What Is Digital Customer Experience (DCX)?

Digital customer experience (DCX) is the entire interaction a customer has with a brand across digital channels, including websites, mobile apps, social media and online support. A strong DCX is personal, convenient, easy to navigate and consistent across all touchpoints, which makes customers more likely to engage and return.

A well-optimized digital customer experience helps brands stand out from competitors, build loyalty and drive conversions. With customer data, AI-driven recommendations and omnichannel integration, businesses can create human-centered digital interactions that increase satisfaction and build long-term customer relationships.

What is digital customer experience?

The whole business world is going through a digital transformation. Every interaction a customer has with your brand on any digital channel affects their digital experience and their overall customer experience.

The advantage of managing the digital customer experience is that you have plenty of customer data to show you how to optimize it. The challenge is to use that data wisely and prioritize actions.

What is the difference between customer experience and digital customer experience?

In our article on delivering a meaningful customer experience, we looked at customer experience in general and its effect on satisfaction and retention. People don't just buy a product. They buy the whole experience: the feeling it gives them, the connection with the brand, the story behind it. Digital customer experience is the next logical stage.

The definition is similar to the traditional one: the sum of interactions between a customer and a company, and the impression the customer walks away with. CX and digital CX overlap. CX can cover anything from the traditional in-store experience and the good old customer service channels to the digital interfaces people use to keep in touch with companies. Digital CX focuses only on the latter.

In a brick-and-mortar store, you can easily adapt the atmosphere to the customers' needs. Creating a digital customer experience is trickier. The warmth, your brand's personality and values, the ease, the seamless process: how do you put them all together to make the experience memorable? The rest of this article answers that.

Why is digital customer experience important?

All decisions are based on emotions. We're living in an experience economy, and several factors make digital customer experience management vital:

• Competition gets tougher. With so many competitors offering products and services similar to yours, memorable digital experiences throughout the journey are how you stand out.
• First impressions matter. How potential customers feel the first time they interact with your brand decides whether you win their interest and trust.
• Your business thrives on retention. The first experience of a newly acquired customer shapes how the relationship evolves. To improve customer loyalty, you have to meet their expectations at every future interaction and order.
• Customers spend more after positive experiences. Customers who are pleased with the experience around your offer tend to buy again and trade up to premium alternatives.
• Positive reviews attract more customers. Happy customers attract more customers like them, so reviews and word of mouth remain among the strongest assets of a good DCX.

When customers are satisfied, you get a better brand reputation and attract more customers like your best ones. Happy customers mean happier employees, too.

What are the benefits of a good digital customer experience?

Higher customer retention rates

To convert a first-time buyer into a repeat customer, their first experience must go beyond expectations. Keep the same level of DCX at every order, and retention goes up while churn goes down.

Improved customer loyalty

Customers who receive the treatment they expect at every digital interaction stay loyal despite aggressive discount campaigns from your competitors. Stay consistent, and they'll stay loyal.

Better brand reputation

Customers who are happy with their experiences are more likely to recommend you to friends and acquaintances. A positive DCX helps you attract new customers through your existing happy ones.

Higher customer lifetime value

Positive experiences at every interaction and order help you keep high-potential and high-value customers close in the long term. High recency, frequency and monetary values lead to a higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

Competitive advantage

What you know about your customers, and how you use it to create a better DCX, gives you something unique to your brand that sets you apart from the competition.

What are the common myths about digital customer experience?

Myth 1: Customers care about digital

As our friends at Liferay point out, customers don't think of digital at all. They don't switch between online and offline experiences; it's all part of a whole. They want to interact with companies in the most convenient way possible, and they want natural human interaction beyond all your tools and artificial intelligence. Since everyday life is now largely digital, the lines between the two types of experience keep blurring.

Myth 2: DCX is about sales and marketing

Think of digital customer experience in terms of sales and marketing, and you will fail. Digital experience should focus on consumers first. Make them enjoy the experience, and they will consider buying from you.

