Digital customer experience
Connect with customers across 20+ digital touchpoints like live chat, SMS, email, social media, and more to meet them where they are.
Today’s customers are as discerning and demanding as they’ve ever been. And there are perhaps more options than ever for them, when it comes to who to trust with their business. That’s why successful companies are focused on customer experience (CX), and in this digital world that means digital customer experience.
Consumers aren’t interested in the complex logistics behind providing exemplary service across channels. They want seamless interactions with businesses however they choose to reach out to them. That’s why you need to trust a solution like RingCX which can make life easier for you, while also delivering ideal digital customer experiences for your customers.
What is digital customer experience?
Digital customer experience is the sum total of all the interactions customers have with your brand digitally. Sometimes also known as digital CX, it represents the holistic experience of any customer who interacts with your business on your website, social media, via live chat, or by any other online channel.
So that’s the digital customer experience definition, but how does it fit in with the overall idea of customer experience (CX)?
Digital customer experience vs customer experience (CX)
CX is the overall impression you make on a customer throughout their journey with your brand. That can encompass offline touchpoints like experiences in a physical store or over the phone. However, today’s consumers interact with businesses like yours online more than ever before.
Digital customer experience, therefore, is an increasingly large and vital part of overall CX. Accounting for all of your online channels and the customer interactions that take part within them, it’s integral to improved brand awareness and loyalty, and to customer retention.
Digital customer experience examples
So, what does the best digital customer experience look like in practice? Perhaps the most important word to keep in mind is seamless.
The best digital customer experience examples are those where customers find it effortless to do what they need to do, where they need to do it, and when. That requires seamless transitions from one digital channel to the next.
For example, let’s say a customer visits your website on their desktop, browses for a while, but then has a question they can’t find the answer to. They see a customer service email address, explain their question fully in an email, and send it. Then, they have to leave home unexpectedly.
While on the move, they flick back onto your website on their cell phone and spot a live chat option. They send a quick message via the chat, explaining that they’ve already fully explained their query via email. A live chat agent then replies with a full answer to the question.
In that scenario, the customer reached out to your brand on multiple channels and devices, as was convenient to them. What made the experience seamless was that the live chat agent who ultimately answered the query could readily connect the customer with their prior email. That’s the key to the best digital customer experience.
Benefits of providing digital customer experience with RingCX
RingCX is an omnichannel contact center solution that makes it easy for your business to deliver seamless digital customer experiences. With RingCX, you can:
Engage across multiple channels
Whether customers reach out on Facebook, Twitter, email, chat, messaging apps, review platforms, or any other digital channel, manage all your responses in one customer engagement platform.
Elevate agent experience
Free up agents to focus on higher-value activities with chatbots and smart routing. Assist them in serving customers better with AI-recommended responses.
Gain insights to improve efficiency
Leverage customizable real-time and historical analytics to increase agent and contact center performance. Use AI to improve customer sentiment.
Get more value with an open platform
Connect with tools that run your business using open APIs and webhooks. Scale your operations instantly with a reliable and secure platform.
Just some of the channels you can combine into your digital customer experience strategy with RingCX
With RingCX you can combine 20+ channels to deliver seamless digital customer experiences, alongside outstanding support via phone, too. Here are just a few examples of the most popular digital channels you can use and manage on the intuitive platform:
Live Chat
- Respond faster by using scripts or canned responses in live chats to answer common queries from customers and site visitors—boosting agent efficiency and productivity in the process.
- Collect customer data from agent interactions that can be analyzed and used to create great digital customer experience strategies.
- Utilize chat ratings and customer feedback to gain valuable insights into ways to optimize your digital customer journeys.
SMS
- Assign a dedicated number for your call center where people can send SMS messages and receive real-time responses.
- Reach offline and non-digital-savvy customers without the limitations of plain text; send documents, image attachments, and more.
- Cut through the noise and engage your consumers with targeted, two-way text messaging that outperforms traditional tactics.
- Create multiple customizable email templates for thank you messages, clarifications, and more— useful for sending out mass emails and for creating a consistent experience for clients and leads.
- Provide context and additional information through email attachments, minimizing chances for miscommunication and confusion.
