How to design a digital customer experience strategy

Your digital experience is a big part of your relationship with your customers. It’s also your first impression and can turn customers into loyal fans or make you a hellish story they tell their friends about. 

Think about it! How many times have you ditched a brand due to slow-loading pages, complicated navigation, or one step too many? 

Needless to say, a digital experience strategy matters as much as your product. Get it wrong, and customers will move on to better options.

So, the question is, how do you design a digital customer experience strategy that puts customers first and delights them?

Let’s find out.

What is a digital customer experience strategy?

All the ways your prospects interact with your brand in the digital space are part of your digital customer experience strategy. 

Key areas of a digital customer experience strategy can include:

• Website & Web Apps: Ensuring a responsive, fast, and user-friendly experience across desktop and mobile, with intuitive UI/UX design, live chat, and AI-powered chatbots.
• Custom Software & Platforms: Providing tailored digital solutions, from SaaS products to enterprise applications, that offer smooth navigation and seamless integrations.
• Mobile Apps & Push Notifications: Enhancing engagement through well-designed mobile applications with real-time notifications, personalized updates, and user-friendly interfaces.
• Omnichannel Digital Support: Implementing AI-driven customer support tools, self-service knowledge bases, and integrated CRM solutions for efficient customer interaction.
• E-commerce & Digital Transactions: Building secure, scalable, and frictionless e-commerce platforms with optimized checkout flows, payment gateway integrations, and performance analytics.
• Search & Digital Marketing Integration: Improving customer acquisition through SEO-friendly web development, PPC landing page optimization, and data-driven marketing automation.
• API & Third-Party Integrations: Ensuring seamless connectivity between platforms, enabling businesses to streamline operations and enhance the overall user experience.

By leveraging cutting-edge development solutions, you can enhance digital interactions, improve efficiency, and create a real customer-centric digital.

Why is digital customer experience so important?

Customer expectations are at an all-time high! 80% of customers think of the buying experience to be as important as the product itself. Plus, Research suggests that brands that offer seamless, user-friendly digital experiences retain more loyal customers quickly and drive higher revenue.

This makes digital customer experiences a critical opportunity for brands to differentiate themselves, build lasting connections, and turn customers into lifelong advocates. 

How to improve your digital customer experience?

Let's lay down three critical players that can help you elevate your digital customer experience strategy. 

1) Tools to identify and measure qualitative data

It's hard to truly know how your customers feel about your digital experience without analytics tools. With the insights gained, a robust DXP software enables you to adapt seamlessly to improve their overall digital experience. With this platform, you can connect rich data, segment your audience and offer each of them targeted content to improve your conversions.

In addition to measuring quantitative metrics, tools like Hotjar, Sprig, and Microsoft Clarity measure customer satisfaction and sentiment by tracking customer movement, scrolls, clicks, and hovers. This helps determine what's causing friction and what needs improvement. 

For example, if customers drop off just before making a payment, analytics tools may highlight a lack of payment options as the reason for observing customer behavior before they abandon the process.

2) Seamless, quick, and consistent experiences

Don't overcomplicate things. Customers want seamless and easy interactions that take them where they need to go quickly. So, focus on creating quick and easy navigation and accessibility across all your digital channels. 

Talking about all channels, keeping things consistent is just as important. You want customers to feel the same connection with your brand, whether they’re on your website, app, or social media.

3) Personalization 

Personalization makes customers feel seen; it makes every interaction relevant and engaging. Tailor content, recommendations, and messages to customers' preferences and behavior.

For example, recommend items based on a customer’s history and past purchases to make them feel seen. 

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

Read more about how to personalize your customers’ web journey here.

Designing a customer-centric digital experience strategy

To create a customer-centric digital cx strategy, you need to put customers at the center from the very beginning. Understand and constantly remind yourself that customers want quick, consistent, personalized experiences. 

Here’s what you do. 

1) Know your customers inside out

Your customers should be the stars of the show. Put yourself in their shoes and try to see experiences from their perspective.

Use reviews, interviews, feedback tools, analytics tools, and focus groups to uncover customer preferences, behaviors, and pain points. 

Use a combination of different sources to get a 360-degree view:

• Engage with customers at different stages of their buying journey to identify gaps and areas for improvement directly from their perspective.
• Talk to your customer support teams to know exactly what frustrates customers and what the most common pain points are. 
• Research what your competitors are doing and use this info to set benchmarks for yourself and differentiate your brand.
• Use tools, experimentation, and innovation to identify needs your customers aren't aware of. No one knew they wanted a touchscreen phone until Apple introduced one, and now it’s hard to imagine a world without it.

We know that managing and collecting information from multiple channels is challenging. Jahia’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) helps you easily collect and manage customer data from various touchpoints in real-time. This way, you get a comprehensive view of each customer.

2) Map the customer journey

To create consistent omnichannel experiences unique to your brand, identify every channel and touchpoint customers use to interact with your brand. Think of everything, all stages, from awareness to post-purchase. Include your website, mobile app, social media channels, email, customer support, and even chatbot (if you’ve got one.)

Once you’ve listed all critical touchpoints, highlight customer emotions, challenges, and goals to know what they want at each stage. Then, look closely for inconsistencies, delays, or difficulties. Make sure you’re providing the same quality of service across all channels. 

Even small details matter. For example, your product recommendations should be the same between your website and app. From the tone of your messaging to your color scheme, everything should scream your brand.

3) Use technology 

From the first interaction to post-purchase, use technology and AI tools to proactively anticipate and respond to your customer needs. Here’s how you integrate technology at different stages:

• Use analytics tools to gather and analyze data at critical touchpoints
• Implement feedback tools to create continuous feedback loops to stay informed on customer pain points, sentiments, and satisfaction levels
• Employ design and prototyping tools to develop intuitive and engaging user interfaces
• Provide customers immediate assistance with AI chatbots or virtual assistants
• Integrate advanced payment technologies like digital wallets or one-click payments to simplify the checkout process and reduce friction

The good news is,  digital experience platforms providers like Jahia let you connect with a variety of third-party applications, including AI-driven tools and advanced payment technologies for simplified transactions. 

4) Personalize everything

Five of my last eight purchases were unplanned—triggered only by targeted ad recommendations while scrolling. This is the power of personalization. It’s no longer a luxury; it’s what customers expect and the key to building long-lasting customer loyalty.

Collect customer data (with tools) and use it to segment customers and personalize content, recommendations, and messaging. You can also use machine learning to dynamically tailor content for individual users on websites, social media, or apps. Plus, with AI you can power product suggestions and deliver personalized emails or push notifications for super-relevant experiences. 

Key Takeaways on Digital customer experience strategy

Even the best product won’t matter if your customers have a frustrating digital experience. 

To create a winning digital customer experience strategy, you need to focus on what your customers need, want, and love. Put them at the center, design with their expectations in mind, and use personalization and tools to delight customers so they actually look forward to every interaction.

And if you want to simplify and fast-tract this process, partner with a digital experience management platform like Jahia. It consolidates all customer data (from multiple sources) for uniform digital experiences and lets you deliver dynamic, tailored content directly to each customer.