Within the first weeks of any marketing training, we learn a fundamental truth: people do business with people, brands and companies they trust. So digital experience is about creating trust and connecting with potential customers in a genuine, pleasant and frictionless way. Improving the digital experience is how you increase customer retention and sales.

In oversaturated markets, it's hard to compete on products and services, because so many companies offer the same thing. What you can always compete on is the experience. Offer people what they want and never keep them guessing. The most mind-blowing visuals are no good if consumers get stuck at checkout or can't reach you through the contact form.

How do you build a digital customer experience strategy?

1. Know your people

   Use customer research and an Ideal Customer Profile to understand what customers want and how they want to buy.
2. Address each stage of the customer journey

   Match the experience to the intent behind each stage, and keep it simple.
3. Use customer data to personalize

   Recognize customers, remember their purchases and recommend what fits.
4. Apply the 4 Is

   Design for integration, innovation, interaction and intuition.
5. Make it convenient

   Remove every obstacle between customers and what they came to do.

1. Know your people

The first step in any business endeavor is getting to know your consumers. Find out what makes them tick, what they want from you, how they use your products and services and, most importantly, how they want to buy them. Do they prefer shopping in physical stores, or do they use their phones to look up offers, compare prices and research brands before they go anywhere?

• Use customer research to uncover the real motivations behind online behavior. You don't want to offer a fully automated experience to an older audience looking for personal interaction and clever storytelling. Know how your users interact with technology so you can meet their needs and expectations.
• Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Your ideal customer profile describes the customers with the highest chances of becoming repeat and loyal customers. It has to reflect reality, so stay away from guesses and gut feelings. Stores that want to define and validate their ICP use behavioral segmentation and qualitative customer research.

Qualitative research fills in the blanks of the ideal customer profile. Jobs To Be Done interviews help you build it, and the qualitative research in our CRO audit shows what makes visitors buy and which barriers stop them.

2. Address each stage of the customer journey

This step goes hand in hand with the customer profile. Everyone has their own story, and every customer has a specific journey, with different expectations at each stage. A customer journey map makes those stages visible.

• Different intentions behind each stage. Are they in the awareness stage? Make relevant information available and lead them carefully to the consideration stage. Are they frequent buyers who come back again and again? Add a little something extra, like a personal email thanking them for their purchase, to surprise them and turn them into lifetime customers or brand advocates.
• Customize the experience to the journey. Once you understand the digital customer journey and the intent behind each behavior, the experience you design becomes more personal. Know at which points digital channels play the biggest role. TTEC suggests focusing on six areas: channel flexibility, reachability, service convenience, purchase convenience, simplicity and personalization.
• Simplicity is key. It's the secret behind every successful design. Innovation is usually simple and obvious. User experience designers know it, and you should too: good design is invisible, and so is good DCX.

Many digital natives are omnichannel consumers, so make sure your research shows exactly where you need to be present when they search for your products and services. Make it easy for them to find you and get to know you.

3. Use customer data to fuel your digital transformation

Customers welcome personalization. In Accenture Interactive's 2016 Personalization Pulse Check, a survey of more than 1,500 consumers in the US and UK, 75% of consumers said they were more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, or knows their purchase history. Taken one by one, 56% preferred retailers that recognize them by name and 65% retailers that know their purchase history.

It's a quid pro quo: customers are generally willing to share their data in exchange for an experience worth their time. Amazon is the classic example. Its recommendations suggest products customers are likely to want, based on a solid knowledge of their buying patterns.

Personalization gets better when you know who your customers are, not just what they clicked. Nexus by Omniconvert groups customers into RFM segments (Soulmates, Loyal, New, Promising, About-to-Dump and Breakups), tracks CLV by cohort and channel, and pushes the segments directly to Meta Ads, Google Ads and Klaviyo, so each group gets an experience that fits it. Read more in our RFM segmentation guide.

4. Apply the 4 Is of DCX

The marketing mix has its 4 Ps. According to UserReport, digital customer experience has its 4 Is: integration, innovation, interaction and intuition. Keep them in mind to design digital processes users love.

