It’s no secret that today’s consumer uses the internet far more than they used to. According to recent data, Americans spend approximately 24 hours per week online.
With people spending so much time online and the rapid evolution of technology, customers continue to have higher and higher expectations when it comes to their digital experience.
Luckily, there are a lot of things business owners can do to improve the digital experience for their customers.
Check out this post to discover the top data-driven strategies for improving a customer’s digital experience.
1. Select and Capture the Right Customer Data
To provide customers with a better digital experience, you first need to spend a little time learning about your customers. While there are a lot of great tools out there for learning about your customer base, Google Analytics is one of the best tools to start with.
With Google Analytics you can learn all about how customers are interacting with your website. Once you collect data from Google Analytics, you can easily convert it into reports. These reports will give you insights on things like:
- The number of conversions your site experiences
- Which site pages are slow to load
- Which site pages generate the most value
- What your top landing pages are
- What people are purchasing
- How your email campaigns are performing
- The age, gender, and location of your audience members
However, Google Analytics will only give you part of the picture. We also suggest checking out this platform to learn more about how visitors are interacting with your website.
2. Create Customer Journey Maps
To get a better idea of how to help your customers, you need to understand their behaviors. One of the top ways to understand customer behavior is to create a customer journey map.
A customer journey map allows you to put yourself in the shoes of a customer to understand how they go about discovering and purchasing your product. Generally speaking, the customer journey takes place in five stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Acquisition
- Service
- Loyalty
The goal with each customer is to get them from the awareness stage to the loyalty stage. To create a customer journey map that will help you guide your customers, you will need to:
- Identify touchpoints (aka, instances where people interact with your brand)
- Analyze your touchpoints to understand what obstacles and uncertainties customers face at this stage
- Measure experience at each touchpoint via feedback and surveys
Once you’ve done all of this, you can map out the customer journey to get a better understanding of consumer behavior. In turn, this will allow you to create a better digital experience.
3. Offer Omnichannel Customer Interactions
To create a better digital experience, you need to offer omnichannel support so customers can interact with you on their terms. The omnichannel strategy should include multiple channels for customer support, sales, and marketing.
According to a recent survey, 9 out of 10 customers expect an omnichannel experience. Most consumers use at least a few communication channels for interacting with your business. It’s important that you focus on creating seamless touchpoints so customers have similar experiences with your brand across all channels.
Here are some tips that will allow you to create a seamless omnichannel experience:
- Engage with customers across all channels
- Coordinate with all departments so everyone is on the same page
- Use similar language across all platforms
- Integrate social click buttons to all platforms and pages
With an omnichannel marketing strategy, your customers will have no problem hopping from your mobile app to your website to your social media profile.
4. Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Customers spend the majority of their time interacting with brands through their smartphones. In fact, 53 percent of web traffic comes from mobile users.
And just because mobile phones are smaller, doesn’t mean customers expect anything less when it comes to their digital experience. In fact, a recent Google report found that 40 percent of customers will leave a web page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
For this reason, you need to make sure to optimize all of your mobile channels. Here are some tips to help make your website more mobile-friendly:
- Keep your content short and sweet
- Make sure you can easily scroll through content with your thumb
- Choose a mobile-responsive website or blog theme
- Get rid of fancy design elements
- Compress your CSS and images
- Add a search function for selling products
With a mobile-friendly website, you can give your customers a chance to make faster purchases and have more pleasant interactions with your business.
5. Make Use of AI Chatbots
A lot of customers don’t want to wait on hold or even make a phone call to get help. To make it easier for your customers to receive support, we suggest deploying AI chatbots online.
Chatbots can engage with your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Plus, bots make it easier for you to collect basic customer data, such as names, email addresses, etc. You can also scale bots during busy hours to ensure you’re offering quality support around the clock.
But, keep in mind that you can’t leave everything to AI. You still need to create a way to hand over complex queries to real human beings.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Digital Experience?
Now that you’ve read this guide, it’s time for you to take the steps to improve your digital experience. With a better digital experience, you’ll have higher retention rates and more satisfied customers.
Be sure to check back in with our blog for more customer service tips.
