Today, seamless digital customer experiences are essential to driving purchase decisions and repeat visits. This guide will show you how to uncover customer journeys and lifecycles and utilize them to provide the very best experience to your customers.

What is Digital Customer Experience?

Digital customer experience is an evolution of customer experience, a term you’re probably already familiar with. The main difference is that customer experience management covers all channels that touch the customer—from face-to-face service to digital chat bot service. So, digital customer experience is an aspect of the overall customer experience practice. Specifically, digital customer experience management focuses on all digital channels that touch a customer—desktop, laptop, mobile, wearables, you name it!

The value organizations can gain from investing in digital customer experience is immense. With the right time and resources invested, organizations can discover exactly what journey their customers take and what content customers want to see. Then, organizations can utilize this information to tailor experiences specific to each customer’s needs, throughout every digital channel imaginable. Customers will enjoy a seamless experience whenever they interact with your brand, driving more purchase decisions, faster.

So, how do you get started in implementing digital customer experiences? Read on to find out!

Step 1: Customer Journey Mapping

You can’t develop experiences that will engage and convert prospects if you don’t know anything about how your customers interact with your digital content. First, outline all of the key business processes that happen on your website. What are the major reasons that a customer may visit your website? To purchase something? To find a product? To return an item? Are there differences between the actions that happen online and offline? These key journeys you identify are vital to the success of your digital customer experience.

Once you understand what your customers are trying to achieve on your site, put yourself in their shoes. Go to your site and navigate it as if you were a customer. Map out each step in the process. Then, use customer journey mapping tools to discover how your customers are actually interacting with your site. Which journeys are most popular? Where does your audience most often click?

Compare this data to what you initially thought the journey was. Use this comparison to discover where the holes are in your digital journey. You may be missing key pieces of content, your content may not be placed in the right spot on your site, or your customers may want different types of content. With this insight, you’ll be able to optimize the customer journey and create an ideal digital customer experience.

Step 2: Personalized, Omnichannel Customer Experiences

Customers engage with content that resonates most with them across the channels that they prefer to interact with. In order to give each customer his or her own unique digital customer experience, perform audience segmentation and divide your audience into key segments with distinct content and channel preferences.

For example, Segment A may come to your website on their mobile device and want to see a link to buy a T-shirt on the homepage, but Segment B may come to your site on their desktop and want to see a link to product reviews on the homepage. Each variation would help the customer through their preferred journey and demonstrate that your organization truly understands your customers and their needs.

Now that you know what you customers want to see, personalize your content based on this insight! Utilize content personalization platforms that enable you to provide various variations to one piece of content so that you don’t have to produce two entirely different variations of content. With personalized content, you’ll be able to provide unique digital customer experiences to your audiences across the entire customer journey. Every time a customer or prospect interacts with your brand, no matter what channel they’re using, it’s a tailored but consistent experience. Drive brand awareness, engagement and purchase decisions easier than ever and faster than ever.

Step 3: Real-Time Customer Engagement

Now that you’ve captured the initial interest of your customers and engaged them with personalized digital experiences, how do you leverage that interest to your advantage?

In today’s world, if prospects have questions about a product or service, they expect to be able to find the answer immediately. However, sometimes you may not have the answer to their question available on your website, or your prospect may not be looking in the right place. If they don’t find what they’re looking for, this could delay or even prevent them from making a purchase decision. This makes it extremely important to provide your prospects and customers features that allow them to communicate with your organization immediately when they have a question and receive answers in real time.

Incorporating real-time chat functionality into your website is an easy way to provide automated, real-time engagement. With real-time chat, you can continue to provide your customers with personalized service and recommendations based on their wants and needs. This continues the consistent digital customer experience you’re aiming to provide. This way, prospects can find specific, personal answers to the questions they may have. Integrating call-to-actions within your chat experience allows for actionable paths for your prospects to take, guiding them throughout the digital customer journey.

Even after they make a purchase decision, chat can be utilized afterwards to ensure any post-purchase questions are answered and that they still have an enjoyable experience with your organization. The customer journey doesn’t end post-purchase. Extend your digital customer experience so that you build a long-term relationship with your customers. Eventually, this will drive repeat visits and purchases to your organization.

Start Delivering Digital Customer Experiences Today

Now that you have a better idea of how to implement effective digital customer experiences, it’s time to get started. Sitefinity acts as the foundation of many organizations’ digital customer experiences, with customer journey mapping, audience segmentation, content personalization and integration with a market-leading chat platform, Live Chat.

Contact a Sitefinity Expert

Contact us today to learn how easy it is with Sitefinity to engage customers across the entire journey and drive more purchase decisions. Sitefinity has a wide range of implementation partners that can help you attain an effective ecommerce marketing strategy.