A Clockwork DCX

Ask anyone in your life their opinion about someone with whom they have had a negative experience.

“I kept texting him for two hours, but he ghosted me. Did he suddenly lock his phone in a locker and go on a roller coaster ride?”

“She kept outpacing me. I tried my best to follow her lead, but she kept moving too fast, and ultimately I got lost during the hike!”

“They kept sending me a broken file. I told them twice that the document they were sending me was not opening on my PC but they kept repeating “The file works fine for us, check with your IT admin”

These are some of the responses I got when I personally asked this question around.?Note that none of the three responders relate the channel through which they had the experience with any significance i.e. the phone, the PC, and the physical hike do not act as a dependent variable in shaping their opinion. For all of them, it was just a bad experience.

And this is a departure from a fundamental idea that marketers need to appreciate in 2020, around the pursuit of creating “Optimized Digital Experiences”, that Digital Experience (DX), Digital Customer Experience (DCX), and User/Customer Experience (UX/CX) means the same thing for end-users. For a business, it might mean different structures, rules, and frameworks, but for the end-user, it is just a part of the overall experience they have with the brand. This has become much more significant during Covid-19 as everything moves digital and the lines between CX and DCX become more blurred.

Imagine someone telling you, “This person X is a super-smart guy at the office who can analyze complex data sets and come up with creative business strategies but at home, he is a complete noob who often needs help opening jars and switching on lights”

You would immediately say, “How is that possible? That’s a complete contradiction”. But unfortunately, this is how a lot of visitors feel when they have sloppy digital experiences with brands that are well set and sophisticated in their non-digital outlook. Wells Fargo with its sophisticated financial services and products and an inferior online presence was a good example of this, till recently.

This becomes more apparent when we analyze the CX pyramid and find it to be a clone of DCX.

Is this a CX or a DCX Pyramid?

So how do businesses go about fixing this and creating an excellent digital presence? How do brands make sure that they are not a part of the 61% of businesses that lose a visitor forever after having a bad digital experience?

Well, to be able to do this, we need to understand that there are five pillars that make an ideal Digital Customer Experience (DCX) on which every company must focus, which are:

1.??????Fulfillment:?How rewarding and frictionless is the experience?

2.??????Handiness: How quickly and easily can users solve their own problems?

3.??????Customizability & Personalization: How much of the DCX is localized, customized, and personal?

4.??????Channel Integrations: How much of the DCX is continuous and consistent across all devices, channels & platforms?

5.??????Design & Navigation: How easy is it to navigate and achieve your online goal?

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Fulfillment:

Fulfillment is all about creating rewarding experiences. The idea of fulfillment in DCX simply implies that the visitor can create an emotional bond with the brand.?Think of someone who comes to your home as a guest or on a business call; regardless of what they came for or what you discuss, they are leaving fulfilled would mean that they are leaving with good thoughts after meeting you in your house. For DCX, this is only possible if your platform/home has the following three traits.

1. It is Valuable: It performs the tasks it was designed for

2. It is Practical: It is easy to use and interact with

3. It is Wanted: It provides feelings of pleasure and creates attraction

?And to incorporate these traits, it is necessary that the platform design considers customer emotions and feelings. To be able to do this, the design needs to reflect the three pillars of human cognition:

?1. Visceral design: How does your platform look, feel and sound?

2. Behavioral design:?How much functionality, pleasure, and usefulness can be extracted from your platform?

3. Reflective design: How much of the message, culture, and meaning of the product or service is incorporated into your platform?

As a rule of thumb, also remember these three rules to create a rewarding experience for the user:

1.??????The DCX should be consistent with your company’s brand promise. For e.g. if your company proclaims to have great customer service, then it should be reflected in the platform. Similarly, for companies that promise innovation, it should reflect in the overall design.

2.??????Customer empathy should be a core part of the design.

3.??????Remember whom you are designing the DCX for; not the CEO, the board, or any internal stakeholder but for the end-user.

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Handiness:

Handiness is all about making customers serve themselves. Ideal DCXs make sure that customers can interact with your platforms anytime they want and solve their own issues. To be able to offer this level of DCX, consider the following:

1.??????Offer self-serve options for as many products and services as is viable.

2.??????Integrate all self-serve options across all digital channels but with varying functionality.

3.??????Create self-serve documentation, videos, and any related assets.

4.??????Optimize these experiences for devices and channels. Do not clone the same experience across different channels and devices as it will backfire. For e.g. for data insights, show detailed insights on the desktop version but only an overview on mobile devices.

5.??????Anticipate the needs of your visitors and build those self-serve services for them.

6.??????Monitor and Track all “frustration” metrics such as content velocity on support pages, time spent on support pages, etc.

7.??????Flag issues that consistently rise and need service rep help.

8.??????Listen to the “voice of the customer” and make relevant design changes.

9.??????Continuously use surveys and metrics such as Customer Effort Score & Customer Satisfaction Score.

10.??Continuously investigate customer journey maps across segments and channels.

11.??Do continuous usability testing on all features, products, and services.

