As our world becomes more and more digital, digital customer experience has become an important part of any business. Leveraging a digital customer experience platform means finding a method to meet your customers across channels, in ways that resonate with them, with an eye towards consistency, speed, and safety.
A digital experience platform expands beyond the web browser and into the real life of your customers, from mobile access via an app to personalization to anticipation and on to the Internet of Things. It includes customer-facing access as well as back-end digital processes that help your internal team create a better customer experience overall.
What To Look For In A Digital Experience Platform
In order to be able to keep your customers engaged, you need a digital experience platform (DXP) that is convenient to them, as well as one that is consistent and provides secure and personalized access. The DXP needs to have the infrastructure to support fast load times too – if your site doesn’t load quickly, your customers will leave, period. Your DXP has to evolve as you do, staying agile and successfully incorporating and managing new technology.
The more capable your DXP is of automation, the better, saving your team time and effort. You need to be able to measure your successes and your failures, and make changes based on that insight. Marketing and IT both need to be able to prove they’re improving the bottom line with every investment they make, and your DXP should do that for you.
At the same time, you need to offer security and trust to your customers, keeping their personal information and their privacy safe while still offering them experiences that matter to them. This is true for eCommerce companies especially, who need to show that they are keeping credit card details and personal preferences safe while still being able to offer customized shopping experiences based on purchase or search history.
Even if you don’t offer a physical product, the customer experience with your company in the digital realm can affect their willingness to work with you again or trust you to perform a service.
How Do Digital Experience Platforms Affect Your Customers?
In order to select the perfect DXP, you need to understand your customer journey and design around it. If implemented correctly, a DXP will give your customers a reason to trust you. If they can access your company via whatever tool works best for them, you’ll make their lives easier, increase their loyalty to you, and get more customers thanks to their glowing recommendations. But if your methods don’t meet your customer’s needs where they are, as opposed to forcing them into an unfamiliar routine, the DXP will be more of a hindrance than a help.
At the same time, if your internal teams aren’t trained properly or aren’t ready to adopt the DXP’s methods, it will ultimately fail. The DXP needs to be part of a long term roadmap, with your customers’ needs taken into account, and with your business goals and team’s capabilities in mind. Any frustration your customers experience due to the DXP — from getting the runaround in customer service to slow-loading pages — will cost you dearly, not only in income and conversions, but in customer loyalty and references.
What are The Different Parts of A Digital Experience?
The DXP for your customers will differ depending on who those customers are and what they need. Generally it starts from the first interaction with your company, often right on your website. A good DXP can take information from each visitor to your website, such as physical location as denoted by IP address, or whether the visitor is returning, and serve up specific content for that visitor, such as local deals or trending topics. With a more robust DXP, the visitor can sign in to a user platform and have even further customization based on supplied information.
All of this information can be included in a mobile app they can access from their phone or tablet, providing consistency across their access points. A customer would be able to search for items on their laptop and see the same information available on their phone later on. They can find customer support information, whether it be self-serve FAQs or chat with a customer support agent.
The DXP will track what they search for and include notes for customer service agents to refer to later, so that the customer’s history can be taken into account the next time they contact customer support. If they make a purchase, the customer can have push notifications on the status of their item sent to their phones via text message or email. Once they receive their item, the customer should have easy access to customer support if something goes wrong, or be able to review the product and recommend it to others.
Your customer experience interaction doesn’t have to end with a sale, either. The DXP will also keep visitors informed of news or information they want to know about the company, such as new products or developments, whether it be via recommendations in the mobile app or newsletter emails.
Get Digital Customer Experience Support From WP Engine
WP Engine has developed a WordPress Digital Experience Platform for the growing number of companies using WordPress to fuel their digital worlds. We serve up native security and speed, as well as award-winning support, for all of our, customers regardless of their size or company goals.
We also offer add-on features, like Content Performance for actionable insights via Google Analytics served right in your WordPress dashboard, or GeoTarget, which lets you deliver hyper-localized content to visitors based on their IP address. With over 51,000 plugins, there are hundreds of ways to customize WordPress to meet your digital experience needs, and our team has curated the best to keep your site running quickly and consistently for customers across the spectrum. To get started, check out our digital experience plans and find the right one for you.