- Leverage a simple-to-use touchpoint where agents can organize information, store notes and records, and view all messaging history at once.
Social Media
- Handle large volumes of interactions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media apps.
- Chat with customers using WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages, Google Business Messages, and in-app messaging on any web, iOS, or Android device.
- Monitor and track social media customer service experiences, and utilize analytics to spot trends across different social media platforms.
Why is digital customer experience important?
In business, the hardest part isn’t securing a customer but retaining them after a transactional exchange. To create loyal customers, you’ll need to keep them engaged with your brand long after their initial purchase. Today’s consumers are, first and foremost, digital customers. They rely on various digital channels to navigate and communicate with brands. Therefore, brands must seamlessly engage customers across various digital devices to fill the gaps in the customer’s journey.
Customers no longer just want to make a purchase decision; they want exceptional, informative, and memorable customer experiences (CX). When businesses make a goal of enhancing digital customer engagements, they’re interested in providing customers with something meaningful—something that goes beyond a great product.
Consumers want to be treated as individuals. They demand a personalized experience and expect brands to know their preferences and purchase history. To meet those expectations, businesses need to leverage data yielded from customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. They can generate actionable insights to inform engagement strategies and improve CX that way.
Whether it's exceptional end-to-end CX, real-time customer support, or valuable content, when done well, a great multichannel engagement strategy delivers. It can improve customer relationships, build brand awareness, and bring you closer to your business goals.
Digital customer experience best practices: How to get started
Now you know what digital customer experience is, some of the channels that can play a part within it, and why it’s important to your business. The next logical question is how you can get started providing the best digital experience to your customers.
Here are just a few digital customer experience best practices to help you start off on the right foot:
1. Start with a clear digital customer experience strategy
One of the things brands of all business models need if they’re to succeed at engaging customers is a digital engagement guide that outlines their goals and strategies. Your goals should be actionable and based on data, with trackable metrics and KPIs, and clear outlines and expectations laid out for your support staff.
Implementing a digital customer experience strategy will keep you and your team on track and ensure that your customers receive streamlined, consistent service throughout their journey.
2. Keep a focus on personalization throughout
Implement customization across digital channels to ensure customers enjoy a seamless experience. Customers want to be treated as humans. That means that generic digital marketing and communication tactics don’t work like they used to.
Businesses need to adapt to customers who demand humanistic brand interactions. When you’re customizing content or support to an individual customer, you must be well informed about their specific habits. Personalized content marketing is a great way to drive engagement by providing customers with valuable blog posts, text messaging, videos, and other resources relevant to them.
Use the right software solutions to help you on your way
Software like RingCX has a range of features and functionalities to help your business engage with your customers across various touchpoints. It allows you to track your audience as they move through their journey with your business, and presents a range of ways to improve the digital customer experience along the way.
How to improve digital customer experience with RingCX
Investing in the right omnichannel contact center software is one of the best things you can do to provide customers with truly exceptional digital customer experience. With RingCX, you can continually offer and improve digital customer experience with the help of a variety of features and functionalities:
Merge identities
Automatically detect and merge customer profiles across different digital channels.
Set up smarter routing
Send messages to the right agent based on message content, channel, and agent skill set.
Suggest responses
Enable agents to reply smarter with AI-recommended suggestions based on integration with Google Agent Assist.
Engage visually
Enable customers to co-browse or share their screens with agents while chatting to solve their problems.
Manage approvals and transfers
Enable agents to ask for approval when responding to inquiries or transfer the conversation to another agent.
Get going with chatbots
Reply instantly to simple questions with chatbots and seamlessly hand them off to agents if a conversation gets more complex.
Tap into supervisor tools
Help agents grow and perform better with dual listening for easy coaching and analytics tracking for key KPIs.
Connect your favorite apps
Enhance your support history by integrating and embedding with existing tools such as CRMs (Salesforce, Microsoft, Zendesk, etc.) that run your business.
Continue conversations
Reduce the effort for the customer and agent by routing the messages on the same or different topic to the same agent the customer last spoke with.
UCAAS INTEGRATION
Connect with experts across your organization
Give agents the tools to access internal experts by integrating RingEX™ with RingCX. Now it’s easy to get answers and solve queries on the spot with team messaging built into your digital engagement platform.
