Tuesday, November 26, 2013

10 Ways to Improve Your Digital Customer Experiences

Whenever customer experience professionals are asked how important it is to improve their digital experiences, they affirm that it is absolutely critical. But, there is still an ongoing struggle to identify what digital experience improvements they need to make. 

Customers today need to have great experiences when they interact with an organization's digital presence, but what can businesses do to improve digital experiences? A new report from Forrester Research, “Top 10 Ways to Improve Digital Experiences,” shares 10 pieces of advice:

10. Flex Your Analytics. A factual basis can be established for understanding where visitors go inside a website or app as well as what they do.

9. Conduct Expert Reviews of Digital Touchpoints. There’s user data and then there are “heuristic reviews,” where experts — who can either be users meeting the characteristics of targeted users or usability experts — try to accomplish specific customer goals.

8. Reach Out to Customers. Get feedback from the people who are encountering the digital experience, with data is derived from surveys, customer feedback forms, emails, support calls, chat sessions and social media posts.

7. Adopt User-Centered Design Process. This involves customer research, idea-generation and iterative prototyping.

6. Take Advantage of the Inherent Characteristics of Digital Touchpoints. This provides the sane advice to use the features — and the size of the screen — of your targeted device. These can include interfaces that are optimized for a touch tablet screen or real-time data in a mobile app that changes content or offers based on location.

5. Get Outside Help When and Where You Need It. This includes tech help as well as specialists for, say, researching customers in their native environments.

4. Plan for the Post-Launch. This is often overlooked for how those great features and customer feedback are going to be maintained over time.

3. Bolster Your Brand. This is a common focus of companies looking to enhance the digital experience. But this distills the wisdom down to understanding your company’s positioning or supporting brand attributes in what is seen and done.

2. Measure Digital Touchpoint Performance Against Business Metrics. This offers the advice to figure out business objectives, ways to get there, how to measure customer response from all digital and non-digital channels and ROI.

1. Unify the Overall Customer Experience. This is a hot topic, as companies and their agencies try to present a unified experience across channels, which means a data consistency about the customer’s interactions and a consistency of feelings about the brand.


About the Author: Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist of the Marketing Division at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. Amanda is the Editor at Large for several of IIR’s blogs including Next Big DesignCustomers 1st, and ProjectWorld and World Congress for Business Analysts, and a regular contributor to Front End of Innovation and The Market Research Event,. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the technology industry. She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCic
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