Understanding a customer’s expectations and preferred experiences across all channels best positions an ecommerce business for success. But gathering that information, synthesizing it, and analyzing it so the data can be used in a meaningful way is no small task.
Enter digital experience management.
Digital experience management works by collecting customer data at a variety of points across all of a brand’s channels. For ecommerce businesses looking to improve the user experience, digital experience management may be a tool to consider.
What is Digital Experience Management
Digital experience management is the practice of collecting and tracking digital user experience data to make strategic decisions that improve the user experience. Effective digital experience management means monitoring and then optimizing your customer experience across all digital channels – web, social media, and mobile apps.
When done effectively, digital experience management allows ecommerce businesses to manage all of their digital experiences more easily, regardless of channel. With the metrics collected, online businesses have the power to improve the digital customer experience and drive customer loyalty with data-driven initiatives.
Ecommerce Benefits of Platforms to Manage the Digital Experience
Ecommerce customers are tech savvy and have high expectations of the businesses they engage with online. Those expectations have only increased after the COVID-19 pandemic with recent data from Talkdesk Research indicating nearly 58% of all consumers said their customer expectations are higher today than they were before the pandemic.
Meeting those customer expectations is a critical component of any ecommerce business’ success. Over the last decade, several tools have emerged to support this effort. Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) arrived first and allow ecommerce businesses to collect and then respond accordingly to the customer experience data collected.
Digital Experience Composition (DXC) platforms emerged to improve upon the limitations of DXPs which require a tremendous amount of technical skill to set up and manage. DXCs provide similar functionality but are designed for hand-off to business users. The need for technical setup and maintenance, though, creates a high cost of ownership and level of complexity that many businesses cannot afford.
Then came Frontend-as-a-Service solutions which, when inclusive of integration and orchestration capabilities, provide many of the same benefits of DXC with a lower barrier of entry. FEaaS can be easily combined with other best-of-breed tools for personalization, customer data, and testing to ensure rich, dynamic customer experiences.
Ultimately each business should choose the digital experience management platform that best meets their needs, budget, and available technical resources, but regardless of the specific category of technology, the below three examples demonstrate how digital experience management can ensure online businesses are meeting customer expectations.
Improving the Omnichannel Experience
According to research from Harvard Business Review, 73% of customers use more than one channel during the purchase journey. The research also found that customers who used more than one online channel were more valuable to a business with an average spend of 10% more than those that only used a single channel.
Because customers choose to engage with an ecommerce brand in multiple ways, and smart businesses want their customers to engage with multiple channels and have ongoing digital interactions, ensuring a seamless experience regardless of when or how customers engage is a must in meeting customer experience expectations.
With digital experience management, ecommerce businesses can develop a data-driven experience strategy that focuses on customer engagement preferences and building the customer relationship. These metrics can highlight any cross-channel issues and allow companies to improve the user experience.
Optimizing the Buyer’s Journey and Functionality
It’s no secret that the goal of any ecommerce business is to create a buyer’s journey that converts users to paying customers. In the simplest form, that is the goal of every ecommerce website. However, how a business moves the user through the journey greatly impacts the conversion rate.
Digital experience management allows ecommerce businesses to optimize the customer’s journey by delivering tracking data that pinpoints what is working to improve your conversion rate and what is hurting customer engagement. This identification puts online stores in a place where they can make tweaks or completely overhaul an entire section of the buyer’s journey to improve the user experience, functionality, and conversion rates. Ongoing and fast iteration is integral to meeting the ever-changing trends and expectations of customers.
Personalizing the User Experience
Today’s ecommerce customers want a personalized experience. According to research from Marketing Dive, 48% of shoppers indicated they left a brand’s website and made a purchase from a competitor because of a poorly personalized experience.
Since digital experience management works by collecting essential data about a company’s customers, ecommerce businesses can use those insights to better personalize the digital experience for each customer. That means at every touchpoint - a click on the website, a downloaded app, an email opened - a company can deliver personalized messaging and opportunities for a sale or upsell.
Digital Experience Management Drives Strategic Decision Making
Putting it simply, for ecommerce businesses, platforms for digital experience management take the guesswork out of decision-making when it comes to improving the user experience on your website. By automating customer feedback in a quantitative form decision-makers are provided with a confidence level that allows them to best meet customer needs and preferences. Digital experience management allows ecommerce companies to deliver consistent, user-driven experiences across all channels to drive customer satisfaction and increase sales.
Read more about the technology ecommerce companies are relying on to deliver digital experiences that convert in our 2023 Survey Report – Composable Commerce: Progress, Challenges, & Possibilities.