Digital customer experience management: What to keep in mind
Committing to deliver exceptional digital experiences to your customers isn’t a “set and forget” scenario. Making sure you have the right digital customer experience management solution is vital, but it’s not the end of the story. You also need to continually manage and iterate your strategy. That starts with knowing some of the principle considerations to keep in mind throughout:
Smart companies leverage the power of technologies such as live chat to build stronger engagement strategies. The enhanced functionality of live chat means it’s not just a great tool for real-time support but can also be used to observe and respond to customer behavior.
This information can be used to create improved customer journey maps in the future. What’s more, live chat enables businesses to observe customers' mobile app or website behavior, which can later be used to increase the relevance of interactions.
Personalization has been a buzzword for a while now, and its meaning changes from business to business. For some, it’s simply using a recipient's first name in an email. For others, it goes much deeper—like using data on prior interactions to proactively tailor future conversations or even offer help proactively.
Personalization is about using all of the customer data available to you in order to determine patterns in behavior and understand what they want. This allows you to use your customer engagement strategies to direct specific, valuable messages toward specific customers at different stages of their journey. In this way, brands can focus on improving CX through personalized journeys.
Customers are increasingly demanding options for self-service during any experience with a brand. These options include different tools and services, including:
- Artificial intelligence chatbots that can answer various questions and direct customers to a human agent when necessary.
- A knowledge base of FAQs and articles that customers can easily refer to when they encounter problems or have questions.
- A library of multimedia resources (webinars, infographics, forums, etc.) that customers can use as a reference when needed.
Digital channels represent the next paradigm of customer interactions. They’re a game changer.
—AXA Switzerland
How to choose the best digital customer experience solutions
Delivering customized customer experiences across digital channels requires businesses to adopt a customer-centric business model to develop personal, lasting connections. The bottom line: the future of customer engagement is sure to be even more dynamic and exciting, which is why businesses must stay on top of trends and ensure they invest in the right digital customer experience software.
In line with staying customer-centric, your first thought should be for those customers. Where are they? On which channels would they most appreciate you providing the chance for interactions? Once you know that, you’ll know the channels for which it’s most crucial that any digital customer experience platform provide you seamless management.
Then, consider how easily or otherwise any new digital customer experience tools will fit with your existing tech stack. Can they integrate with your favored CRM? Do they come as part of a more holistic platform that also lets you serve customers via more traditional channels, like phone calls?
When you opt to offer digital customer experience services via RingCX, you get a full suite of omnichannel features so your team can form meaningful connections and achieve that ultimate goal: complete customer satisfaction and customer success. Check out our pricing and plans, and find out why clients choose us over the competition.
Deliver exceptional digital customer experiences with RingCX
Solutions that drive better customer experiences
48%
Increase in customer satisfaction
53%
Increase in employee satisfaction
25%
Increase in average revenue per agent
30%
Decrease in cost to serve
46%
Increase in revenue growth rate
43%
Increase in first contact resolution
Source: 2022 RingCentral Customer Success Metrics Survey.
Digital customer experience FAQs
Measuring digital customer experience is similar to measuring overall CX. You might choose to monitor particular metrics specific to CX like first contact resolution (FCR) or customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
Alternatively, you could use direct customer feedback surveys that ask your customers to assess their experience of your digital channels. Or, as an ultimate measure of digital customer experience, you may choose to examine customer churn rates and reasons for churn. For instance, can you pinpoint any digital touchpoints or interactions that often precede customers leaving?
From a customer’s point of view, a good digital customer experience is nothing special. In fact, it’s simple, straightforward, and fast. That’s rather the point. Customers want answers to their questions, resolutions to their issues, or even to complete purchases with the minimum of effort and fuss. Your digital customer experience strategy should aim to make things seamless at every point of customer contact.
Perhaps the most common misconception about digital customer experience is that customers themselves view it differently to CX as a whole. In general, customers don’t care how a business helps them or by what means they get an answer to a query, as long as they can get it quickly and effectively.
Digital customer experience is also not about technology. While interactions are handled via digital channels which can incorporate and utilize impressive new tech, digital customer experience—like all CX—is still about the customer. They should remain your focus.
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