Steps and Best Practices to Increase Digital Customer Experience

13. Segment your audience

The first step to improving customer digital experience is to segment your customers into logical groups. Do this frequently with your email marketing and digital advertising, but how is it different for CX?

Well, segmenting for digital marketing is typically done using data points, but for CX you segment using personas, or a profile of an imaginary, typically customer.

And if you work for a large company with a very wide variety of customers, then you may want to choose a business unit to start with and then identify its customers first.

Where to start

There are whole books written about personas, but to get started you really just need to identify a few typical customers.And to make your personas more like real customers, there are a number of questions that you need to be able to answer about them.

Questions to build your persona 

Demographics - Who, broadly speaking is this person? Male or female? Age?

Location - Are they at work or at home? What device are they using?

Information preferences - How do they like to find out about things? How did they find out about you?

Problems - Why are they interested in your product? What problems are they trying solve?

Buying phase - Are they ready to buy? Or is there some other goal? 

Constraints - Is there some constraint they have, like price?

Expectations - And once they are a customer, what level of service will they expect?

And do note that a 'persona' is very different from a 'user'. That is, when you think of a 'user', you think of someone who is determined to use your product in the most efficient way.  A persona, however, has goals, pain points, media preferences and other human characters which may not be efficient or even rational.Coming up with many personas is not an easy exercise, granted, so it is probably best to limit your scope at first to just a few of your most active, typical customers.

12. Look at touch points

The visible part of the customer journey. Once you have a few personas, then start to think about their goals on each phase of the customer journey. (If you haven't yet, have a look at my previous post where I cover the customer journey in detail.)And, on that customer journey, we need to match each step with the visible parts of our product and marketing strategy. These are commonly called 'touch points'.

Touch points are particularly important for digital because on your website or app, your customer does not have a user manual to guide them through their journey. Each touch point must make sense on its own.

Touch points, illustrated

It's difficult to generalize across industries when matching touch points with the customer journey.A car buyer may only use digital in the very early phases of the journey, whereas the experience of booking travel is almost entirely digital.But here is a diagram which can give you some idea of which touch points correspond with each phase of the customer journey.

And, as you can see here, identifying touch points is made more complex by the fragmented media landscape we, and our customers, experience every day.

An example : One company that has clearly examined its touch points with customer personas in mind is Singapore fashion retailer Zalora. I have covered Zalora's multi-channel strategy before, but here is an example of how it uses a variety of touch points to help customers through their buying journey.

11. Evaluate customer impressions

Finally, you need to consider each touch point of the customer journey with the priorities of each persona in mind.That is, you need to think about how your customer perceives each step and then, like Zalora, see what you can do to improve it.The three aspects of customer impressions

To help you do this, here are three aspects of how your customers will evaluate each touch point:

Functionality - Does it do what I expect it to do?

Performance - Does it do it in a reasonable amount of time?

Appeal - Do I feel satisfied after using it?

And for each touchpoint and each persona you can evaluate it using these criteria with data, surveys, or even intuition (to get started).

Now, I know that we are building up a huge list of things that need to be looked at. That is, if you have three personas and six touchpoints, and three aspects there are now a whopping 54 items to analyze.But fear not. When doing this sort of analysis there will be obvious painful points which emerge and then it's just a matter of prioritising them with the most commonly-used touchpoints at the top.And by resolving the items at the top of the list, you will start to make an impact on the experience of your most frequent customers.

An example One company who has clearly conducted impression analysis with its customer personas and touch points in min.The front page of its mobile site is a great example of how improving CX can differentiate your offering in a highly-competitive market. 

10. Flex Your Analytics and Operational Data, so a factual basis can be established for understanding where visitors go inside a website or app as well as what they do. The report highlights the example of Lands’ End, which analyzed data about cross-channel behavior. It found many customer service calls related to finding the right size for an article of clothing. Call center volume was reduced 20 percent when contextual help about product sizing was added to the website.

9. Conduct Expert Reviews of Web, Mobile and Tablet Touch points. There’s user data and then there are “heuristic reviews,” where experts — who can either be users meeting the characteristics of targeted users or usability experts — try to accomplish specific customer goals. The customer’s goal isn’t “give me a brand experience that is consistent across channels,” of course, but is more focused on the order of “buy a set of bath towels.”

The report points to accepted categories of evaluation criteria for users’ responses — value, navigation, presentation and trust — and includes the most common questions in each category. Under “value,” for instance, a common evaluative question is “does the landing page(s) provide evidence that the specified user goals can be completed?”

8. Reach Out to Real Customers, expands on No. 9's intent to get feedback from the people who are encountering the digital experience, except here the data is derived from surveys, customer feedback forms, emails, support calls, chat sessions and social media posts. A large Canadian pizza chain, for instance, found that fewer steps — and therefore fewer choices — were preferred by many customers during online ordering, as long as they could easily go back and make revisions.

Within this step, Forrester includes the advice to “test designs with users to uncover specific usability problems,” employing a prototype if the project is still in development. This appears to repeat step No. 9, except that perhaps the research firm is suggesting this for works-in-progress instead of 9’s emphasis on existing sites and apps. But in practice, having real users or experts pretending to be real users, is essential whether you are developing a new site/app or trying to figure out how effective an existing one is.Forrester also recommends the creation of persona — detailed fictional characters who represent customer types and who can then be used to lay out a customer journey of goals, steps and needs across the experience. Among other things, the customer journey will show the digital touch points where this character will need to interact and what needs to be accomplished at each one.

7. Adopt Proven User-Centered Design Process that involves customer research, idea-generation and iterative prototyping.

6. Take Advantage of the Inherent Characteristics of Digital Touch points, providing the sane advice to use the features — and the size of the screen — of your targeted device. These can include interfaces that are optimized for a touch tablet screen or real-time data in a mobile app that changes content or offers based on location.

5. Get Outside Help When and Where You Need It, including not only tech help but also specialists for, say, researching customers in their native environments.

4. Plan for the Post-Launch Reality, an often overlooked need to plan for how those great features and customer feedback are going to be monitored and maintained over time.

3. Bolster Your Company’s Brand is a common focus of many companies looking to enhance the digital experience. But this distills the general wisdom down to such essences as understanding your company’s positioning or supporting brand attributes in what is seen and done.

2. Measure Digital Touch point Performance Against Business Metrics offers the sound advice to figure out business objectives, ways to get there, how to measure customer response from all digital and non-digital channels and return on investment.

1.Unify the Overall Customer Experience. This is a hot topic, as companies and their agencies try to present a unified experience across channels, which often means a data consistency about the customer’s interactions and a consistency of feelings about the brand.