What is digital experience?

As the name indicates, it’s an interaction between a user or customer and the employee or company by using digital technologies. This interaction can be between B2B and B2C by using digital technologies. It allows companies and organizations to get rid of paper processes and create services that can be run through modern technologies and the internet. If we talk about digital experience design, it should be intelligent, omni-channel, personalized, and relevant. When you ask people to define the digital experience, you’ll get different answers, but all of them will be relevant.So, in this article, we’ll discuss DX in detail and how to improve it. Let’s start.

Defining digital experience

It’s a process of digital transformation of businesses. In digital experience, the traditional customer experience is reshaped and transformed into a digital experience through mobile apps, websites, smart devices, social media content, and many more. All these resources provide digital experience to customers, employees, or anyone who interacts with the organization.

Elements of digital experience 

Digital experience has two main but interrelated elements, such as:

• Delivering good digital experience 

As the name indicates, its role is to provide a relevant and personalized experience using tools and technologies. A person enjoys a digital experience through the right digital channel at the right time.

• Ability or tools to deliver good digital experience

This element indicates that there should be all the tools and technologies that can help empower your staff and employees so that they can analyze, manage, and improve the overall digital experience. Moreover, these tools can help them make it more engaging and personalized.

Why is digital experience important? 

Nowadays, customers interact with your products and services digitally, so it’s important to create a cohesive and contextual digital experience. More importantly, its focus should be on addressing customer needs. As you know, digital touch-points are expanding and increasing day by day, so it’s not easy to manage. On the other hand, an excellent digital experience can differentiate your company, help engage new users, and increase customer loyalty.

Therefore, the best practice is to consider DX part of user experience and customer experience. When businesses and companies understand the digital experience better, they can be more proactive and create personalized experiences. Personalized experiences can enhance employee experiences, satisfy current users, and engage prospective customers.

What makes for great digital experience?

So, now you’re familiar with digital experience and why it is important. Now, you might be wondering what facets can make a great DX. Moreover, it’s essential to understand these facets because they can help in developing a great user experience. You can make it great by focusing on the following things.

• Functionality

Here we’re talking about the functionality of the website, mobile app, and other digital touch-points. For your ease, you can divide functionality into accessibility and usability. Both these terms look similar, but there is a difference between them.

For example, usability indicates the difficulty a user faces while performing an action on a website or navigating through the website. When a customer or user faces these issues, their usability issues and negatively impact the customer experience.

Accessibility is how easy and smooth it is for users to access your website or mobile application. In digital experience, this term is mainly used for disabled persons. As technology is evolving and getting smart, the use of smart devices is increasing. Hence, accessibility also ensures that the user can access your website from different devices.

Websites or apps with poor functionality will never encourage users to visit them again. As mentioned earlier, your digital experience differentiates your brand from others.

• Customization

Nowadays, customers want personalized experiences because they’re used to them. But customized experiences benefit organizations in various ways, such as they increase brand awareness and loyalty. Organizations can now use tools like machine learning and AI to analyze customer data and provide more cohesive and personalized digital experiences.

For example, personalized messaging can help a lot in delivering your brand message to the right audience at the right time. A rich user experience can help you get more sales. So, a digital experience that delights and engages your customers can create meaningful interactions. As a result, it can set your company apart from the competition.

• Self-service

In this modern world, the customers want to take control of the situation and solve their own problems. If you don’t know much about self-service, think about mobile apps and websites that allow people to make payments, order food, book hotels, and schedule appointments.

Self-service features are mandatory for a great user experience regardless of whether you have an e-commerce website, app, or any other website. You can ensure it by listening to your customers’ needs and queries.

The best approach is to get customer feedback and add self-service features to your digital product. Moreover, get feedback about the self-service feature from customers through surveys and calls. There will be some issues with your self-service feature, so try to fix them.

• Ease

People often mix this term with usability, but ease within digital experience refers to the difficulty or challenge users face while buying a product or performing an action on a website or app. When customers face more complications while performing any action, they’ll not do it and leave your website. Moreover, they will not become repeat customers.

So, it’s essential to understand customers’ pain points and touch-points and reduce friction to optimize the digital experience. If you’re not sure about where the customers are struggling, you can take feedback to identify friction. Listening to customers is crucial for the overall and long-term success of any business.

• Cohesion 

We have used this term earlier but didn’t explain it in detail. For a seamless digital experience, different channels like websites and mobile apps should be aligned in design and branding. It will ensure that when customers visit different channels, they enjoy seamless interaction. This consistency in the digital world can help you improve brand recognition, brand trust, and brand reputation.

So, focus on all these facets and provide a great digital experience to visitors and customers.

Tools to improve digital experience

Now that you understand the importance of digital experience and what makes it great, the next and most crucial step is finding ways to improve DX. Luckily, various tools can help you do that. Here we’ll discuss a few of them so that you can improve it.

• Digital twin 

It’s a virtual representation of a system that uses simulation, real-time data, and machine learning to help decision-making. Organizations need to develop digital twins to replicate the environment of the entire company, which will offer insights into the organization’s touch-points. These digital replicas can go a long way and help employees and organizations to analyze, stimulate, and improve customer journeys. As a result, they can create more cohesive and personalized DX.

• ContentOps

They’re also called content operations. They’re the infrastructure of the organization. For example, the process and technology used to produce and maintain cohesive content across multiple digital channels. When content operations are well-defined, they integrate with marketing automation and help in asset management, inventory, project management, publishing tools, scheduling, and many more.

• Headless CMS

A headless content management system delivers content to multiple channels via APIs. So, content creators can use tools to create content for social media, smart devices, websites, e-commerce, and mobile apps. A unified hub can help you centralize content creation, and you can also track and measure engagement through it.

• Customer data platform

As the name indicates, CDP collects and unifies customer data from different channels. Moreover, it builds a coherent, single, and complete view of each customer. It ensures that everything is accessible to other systems. Customer data platform helps organizations to understand their users in a better way and complement marketing strategies. As a result, they can create more cohesive and personalized digital experiences.

• Artificial intelligence 

When we talk about how to improve digital experience, how can we miss artificial intelligence? Every organization can use it to improve digital experience strategy and development. Moreover, AI can help you automate campaigns and processes, get insights, and many more. As you know, we are entering a new era, and how can someone ignore using AI.

Final words

If you want loyal customers, it’s essential to understand their needs. You need to make extra efforts to keep your customers happy. But the good news is that providing a great digital experience can help you fix many customer issues. So, ensure that you understand the importance of digital experience and use the right tools to provide a cohesive and personalized experience to customers. So, leverage technology and tools to address your customer’s problems and maintain a happy and loyal customer base.