What Customer Experience Means for Brands in the Digital Age

Everyone knows personalization is the key to a stand-out customer experience. But few know how to provide it. For those companies, the time to learn was yesterday. Personalization is what customer experience means in the digital age. It’s the act of tailoring your services and interactions according to each individual customer’s needs and preferences. Prioritizing personalization can remedy customer dissatisfaction, establish a stronger brand, and most importantly, build trust. When customers trust you have their best interests in mind, they not only rely on you more, they will be inclined to spend more money. According to a 2017 study by Segment, consumers are willing to spend more money when brands deliver a highly personalized shopping experience and targeted recommendations. However, 71% of consumers say they are disappointed and frustrated with the lack of personalization they actually receive.

Dive deeper: How to provide the ideal customer experience in the digital era.

Brands that know how to provide a tailored customer experience have much to gain — 49% of surveyed shoppers said they purchased a product they did not intend to buy as a result of a personalized recommendation from the company. The potential to use a personalized customer experience to raise revenue is virtually uncapped.

What customer experience means

Before we dive into how to provide a highly personalized customer experience, let’s define this term. Customer experience is often used interchangeably with customer engagement, but it’s important to clarify the distinction between the two.

Customer service is dead in most public companies. Wall St. rules now. One reason we try to support small biz and entrepreneurs who live to make customers & clients happy. That’s what we do, too! #WeLoveOurClients #CustomerExperience https://t.co/CDCjCR1oUn

— Trusty & Company (@trustyandco) August 13, 2018

Customer experience is the sum of all of the interactions a customer has with your company. The customer experience is not objective — it’s determined by the way customers perceive your company. On the other hand, customer engagement has more to do with how a customer interacts with your brand. Both are critical to succeeding in a competitive digital landscape. Though brands could previously dictate relationships, the digital age has changed the definition of what customer experience means. Here are three tips on refining your CX strategy.

1. Keep the customer journey top of mind

By understanding the end-to-end customer journey, you can offer enhanced value throughout the process. Consider the steps they take, which include things like buying a product, opening an account, resolving disputes, and experiencing your product first hand. This is often a complex route, concerning multiple platforms like social media, researching online, customer service, and completing a purchase. Because these interaction points will be managed by different departments, it’s difficult to cultivate a consistent experience across all touchpoints. However, it’s critical to make your customer journey unified and seamless, not disjointed For more information on customer journeys, check out this great video:

2. Extract the most value from your data

Collecting data isn’t the difficult part, it’s what you do with it that matters. Between all of your departments, you’re probably drowning under a deluge of customer data. But without advanced analytics, you won’t be able to draw any meaningful insights from it. By investing in analytics, you can consolidate relevant customer data — such as demographics, location, interests, and purchasing history — and use it to provide personalized recommendations. Predictive and prescriptive analytics offer an even greater view of the customer than retrospective analysis. These tools automatically deliver your customer success personnel the information they need to proactively address customer complaints and prevent churn before it occurs. They can also deploy targeted promotions and recommendations right to your customers’ screen to encourage them to make more purchases.

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3. Understand customer intentions

Data and analytics allow companies to establish a sophisticated view of their target audience, but understanding behavioral economics can power better user-centered decisions. By understanding the common behaviors that influence customer behavior and decisions, you’ll be better equipped to handle customer interactions and make sales. For instance, how can the number of purchasing options you present influence your customers to choose the one you want? How does the language you use to describe your products’ attributes excite your customers? While personalization is the key to understanding what customer experience means in the digital age, these timeless principles of human behavior are an important tool to have in your toolbox.

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WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) transforms the user experience in today’s overwhelming digital world. Using artificial intelligence, engagement, guidance, and automation, WalkMe’s transparent overlay assists users to complete tasks easily within any enterprise software, mobile application or website. Discover how a DAP can revolutionize your business — request a demo today.