In today’s world, it’s essential for businesses to have a great digital customer experience. This is the experience that customers have when they interact with your company online, whether it’s through your website, social media channels, or email marketing.If your business doesn’t have a good digital customer experience, you’re likely to lose customers and sales. In fact, a study by PwC found that even 59% of the most loyal customers will walk away after several bad experiences with a brand they love. Knowing that fact, the importance of digital customer experience providing value for customers can't be overstated. It's easy to see the benefits of a good digital experience, but how do we go about providing this for our customers?Let's start at the top level view of what we are trying to achieve. You want to have a digital presence that engages consumers and converts them to loyal customers, or even better, you want to serve the loyal customers you already have with superb digital resources.If you are starting from the beginning, what do you have to do first?
Identifying the Target Audience
The first, and most crucial step in the process is to identify who you are making experiences for. Are we designing for teenagers as potential customers for a product, or are we designing for executives in mid to enterprise level businesses? As you could guess, there is a massive difference in the strategies for either customer base. To find the correct target audience , you can use market research, surveys, interviews, and focus groups.After you have identified who your target audience is, the next step is to understand what they need and want from a digital customer experience.To do this, you'll need to put yourself in your customers' shoes and understand their journey. Try to map out all of the steps they take, from the very first time they hear about your company to when they become a customer or client.You can use this map of the customer journey to start identifying pain points and moments of delight. These are key touchpoints that you'll want to focus on when designing your digital experience.
Designing Experiences
Now that you have a good understanding of your target audience and what they need from a digital customer experience, it's time to start designing.Creating personas can be helpful in this stage as they give you a specific customer to design for, with their own unique needs and wants.Start by sketching out some rough ideas of what you want your digital experience to look like. Think about the overall flow and how each page or step will lead into the next.Once you have a good idea of the general flow, you can start creating wireframes. These are essentially sketches of each individual page or screen, with placeholder text and images.The goal of wireframes is to get a general idea of the content and layout, without getting too caught up in the details.Once you're happy with your wireframes, it's time to start designing the actual experience. This is where you'll add in all of the visuals, like colors, fonts, and images.You'll also want to think about how users will interact with your digital experience. Will they be filling out forms? clicking buttons? using search?All of these interactions need to be taken into account when designing the user interface.After you've designed all of the individual pages and screens, it's time to put it all together into a prototype. This is a clickable version of your digital experience that allows users to navigate through it as if it were the real thing.Prototypes are essential for testing out your design and making sure that everything works as intended.Once your prototype is complete, it's time to test it out with real users. This can be done through user testing sessions, surveys, or interviews.Getting feedback from actual users is essential for making sure that your digital experience is successful.Based on the feedback you receive, you may need to make some changes to your design. Once you're happy with the final result, it's time to launch your digital experience!Congratulations, you've now created a digital customer experience!
Gathering Feedback and Iterating on Your Designs
Now that your digital experience is created you can continuously gather feedback from your targeted audience to ensure that you are building digital experiences that they desire.A digital customer experience is not something that you create once and leave to rot. It is a commitment from your company to provide customers with the best experience possible. Meaning if you want to succeed, you need to constantly evaluate your digital offerings with metrics or feedback directly from your customers.Do all of the steps above sound long and complicated for you? Don't worry, we agree, which is why partnering with a digital experience platform can save you all the time and effort of every step after mapping the customer journey. All you need to bring is the vision, and with Lumavate’s DXP you can build hundreds of seamless digital experiences to offer to your customers. If you want to learn more, schedule a meeting and demonstration with Lumavate today!
Meet with one of our experts to see how easy it is to centralize your product data, manage digital assets, and create digital product experiences. Trust us…you’re going to be wowed.