Innovation doesn't have to be fancy or complicated. Sometimes it solves one small problem in a visionary way. Take Uber. The idea seems simple and obvious, but it appeals to users because it removes the frustration of waiting without knowing. It connects riders and drivers, sets the route and shows exactly when the car will arrive. Ten minutes are much easier to bear when you know that is exactly how long you'll wait.

Interaction is about the steps users take: scrolling, clicking, filling in a contact form. Don't be intrusive, and remove useless obstacles. If a reader gets bored halfway through a long blog article and wants to go back to the home page, scrolling all the way up is annoying, and many will leave. The fewer unnecessary steps, the better.

Intuition is where the research pays off. Turn what you learned about your customers into a simple, intuitive design that anticipates their online behavior. Artificial intelligence and machine learning become strong allies as you get better at delivering the right experience.

5. Make it convenient

Customers want it all, and they want it now (Queen were right all along). Convenience online is very similar to what people look for offline: the closest shop with the best deal. Online, the process has to be even quicker and more seamless. Ask questions that give you the most useful answers:

• What turns a prospect into a buyer?
• What are they looking for in their day-to-day lives?
• How far are they willing to go to fulfill their needs?
• How available are your products and services?
• To what extent can they be served digitally?
• How seamless is the transaction process?

How do you measure digital customer experience?

The core DCX question is simple: are your customers getting the experience they expect? No single number answers it, so combine feedback metrics with behavioral ones. Our comparison of NPS, CSAT and CES explains which survey to use when.

Surveys tell you why a metric moved. The behavior tells you whether the change mattered. Together, they show which customer pain points to fix first.

How can you improve digital customer experience?

A good digital customer experience lets people interact with your brand in the most convenient way possible and feel it is human, despite all the technology involved.

Ask for customer feedback

Ask for feedback at two key moments of the customer journey: before delivery and after delivery. How customers perceive the digital experience dictates the future of the relationship, and you can't improve DCX if you don't find out what goes wrong.

Feedback is how you make relevant improvements. It's hard to imagine now, but Starbucks once faced gloomy times. During the 2008 financial crisis, its revenue dropped nearly 30% in two years and it had to close more than 1,000 stores (Forbes, 2019). Its way out included improving both its CX and its DCX.

Use the feedback for the turnaround

Starbucks launched "My Starbucks Idea," a platform where customers could submit feedback and suggestions. It became a long-term strategy, with the brand committing to permanent innovation, and it changed the brand's image from a corporate coffee chain to a community of coffee lovers.

Pair innovation with feedback

In 2017, Starbucks added My Starbucks Barista to its iOS app, a virtual assistant that lets customers order and pay by voice or message, as if they were talking to a barista. It also launched a Starbucks Reorder skill for Amazon Alexa, so customers can place their usual order by voice and pick it up in store. Ordering with just your voice is an essential feature for busy people.

Keep it in line with your brand's personality and values

Innovation without a personal touch is like a strategy without consumer insights. So what is the main idea behind these innovations, and what do they bring to the consumer's table?

"The Starbucks experience is built on the personal connection between our barista and customer, so everything we do in our digital ecosystem must reflect that sensibility," said Gerri Martin-Flickinger, then chief technology officer of Starbucks. That principle helped the brand and its app become part of customers' daily routines.

Use surveys to get ahead of your competitors

Besides the regular feedback you ask for at the end of an interaction, launch a survey every once in a while for more in-depth information. The feedback survey tool in Omniconvert Explore helps you find out why 9 in 10 visitors never make a purchase on your website, so you can target the areas that need improvement. To see how satisfaction differs between customer groups, Nexus reads NPS by RFM segment.

Whenever you reinvent your DCX, keep it simple, intuitive and personal, and look for relevant examples in your field. As Depeche Mode wisely put it in "People Are People": "So we're different colors / And we're different creeds / And different people have different needs."

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