4 steps to building a killer digital customer experience Strategy

Delivering killer digital customer experiences requires interacting with customers at every touchpoint. The success of your business depends on customer experience, and these days, there’s no forgiveness. If you stumble in delivering on expectations, customers move on quickly and never return. Consistently providing exceptional service can be challenging, but with the right strategy in place success is well within reach (read 7 Customer Service Strategies For Highly Effective Teams for additional insight).

Having talent in place who possess the right characteristics can actually make or break your digital customer experience. When you hire or promote leaders who put the customer first, this mindset will filter down to the rest of the team. We’re not just talking about your customer-facing employees; your entire organization needs to be digital-first and customer-centric. Look for people with a total dedication to customers and a willingness to do what it takes to make them happy.

A single data point about a sale or a social profile doesn’t tell a customer’s full story. If you’re only focusing on one characteristic, action, or transaction, you’re destined for failure. To stay competitive, “you must win at every interaction the customer has with your organization.”¹ That’s why a killer digital customer experience strategy must include taking the time to understand customers in a new dimension. By infusing your strategy with a data-driven approach, your service agents will better understand the customer’s journey, history, and interaction touchpoints before they even start interacting with that customer. Start winning with the right social media management tool that connects customers’ digital footprints with your CRM.

Here are the top five data-driven tips and practices you need to know for a killer customer experience strategy.

1. Use a dashboard that allows tracking of all social customer activity and interactions in one place. At a glance, you’ll identify “early-warning” signs of potential issues with live, actionable data so that you can head them off.
2. Customer sentiment matters — use NPS and CSAT data to fuel your strategy in real-time. Customer sentiment gives you the insight needed to evaluate how customers perceive your performance and brand.
3. Get personal customer data by implementing private messaging as part of your response strategy. By using Twitter’s Direct Messaging and Facebook’s Messenger, you’ll be responding exactly when and where a customer needs you and tracking issue resolution in one channel.
4. Respond with context using holistic customer profile data merged into a single record containing information across social networks and CRM systems including interests, tags, internal notes, past thread conversations, and community interactions.
5. Aggregated data displayed via a social media monitor wall gives your organization insight to how social customer care influences customer sentiment, key agent metrics, response times, number of cases being handled, and live feed mentions. With a better understanding of the customer, all departments can apply that insight to their respective roles, ultimately driving more nuanced, customer-centric experiences.

Smart brands understand that on-domain communities can help facilitate seamless experiences while simultaneously lowering support costs. Leading Australian energy company AGL recognizes the importance of community to customers who increasingly want to interact digitally. “Our initial goal was to provide a way to divert calls from our service center, but our community quickly became a source of truth in the industry with our knowledge base articles, in addition to providing a seamless pathway for our customers to get support,” says Digital Community Manager Liam Woods. Customer-centric “social hubs” for your like-minded brand enthusiasts are places where peer-to-peer support thrives, which, in turn, will have a substantial positive impact on perceptions of trust and loyalty.

If data is the game changer for CX strategy, actionable reporting is the coach on your unbeatable team. It’s not enough to just track customer service interactions; that data must be channeled into something useful. When customer analytics about customers’ voice, sentiment, and opinions are shared throughout your organization, it leads to an improved understanding of customers’ needs regarding your products or services. A killer CX strategy embraces customer care analytics as a way to not only quickly fix underperforming customer experiences, but to create better, more useful products.

For more strategies to enhance your customers' experiences, read 7 Customer Service Strategies For Highly Effective Teams.

¹ Future of Experience: A Gartner Theme Insight Report