What started around a decade ago accelerated with the outbreak of the pandemic. Millions of people found themselves locked in their rooms without the ability to conduct in-person purchases as usual. Even amid the relaxation of COVID-19 restrictions, many businesses will not be able to return to the usual mode of customer interaction for years.
A huge percentage of Gen Z and Millennials report that they prefer online interactions with their brands. Thus, your business can also respond to the changing trends in customer preferences by delivering seamless and omnichannel digital experiences. When you hire user flow designers, you need to determine whether they’re knowledgeable about this trend and can deliver state-of-the-art solutions for your business.
Here is a quick guide to the digital experience to help you find the right way.
In simple words, your customers’ digital experience (DX) is their journey through your brand’s apps and products. This journey starts with an online search with specific keywords, coming across your commercial in a social media thread, or learning about your brand from an acquaintance. It includes all activities that users perform online related to your brand. They may study your resource and read your content, subscribe to your social accounts, or leave reviews on external websites.
As this aspect of digital interaction is still relatively new, many businesses find it hard to define a customer journey standard. What experiences are positive or negative? How much should the customer engage with the brand for you to consider the UX choices successful?
Only a complex approach to evaluating the customer’s digital experience across different touchpoints can give workable insights into your business strategy.
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So, why should you bother with the quality of the digital user experience overall? Isn’t it a logical outcome of other UX/UI efforts?
Not exactly.
Businesses can affect the digital experiences of their customers to a large degree. And the main reason why they should work on it is the clients’ proven willingness to pay more for stellar DX. Research shows that customers are generally ready to pay a premium for a great experience coming with their beloved products. So, you can easily monetize this trend with a couple of tweaks and investments in the DX optimization.
Another argument for taking digital experience seriously is the users’ short attention span and insistence on high service standards. The competition in the digital market is too high to leave DX to chance. If your users can’t quickly locate the needed item or experience problems at the checkout, they’re likely to leave your page and never come back. Therefore, you should work on every aspect of your UI/UX to leave all visitors satisfied.
The bad news is that you can’t succeed in the digital market without a focus on the customer. The good news is that you can achieve greater heights by investing time and effort in the versatile DX. Here are some paths to explore.
It’s impossible to deliver worthy digital experiences to clients without innovative technology. Users are increasingly tech-savvy, so they want seamless, innovative solutions from their favorite brands. Thus, you need to keep pace with the latest tech and use cloud solutions, SaaS tools, and other digital innovations.
The mandatory minimum of tech tools for a satisfactory digital experience today includes a personalized live chat, AI-powered chatbots, self-service tools like voice assistants and a knowledge database, as well as a competent and prompt help desk.
Your website should be optimized for superior performance for better DX. This concept is pretty broad, covering many factors:
Omnichannel contact with a favorite brand is one of the most significant elements of the digital experience users want to see today. It means that your touchpoints with customers should be recorded in a single database, with the history of their orders reflected at every consecutive contact. People love seeing that you know what they ordered last time. So, they are more likely to place orders with companies that store their preferences, send non-intrusive reminders, congratulate them on significant holidays, or at least know their names and addresses for order shipping.
Another vital element of omnichannel service is a competent support desk. Your representatives should be reachable via many channels. Not everyone can deal with chatbots, and frustration resulting from AI bot service may result in poor UX. Thus, it would be best to offer both options to clients, giving them human assistance whenever they get stuck.
No matter how customers love service personalization, many don’t want to go through the hassle of contacting a human representative. Users may have a small question or an issue of interest, and they should be given the tools for self-service. Besides, modern users are much more curious and want to learn more about the product they’re using.
This can be easily achieved with voice customer service prompts and a database with lessons and FAQs to help users out. Enhance your app or website with detailed manuals and product reviews; add an expert blog; spice it all with feature upgrades and customization plans. Your customers will be thankful for the opportunity to shop around and self-educate without cumbersome support involvement.
We live in the customer era where users are in full control of business success. The times of passive consumption are long gone, and the wide dissemination of consumer-generated content and social media contributes to users’ power over brands. Instead of feeling stuck or confused about this change, you can try to shift your business operations to a customer-centric approach.
You will quickly win yourself a sound niche online by giving users an outstanding DX and ensuring that they are satisfied. Thus, a focus on high-quality DX can become your secret to business sustainability and flexibility.
