What are digital experiences?

What are digital experiences — and what separates excellent digital experiences from poor ones in terms of the responsiveness, personalization, consistency, and intuitiveness that determine whether customers choose digital channels again or avoid them in favor of calling a human?

What are digital experiences?

Digital experiences are the collective interactions a customer has with your company through digital technologies. But technology alone doesn’t make something a digital experience.

Reading a PDF version of a document on a company’s website isn’t necessarily a digital experience if it doesn’t offer anything above and beyond what reading the paper document would. Therefore, companies should create digital experiences that go above and beyond off-line experiences.

You can print a user guide and package it with your company’s products, and you can post a basic PDF of the same user guide in the customer support section of your website. But a company focused on creating meaningful digital experiences would add features like:

• Embedded definitions that appear when the customer hovers over an unknown term,
• Clickable links to related content that allows the buyer to learn more about specific topics,
• A thumbs up or thumbs down voting experience that allows the customer to state whether or not the user guide answered his or her questions,
• An open-ended text box that allows the customer to elaborate on why they voted thumbs up or thumbs down, and
• The chance to engage with your company via live chat if further assistance is needed.

How to build meaningful digital experiences?

Because digital experiences are powered by digital technologies, many companies task the IT organization with leading their digital experience strategy. But while the IT department is full of technology experts who are important partners in rolling out meaningful digital experiences, it’s best that your digital experience strategy is created, implemented, and maintained by a customer-obsessed team. This helps ensure that your digital experiences are designed first and foremost with the customer’s needs in mind.

One common way that companies ensure that their customers have a consistently positive digital experience is by establishing a digital customer experience team. Similar to traditional customer experience teams, digital customer experience (or DCX) teams help define, understand, and shape a customer’s experience across digital channels.

In order to create the right digital experiences for your customers, digital customer experience teams typically include the following roles: an executive sponsor, a digital customer experience leader, a digital analyst, a user experience designer, a digital content marketer, and a marketing technologist.

When launching your digital experience team, it’s best to start small and build from there. Focus your digital experience team on a short list of specific projects with measurable outcomes. This will allow your digital experience team to achieve a few quick wins with quantifiable business value.