Digital Customer Experience vs. Customer Experience

Over 3,424,900,000 people use the internet every day. 90% of those people have used it to purchase something or contact a business within the last year alone. In the United States, Germany, France, U.K., and Canada, over 80% of the population has an internet connection. If you ignore the technologies commonly used on the internet, you are dooming your business to irrelevance.

We talk a lot about customer experience (CX), primarily digital customer experience (DCX) on this blog. They are subjects we believe to be extremely important due to their significance to businesses in the digital world. If you can’t offer your customer a high-quality digital experience, your customers’ experience when interacting with you will suffer greatly. There is no way to survive in today’s competitive environment without offering exceptional experiences at every step of the customer journey.

Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience (CX) is one aspect of a digital transformation. All customer interactions, every touchpoint, and phase of interaction with the customer is a part of the overall customer experience. CX is an ongoing process, growing and evolving every time the customer interacts with your organization. An excellent customer experience is the cumulative impact of many touchpoints. Good CX provides consistent experiences that meet customer expectations, every step of the way. If you offer a better CX, you will improve your customer retention rate. By increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent, you can increase profits from 25 % to 95 %. Customer Experience focuses on the customer journey, the environments they interact in, and the actual touchpoints a customer interacts with.

An excellent customer experience can turn people into promoters and extremely loyal enthusiasts who urge their network to buy your product or use your service. A bad customer experience will turn that customer into a detractor, potentially leading to them “trashing” your business’ reputation and advising their networks to avoid you like the plague. It takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience.  Evidently, CX is something you should be focusing on continually improving, seeing as it can have a critical impact on your business.

While customer experience has many different aspects, there is seemingly a singularly most important aspect of the whole equation. Regardless of the touch point and interaction, digital customer experience is an emerging concern. The digital ecosystem will often be home to initial interactions, and at the rate in which technologies are being adopted, more and more touchpoints will happen digitally.

Digital Experience (DX) for Customers

Digital customer experience (DCX) refers to the experience customers have with an organization on digital platforms. DCX encompasses every communication, all products, services and processes your customers experience via a digital channel. DCX is just one part of CX. The net cast by customer experience is much wider.

With the way information is consumed today, it is clear that DCX is the most important part of CX. After all, 70% of buyers return to Google at least 2-3 times during their research. Meaning that most, if not all, of the information a person has about you, will be found online. Roughly two-thirds of the buyer’s journey is completed digitally. Be sure that you offer an engaging, personalized DCX.

According to McKinsey, companies with greater digital capabilities were able to convert sales at a rate 2.5 times greater than companies at lower levels did.

It is important to ensure your clients have a pleasant experience when looking online for information. DCX involves every digital touchpoint, including all web and mobile interactions. DCX also encompasses beacons, IoT devices, face scanning, wearables and any other potential digital touchpoints.

One of the most appealing aspects of crafting a great digital experience for your customers is the copious amounts of data it produces. Due to the amount of data that gets created in the digital ecosystem, including cookies, online forms, existing profiles, and other data sources, DCX can be quantified much easier than experiences in non-digital ecosystems. The quantity and quality of the resulting data allow marketers to personalize the DCX, enabling them to offer content and messaging that uniquely speaks to that customer.

Conclusion

Customer’s expectations have changed. They want a better experience when doing business with your company. To meet and exceed those expectations, you need to prepare yourself to fully utilize the data provided by digital environments. You will also need to offer personalized content and provide an all-around great and seamless experience.

Remember, while these strategies are related, they still have enough differences between them that they can be considered separate concepts. Customer experience involves including more experiences, such as in-branch, over the phone, any mass media advertising, receipts, or other face-to-face interactions. Digital customer experience focuses on mediums that are strictly digital.

If you want to learn more about digital experiences check out:

• Improving Digital Customer Experience [Infographic]
• 3 Key Benefits for Digital Experience Platforms
• Liferay Digital Experience Platform: A Business Case

For more information on customer experience, visit the following:

• 3 Keys to a Better Digital Customer Experience
• Improving Customer Experience: Mobile, Online Self-Service, Content Targeting
• Omni-channel is the Key to Optimizing Customer Experiences

To better understand CS through a real world example, feel free to read our case study on the IBI Group.

In collaboration with IBI, Veriday implemented a digital strategy, combining location-aware and responsive design technologies. This strategy would transform the online customer experience.

Since the launch of their new digital experience strategy:

• Site visits have increased by more than 55% year over year
• Average visit duration has increased by 35% year over year
• Increased Pageviews by 90% year over year

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