3 prerequisites for great digital CX and how to maximize them

2020 is the year for digital channels. While most enterprises have long been increasing investment into mobile app and web experiences, customer use of these offerings has soared during lockdown. Case in point: In Q2, e-commerce saw its highest share-of-spend ever, accounting for about $1 of every $5 spent in the U.S. Digital CX has never been more critical to capturing new customers, increasing revenue and driving long-term brand loyalty and engagement.

It would be easy for organizations to look at the data and think that their existing digital experiences position them for success in this environment—after all, most brand interactions and purchasing are now partially or wholly confined to digital spaces. But enterprises face a new reality: About 67% of customers are “serial switchers,” changing brands and products frequently due to poor customer experience (CX). According to McKinsey, “The bar for digital excellence, already high before the pandemic, has gone through the roof.”

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Digital CX isn’t something that organizations can simply work on once and move on. That’s because there’s often a gap between the experiences businesses want to deliver and the sub-optimal real-world experiences customers often have on digital channels. New demands emerge, an element on a page or screen breaks or interest in a particular feature grows—all of which can change the experience that customers have on a mobile app or website. To consistently deliver great CX, organizations must focus on providing three key elements:

• Working functionality: Every element of a digital experience must work perfectly from a technical perspective. Each feature must load correctly, the experience must provide fast performance with few crashes, and customers must experience few struggles when using the website or app.
• Security: The experience needs to be fully compliant with government security and privacy regulations, and customers need to feel that they can trust an organization with their personal information.
• Experience: Using the website or mobile app should feel intuitive and effortless. Everything functions as customers want it to, and customers are able to complete the activities they desire.

Think of these capabilities as the columns that hold up digital CX. Delivering on these pillars enables organizations to bridge the gap between desired and actual CX.

Three elements missing in digital CX – and what to do about it

There are three “gap maintainers” that prevent organizations from providing working functionality, security and experience on their digital platforms:

Decisions are made based on partial data

Organizations often rely on CX and customer journey analytics that aren’t able to capture all of the data. Every session and every event within each session must be accounted for in order to see exactly where and why customers are struggling or unhappy with an experience. Organizations need tagless capturing that autonomously tracks every action within a digital journey, including on the server-side, within the website or app, and the impact of user elements like device and OS type.

It’s difficult to prioritize updates and enhancements

When faced with numerous options for what to work on next, organizations don’t always know which changes will have the greatest impact on CX and ROI. Artificial intelligence can help pinpoint the updates that are most in demand from a customer’s perspective and that will have an outsized effect on their ability and desire to continue moving through a digital journey.

Teams can’t collaborate due to siloed data

The key teams involved in CX—engineering, product owners, marketing, data analysts and contact centers—each work with a plethora of platforms that cull different types of data and provide varying insights. But there’s often no consensus on how to move forward. Organizations can overcome this by implementing technology with intuitive digital journey visualization. This technology can deliver a single, unified source of truth for all parties with key data like why customers are struggling and the impact of struggles on revenue. Combined with session replays, teams get immediate insight into real-time CX.

A view into the true CX that’s happening on digital channels is essential in today’s digital-first landscape, and achieving it is within reach if enterprises remove these gap maintainers.

To learn more about the customer experience gap and how to close it, read our white paper, Digital Customer Journey Mapping in Today’s World.