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Customizability and Personalization:

Customization & Personalization is all about propagating familiarity. The same reason people appreciate others who remember their name, their birthdays, and their favorite drink at their local coffee shop & bar, it makes sense for digital visitors to appreciate platforms that acknowledge them without invading their privacy.

For a company to do this, the personalization journey needs to start off with these two goals:

a.??????Creating a Unified Personal Profile for every customer across all your platforms

b.??????Focusing on the 4 Rs of personalization. The same way customers expect to be treated individually by their favorite offline business, online customers expect to be recognized by name when they arrive and have their preferences remembered without having to be reminded. Customers expect the business to know them better than they know themselves by paying close attention to their unique preferences and making recommendations that are relevant within the context of the situation.

Then comes the targeting and positioning part, which can be done by using Behavioural, Rule-Based and AI-based (e.g. Adobe Sensei) variables such as:

After choosing the positioning and targeting variables that are most relevant to your business and objectives, personalize each element in your digital ecosystem that you can, such as:

There are also three must-dos when it comes to personalization:

1. Continuously utilizing insights and recommendations to adjust behavior.

2. Experimenting with new Customized and Tailored experiences

3. Ensuring that content and messages reach the right customer at the right time in the right format and on the right channel.

?All this personalization and customization makes it easier for customers to interact and conduct business, which, in turn, propels organizational growth and improves their experience.

Also, make sure that all this personalization didn’t affect your SEO (which can happen) by taking into consideration the following items when tailoring web pages.

1. Cloaking the content presented to the search engine spider
2. Not Using the wrong type of redirect
3. URL and content Duplications
4. Web loading performance

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Channel Integrations:

Consistency of user experience is crucial in the process of creating a perfect DCX, and that simply can’t happen unless all your devices and platforms are integrated and talk with each other. To do this, a company should consider the following:

1.??????An inventory of functions should be built with the MoSCoW method which is basically putting functionality into categories of “must-have”, “should have” and “could have” and implementing one category across all platforms rather than choosing different features for different platforms.

2.??????Customer journey maps should be built for all devices and platforms and their correlation to one another be found and adjusted for in the design.

3.??????User data must be integrated and be consistently reflected across all platforms.

4.??????The transitioning between channels should be seamless and experiences on one platform must not be significantly better or worse than other platforms.

5.??????The DCX for every channel should be designed with the device or interactivity in mind. For e.g. Don’t ask store visitors to fill in an online review form as this online experience is disconnected from the physical store.

6.??????Don’t promote one channel as your main channel. Encourage customers to choose whatever platform feels the most comfortable to them.

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Design & Navigation:

Creating an idealized design and navigational platform is all about getting the customer journeys right. Building a great website or mobile app experience that is easy to use and navigate revolves around understanding the digital customer journey and how it affects user choices. Customer journey maps help facilitate a common business understanding of how every customer should be treated & what users expect and do so you both can achieve success.

To be able to create these, do the following:

1. Start off with the goal of creating three types of journey maps: what the visitor is doing right now, what the visitor wants to do, and what your business wants the customer to do.
2. Analyze the buyer personas and the ideal customer profiles your company has previously created and align them with your digital segments. Your digital segments must be consistent with the non-digital segments your company has created.
3. Interview customers, internal stakeholders and hold focus groups to find out what exactly visitors are looking for. This is done to understand their motivations, goals, purchasing habits, and pain points. Start off with the assumption that you have no idea what the customers exactly want.
4. Curate a detailed touchpoint inventory and a list of processes they go through before reaching the major conversion points.
5. Also, take into consideration “Moments of Truth” where visitors either leave the customer journey for good or dramatically change their behavior in your favor.
6. Do a channel analysis and figure out if there are any patterns or consistency of behavior across channels.
7. Do a time scale analysis and consider the length of the buyer journey.
8. Align all those touchpoints with the behavioral stages of the customer such as researching, evaluation, decision making, etc.
9. Map those behavioral stages with specific “Jobs To Be Done”. What exactly are the customers trying to achieve in those behavioral stages?
10. Base all your navigational and design changes on what you have learned in steps 1-9.

?Additional Factors:

Apart from the five pillars of DCX, there are two other variables that influence DCX indirectly, which are

1.??????The “Kinds” of Demand Generation – How are you generating the demand and where is the traffic coming from? Do they align with your buyer personas and Ideal customer profiles? Imagine being kidnapped and being brought to Drake’s house. Yes, you would have loved to meet Drake but being kidnapped ruins the whole experience. So “Don’t count the number of people you reach but reach the people who count”.

2.??????The backend IT and Site infrastructure and how it has been implemented for e.g. better security will lead to longer load times which will impact DCX.

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Conclusion:

Just as Covid-19 has pushed companies like Twitter, Square, Coinbase, and Shopify to declare themselves as “remote first”, it's only a matter of time before some companies are also compelled to internally declare themselves as “digital-first”. At the very minimum, the blurring of lines between CX and DCX has already begun for companies (it has already happened for users), and it's high time for all brands to look at the pillars of DCX and optimize their digital experiences.

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