Building Customer Experience (CX) Into Your Digital Presence
Dawn Raquel Jensen
Fractional CXO/CMO | Professor | Entrepreneurial Marketing Coach & Social Business Trainer for High-Performing Entrepreneurs & Leadership Teams
“The essential difference in service is not machines or ‘things.’ The essential difference is minds, hearts, spirits and souls.”
- Herb Kelleher, Founder Southwest Airlines
In this era of modernization and the rapid spread of awareness and resources for everyone, the internet stands as the significant pillar holding everything together. This is why it comes as no surprise that even businesses, commerce employees, and marketing firms have taken a liking to this platform and have recently started focusing on expanding the range of their sales pitches on social media sites and the worldwide web as well.
Today, 70% of organizations have a digital transformation strategy or are working on one. Let’s discuss the importance of a successful digital presence and why it is crucial for customer experience.
What Exactly Is Digital Presence?
According to stats, about five billion people are using the internet and 4 billion active social media users globally in 2022 as of right now.
Simply put, ‘Digital Presence’ means showcasing your business online to billions of people accessing the internet. Your digital presence determines how your business, brand, and product/service appear to online viewers and potential buyers.
85% of people conduct research before making an online purchase, and among the most used channels for research are websites (74%) and social media (38%). (Source: Forbes)
Thus, a widespread yet strong digital presence is essential to stand out from competitors.
Creating a Digital Presence
Anyone who knows about digital marketing understands that these are very volatile times, and the market is always changing. Popular search engines are ever-changing their algorithms to meet the additional needs of their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. But certain fundamental aspects of this market can still be generalized and used to construct a long-term digital strategy that will grow with the algorithms.
Creating the right digital presence can be reasonably simple and might involve one or more of these options:
Ways To Improve The Digital Presence
According to Gallup, to drive emotional engagement with customers, your organization needs to balance technology with highly-personalized human connection. “Your digital presence can convey all your service values and represent your brand promise. But your promise and values have to be defined, designed and delivered properly.”
There are several possible ways to increase your brand’s digital presence.
Going more in-depth, we discuss how these actions will have a significant impact on customer experience.
Now, let’s focus on how improving your digital presence will improve the quality of the experience offered to the customers. According to research by Microsoft, 66% of 18–34 year-olds say their customer service expectations have risen in the last year.
How To Improve Your Customer Experience Relationship
A more significant digital presence is directly linked to a better customer experience. 70% of online businesses fail because of bad usability.
What is Customer Experience (CX)?
Modern-day digital CX is a representation of your brand in the eyes of your online customer — built upon the accumulated and consistent interactions they have with your brand across online platforms.
Customer experience makes it easier for visitors and viewers to engage with your business on various platforms. You can follow different actions and techniques to improve the user experience and prompt consumers to purchase.
There are also a set of actions that decrease the chances of customers deciding to go with your brand instead of the competing brands in the market.
By keeping all these statistics in mind, you should establish a working digital marketing strategy that boosts customer interactions and engagement.
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Tips To Improve Customer Experience
Know Your Customers
Investing in customer persona research and knowing your audience are directly linked to each other. By knowing who you’re dealing with and their preferences, you can make personalized ads and propose better suited to each client, improving their experience and sales.
Boast Positive Reviews
According to a survey by Dimensional Research, 90% of customers are influenced by positive reviews when buying a product. Positive reviews indicate customer satisfaction, reliability, and authenticity. Sharing positive customer feedback and reviews online will also improve your online presence, resulting in improved sales.
Leverage Personalization
91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them (Source: Forbes).
Personalize your content using data analysis and digital technology to resonate with your target audience. Deliver individualized messages and offerings to prospective customers to enhance their cx. Get close and personal with your clients, making them feel like much more than just a random grain of sand in the vast expanse of a desert that is the internet.
Closed-Loop Feedback
Closed-loop feedback is the principle of following up on the customers who left a negative review. Research found that very few companies follow up with their customers. You can avoid poor experiences and ease their concerns by sending a follow-up email, offering them help, and correcting whatever issue is at hand. This results in an even stronger and longer-lasting relationship dynamic between your brand and the customer.
Knowing that any wrongs will be immediately corrected, customers will feel much more at ease. Making your strategy such that any critical customer’s complaints are directly reported, and they immediately notify the relevant responding person, you can attain their trust and build a more long-term relationship with them.
Chatbots
We know that most of the customers’ inquiries are repetitive and straightforward and don’t require personal assistance. 68% of consumers like chatbots because they provide quick answers.
Hence, using chatbots can help you provide 24/7 customer care service while also minimizing the costs, as long as you make sure that the clients can ask them to talk directly to human customer service managers when needed.
Importance of Digital CX
Anticipating future trends and constructing your strategy around them is how most brands keep their customer list growing these days. Times are changing, and so are the customer’s preferences. A Walker study found that at the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
You have to develop a dedicated, engaging, and friendly platform for your audience to improve their overall customer experience. Enhancing digital customer experience will develop a sense of trust between you and your target audience, making them more likely to choose your brand again in the future as well.
By making your outlets easier to navigate and more streamlined, customers feel little of a hassle than a slower and more cluttered website. As a result, you don’t have to worry about abandoned carts as they’re much more likely to feel inclined to buy your product. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.
Utilizing X-Data and O-Data
X and O-data represent the two aspects of customer experience. For example:
X-Data: elaborates statistics from the customer’s point of view. It is the customers’ feedback that comes to you directly via emails or Q&A sessions.
O-Data: shows your company’s operational statistics. It includes the number of clients gained or lost, total daily or annual sales, referrals, etc.
By aggregating both and incorporating them into your marketing strategy, you can create a specialized algorithm that knows individual preferences and is also aware of what offers have had a positive response and vice versa. By making the most of these statistics, you’re increasing your brand awareness and perception of customer needs.
Possible Trends For The Future
If we observe research statistics from various sources, we come to see a specific pattern. Certain “trends” seem to be gaining popularity. We can see the most general and universally applicable trends in the chart below:
Keeping your customers satisfied and providing 24/7 support, personalized offers, we can achieve better value-for-money by keeping an open mind and changing your strategy to keep up with the times. This article provides an in-depth review of most, if not all, of the factors that we should keep in mind while doing so.
Dawn Raquel Jensen, EMBA, merges social media, digital marketing, technology training, and business strategy together as an embedded CMO/CXO to organizations, leadership teams, and first-stage businesses. She provides coaching and deep-dive advisory and marketing support services so business owners can influence and impact the communities they serve. She founded Virtual Options in 2008 to work with successful entrepreneurs and high-performing teams and since then, works and speaks internationally on marketing and entrepreneurial leadership. Dawn also resides as the Social Media and Marketing Adjunct Professor for Seminole State College.