Digital customer experience includes all interactions on a company's online properties such as websites, mobile apps, emails, customer service chats, and others. It also includes how customers interact with these properties and their feelings about the interactions.
Your customer's perception of your brand is directly tied to their customer experience, so improving their digital interactions is crucial for success. Customers want and expect their online experiences, including their mobile customer experience, to be easy, seamless, friendly, and effective. By focusing on the customer — and on their needs, specifically — you can create digital customer experiences that deliver on the promise of "customer-first" and deliver you brand loyalty and greater sales.
Components of Digital Customer Experience
As more customers go online for any — and, in some cases, all — of their interactions with your company, most of their overall experience will be digital. While the channels will be a mix that likely includes multiple pages of your websites, marketing emails, and more, the components of your customer's digital experience are a combination of:
Customer journey
The customer journey is the sum of the steps your customer takes before making a purchase, from their first interaction all the way to clicking the "buy" button. For the most part, this journey will take place across your digital properties; optimizing for the digital customer experience is to expertly guide your customers through the process. By mapping the customer journey, you can pinpoint where and how customers interact with your brand, identify if the current stages in the journey are optimal or even in the right order, and create an outside-in look at existing marketing and sales processes.
Touchpoints
Touchpoints are the individual interactions your customer has with your brand. For the digital customer experience, this includes your websites (and specific content, such as landing pages and content marketing), mobile apps, social media accounts, and live chat. It can also include your digital ads, such as your search engine marketing links and even organic listings.
Data Sources for Improving the Digital Customer Experience
Compared to customer interactions with traditional advertising and brick-and-mortar storefronts, digital properties are far easier to quantify and qualify. With data about how your customers interact with your brand, you can understand how effective your efforts to optimize the digital customer experience are and find ways to improve.
Data about your customer's interactions also enables you to personalize their experience, providing you insights and opportunities to adjust and respond to trends, both explicit and inherent in the data.
Here are a few of the sources of data you can collect, organize, analyze, and use to improve your customer experience:
Transactions
Transactional data will help you understand your customers' purchase history. This data could consist of orders and associated information (method of payment, e.g.) and include customer information such as purchase history.
Site traffic
Understanding how your customer interacts with your website makes it easy to know your target audience's patterns. You can track and collect data about what actions customers take on their laptops, smartphones, and other connected devices, as well as how they came to your site — whether from a search engine result page or advertisement. In many cases, the customer journey can be mapped from the data about their digital path.
Social media
Your social media data provides information about how customers engage with your social channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. It includes post views, "likes," and other numbers demonstrating how effective your social campaigns are in driving awareness and traffic to your websites. Social media data can also assist you in audience segmentation, lead nurturing, personalization, and developing and improving content.
Customer service
Your customers' digital interactions with your support team is a helpful source of data regarding customers' impression of your products and services. It can also provide demographic information, including where your customers are located, and even contact information that could be useful to your sales team.
Digital Customer Experience and Big Data
Collecting, organizing, and analyzing data related to the digital customer journey can lead to powerful, actionable insights and an improved digital customer experience. Understanding the complete digital customer experience and connecting it to all aspects of your business will allow you to personalize your experiences, know what's working and what's not, help you respond more quickly, and thrive.
Optimizing the Digital Customer Experience with Snowflake
Snowflake's platform provides marketers with the essential infrastructure to get data-driven marketing results based on the totality of the digital customer experience. Whether you are acquiring or building a customer data platform to achieve a complete 360-degree view of your customers or supporting business intelligence and machine learning marketing efforts, Snowflake can help you become a more data-driven organization.