What is digital customer experience (CX) and how do you know if your website delivers?

In order to know if you are providing a positive customer experience to your audiences (one that will help you to grow and retain relationships) you’ve got to know what it is and how to measure it.

Customer experience is the resulting feeling or perception someone has toward your brand as an outcome of one or many interactions they’ve had either directly with your company (on the website, in a store or through the call center) or indirectly related to your company (such as an independent review or social referral).

It’s difficult for brands to maintain perfect customer experience scores but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Because customers solely decide which  journey they follow and interactions they take (and they change often), you aren’t able to fully ‘control’ a customer experience – but, with strategy and proper foresight you can proactively influence, manage and improve it.

Staying on top of the constantly changing needs and wants of your customers and understanding what makes an enjoyable, hassle-free interaction for them is the foundation in creating a path to improve customer experience.

Know your customers

So, what do customers need and want in the interactions with your brand in order for the experience to be enjoyable?This list isn’t all-inclusive but helps to paint the picture that a positive customer experience is, above all else, personal and easy.

Customers want interactions to be:

• Relevant – let them know you understand their unique need or situation.

• Convenient – don’t make them jump through hoops or click more than than a few times to find information.

• Easy – the first place to make CX improvements should be to make common, multi-step tasks or processes easier for customers – this will go a long way!

• Proactive – don’t make customers think too hard about next steps – you should be one step ahead of them laying out the path for them to take.

• Consistent – without consistency, brand trust will erode and experiences will suffer.

• Timely – customers appreciate the right messages being delivered at the right time.  Know your customers to be able to identify the ‘right time’.

• Memorable – customers interact with dozens of brands per day, what makes you stand out?

• Helpful – offer multiple help and support methods. Don’t assume that everyone will pick up the phone and call to ask questions. Some will just abandon the brand if they can’t reach out in their method of choice.

• Evolving – customers needs and wants change all the time and they expect you to keep up. This is why having a CX strategy and roadmap is so important. It keeps you in step with changing demand.
  

How do you measure CX?

There are many ways to measure if your customer experience initiatives are working. If you are looking to measure overall CX, the best way is to utilize CSAT scores derived from customer surveys and industry benchmarks. However, if you are looking for ways to measure if your customer experience initiatives are successful on your website, we recommend benchmarking and progressively monitoring KPI’s such as:

• Conversion Rate – if you’ve fulfilled a need for customers and provided either with enough information to make a decision or an outlet to reach out to continue to conversation, and you’ve made the interaction relevant and easy, you will see conversion rates improve.

• Average Order Size or Average Revenue Per Customer – happy customers will trust you and continue to buy and shop with you.

• Repeat Customers – same as above

• Ratings and Reviews – asking customers about the experience they had is a great way to measure CX.

• User Testing – conducting A/B or multi-variant tests and/or doing user testing that observes how users navigate the site and if/where they get stuck. Testing can show time and path taken for users to complete tasks or transactions on a website. The data can then be analyzed to draw conclusions on if the interaction was successful and easy for the customer.

• Feedback and Online Surveys – Feedback can be direct from customers but also from those serving customers on the front lines. For example, does the call center get lots of calls about things that can be answered on the website. As you make changes to your website, monitor the changes you see to the questions being asked in all channels.
  

Do you have to tackle CX all at once?

If you have a ways to go in order to make your website meet all of the customer wants and needs we’ve mentioned above, it can be overwhelming. Where do you start? That’s ok because CX is not something you either have or don’t have. It’s an ongoing, evolving process of making positive improvements that your customers will enjoy and that will bring you results.

Download our free Crawl, Walk, Run Your Way to CX E-book

There are some strategies that will make larger impacts sooner and there are some steps that make sense to do before others. We’ve laid out all our recommendations for making incremental, well-thought out steps toward CX like the big brands. So, if you would like to know how to get your site from where it is today, to the likes of sites like Amazon, Netflix, Bank of America, Uber and others, download the free Crawl, Walk, Run to CX E-book.

We're here to help

The biggest move toward improved CX that you can make today is just taking that first step. Contact us if you’d like help developing a rewarding CX journey.