The digital experience that a customer gets while interacting with the brand is one of the reasons for any company’s success in the 21st Century. Continuous tracking of user actions and predicting their intent are among key components of digital customer experience so it helps a company to clock higher sales. Now, the pertinent question is - How can a company improve its digital engagement?

Two Rs play a key role in ensuring great customer engagement.

1) Relevant content strategy, wherein a company needs to understand its customers’ preferences. This would entail aligning your content and product options to the needs of the customer.

2) Reliable technology can help companies attract more customers on its platform. As per a PwC report, nearly 80 percent of American consumers say that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are key elements of a positive customer experience. Hence, using technologies that enable customers to spend more on a company’s product.

Closely linked is the idea that users must be able to operate with ease. The PwC report also notes that customers want the design of websites and mobile apps to be elegant and user-friendly.

Nevertheless, companies also need to be careful that they provide a unified digital experience to users that is contextualized. With the spurt in different digital platforms that can be used for marketing, it is necessary that different platforms do not remain in silos and offer better synergy in content as well as user experience. This also means a company must ensure that toggling between different pages of a company’s website or app is seamless.

A factoid for digital marketers to note:  A recent survey of U.S. consumers shows that the PC/browser combination still offers better opportunities for commerce than even mobile apps.

While a better user experience is in all likelihood to help attract more customers and increase sales, it is important for companies to focus on the quality of leads one gets rather than just the quantity. In short, companies need to focus on prospective customers based on their activities, behaviors, and interactions with the brand.

One good way to understand the quality of leads is to gather useful data like the types of pages a customer visits, time spent on each page and how they found the page.

Here’s a real-life example of a successful digital customer experience helping a company reap benefits:

In November 2020, The Crocodile and ServiceNow won 'Best customer experience (CX) initiative'. According to a report, The Crocodile created the Connected Customer Framework (CCF) to help ServiceNow build integrated communications to aid customers at every stage.

The target: to help ServiceNow, a US-based software firm, create collaboration between different departments within a business. The initiative specifically targeted organizations located in the UK, Ireland, and Alps regions with 3000 employees or higher.

The result: The initiative succeeded in delivering 120 high-quality MQLs - with a combined opportunity value of $12 million - and helped ServiceNow set the B2B industry benchmark for customer-first execution at scale. Moreover, statistically speaking, the initiative helped ServiceNow clock 73% higher engagement in the Alps region and 20% higher engagement in the UK and Ireland region, compared to previous global programmatic campaigns.

While knowing your customers’ needs and engaging with them are key to any company’s digital success, the increasing push for data privacy cannot be ignored at all. As often noted, digitally engaging with customers help companies to collect valuable data that enable greater personalization and generate new leads. However, customers would like their data to be protected against possible misuse. Creating such an infrastructure where the customer can accept or reject data collection will also help companies to foster trust among customers.

But while turning the focus on customer experience, it is also important to pay attention to employee experience. That is because ultimately it is employees who deal with the customers on daily basis. A Mckinsey & Co report notes that a positive employee experience can help companies raise more profit – perhaps the single biggest motivation to keep employees happy!