businesses can also increase customer retention rates.
Implementing DXPs to improve customer experience
DXPs act as a bridge between a business and its customers to improve customer experience by breaking silos across the organization-wide customer-related functions and operations. It introduces your business to advanced ways to engage customers and meet their expectations.
1. Omnichannel Engagement
DXPs give your customers the ability to start a conversation with a brand on social media and continue the same interaction seamlessly on an email without having to repeat themselves. It creates a connected ecosystem for the customers across multiple channels, including email, social media platforms, messaging apps, and all the online and offline media. It creates a consistent experience across all customer touchpoints to achieve high customer satisfaction and retention.
2. Personalization
With DXPs, you can collect customer data and use these insights to create personalized experiences. This initial raw data gives you a glimpse of your customer’s preferences and behaviors. Tailoring your services and products to these insights will help you meet the specific needs of each customer. Use this data to build customized product recommendations, targeted marketing messages, and personalized content.
3. Streamline processes with Automation
DXPs help you to automate routine tasks, such as responding to customer inquiries and sending follow-up messages. This not only improves request response times and reduces human errors, but also allows your employees to focus on more complex and high-value activities. Additionally, automation and scalable systems help in streamlining your operations and improving customer experience. By implementing scalable systems, your business can grow effortlessly without sacrificing efficiency or customer experience.
Drive revenue growth with DXP’s key features
Exceptional customer experience has become the need of the hour for every customer-focused business. The best way to achieve this superior CX is by using DXPs – an advanced solution that gives combines all the customer experience platforms under one roof. Here are some key features that can help you drive revenue growth with DXP:
User-friendly Design
DXPs enable you to make changes in digital platforms without any need for technical knowledge. It has a scalable architecture that is designed to save your time on complex coding, and which allows your digital portals to handle more customers and sessions with zero downtime. The tool also gives you the ability to effortlessly expand your platform with new features and technologies whenever needed.
Personalization
Based on past interactions, behavioral tracking, and historical customer data, DXPs can offer its customers personalized experiences. It also analyzes the time spent on each page to match the interests and preferences of your customers, thus catering to their unique needs.
Multi-channel Experience
DXPs deliver connected digital experiences to their customers by delivering consistent service and support across all its touchpoints. From online channels to offline interactions, customers can expect a seamless experience throughout.
Content Management
DXP’s robust content management system (CMS) allows easy content creation, management, and delivery. It contains a repository of content and enables DXP operations with the right context.
Data Security and Privacy
DXPs offer advanced security and privacy features to secure your customer data and meet industry and regional regulatory compliance standards, such as GDPR.
Customer Data Management
The data management tool offers the consolidated data of customers which can be used to run successful marketing and ad campaigns. It helps in customer segmentation, ad attribution, and more. It also helps in improving overall productivity and efficiency.
Analytics and Insights
Analytics under DXP enables businesses to extract real-time and historical customer data. This data can then be utilized to make informed decisions for customer experience optimization.
Your Roadmap to Implementing DXPs
DXP implementation can be overwhelming until you have the right roadmap. With the step-by-step guide given, you can now streamline your processes to meet your customers’ expectations.
Step 1: Define clear goals and objectives
Prior to implementing a DXP, businesses must clearly define their goals and objectives. This involves identifying what you want to achieve with your DXP. In short, document your goals, such as improving customer engagement, increasing revenue, or streamlining operations, which will help you in determining the success of your DXP implementation. Your SMART goals which comprise specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound attributes, must be mapped to your overall business strategy to set the right foundation for your DXP implementation.
Step 2: Assess the current state
To assess your current state, analyze your existing technology infrastructure and digital capabilities. You can start by identifying your existing systems, processes, and tools. Having a DXP mapped to a business strategy enables the company to achieve its defined goals efficiently. Moreover, assessing the quality and completeness of your customer data will give a 360-degree view of advancing personalization and targeting.
Step 3: Identify Requirements
Once you’ve documented your goals and the current state of existing systems, focus on identifying your specific needs and requirements to adopt the DXP. This step varies from one business to another. It could be content management for one and personalization for another. Other such functionalities of DXP include multi-channel support, omnichannel presence, improved customer support, providing self-service portals to customers, or enhancing technical requirements such as scalability and security.
Step 4: Select DXP Vendor
With requirements in hand, businesses can evaluate different DXP vendors and select the one that best meets their needs. To evaluate a DXP vendor, you would require considering a few factors such as product capabilities, scalability, ease of integration, and support. It’s also essential to keep an eye on the cost involved, vendor reputation, and customer reviews.
Step 5: Develop CX Strategy
A comprehensive customer experience outlines how the DXP will be implemented and integrated with existing technology. This involves defining your target audience, mapping out the customer journey, and identifying key touchpoints. Your content strategy must also align with your customer journey, support your business goals, and include developing new processes and workflows, as well as training staff.
Step 6: Implement DXP
Now for the deployment of DXP, professionals need to configure it to your business needs and check if its integration will be aligned with your existing technology stack. Conduct a thorough test run to ensure the platform meets all your predefined requirements and is ready to deliver a seamless customer experience. This step also covers setting up the technology and migrating content.
Step 7: Test and Optimize
With continuous testing and optimization, you can make the most out of your DXP investment. Begin by monitoring your key performance indicators, which include conversion rates, engagement rates, and customer satisfaction, to make informed decisions regarding further customer experience optimization. You can also use customer feedback to identify areas for improvement and refine your CX strategy over time.
Take your Customer Experience to the next level with DXPs
Customer experience has become a differentiating factor for businesses to stand apart from their competitors. With the implementation of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), businesses get the easiest way to enhance their customer experience by providing personalized, multi-channel experiences across all touchpoints. With the right approach to DXP implementation, businesses can streamline the process and achieve continuous revenue growth.
Don’t let your competitors steal your customers with subpar experiences. Incorporate DXPs into your business strategy today and see the difference it can make.
