How can Businesses Gain Insights into Customer Journey Using DX Metrics

Author: Stark Tony

With digital experience (DX) becoming the key attribute for business enterprises to achieve and remain competitive, they are vying to maximize its impact. This means taking steps to optimize the digital touchpoints and streamline the customer’s journey using a digital experience monitoring platform. However, notwithstanding the humongous volumes of data generated from various digital touchpoints, businesses find it challenging to analyze them. This is because traditional analytics does not give the entire story. It doesn’t give insights into the customers’ emotions, a crucial parameter driving conversions.

Gain insights into the digital experience of customers

In the traditional scheme of things, tracking a user’s journey to see whether he or she has completed a certain activity (filling in a form or buying a product) is the goal. But this does not always give the true story and could be misleading at times. For instance, a user visits your website to check its look and feel or the products or services offered and leaves without taking any action. So, even though it is not a conversion in technical terms, it can turn out to be a successful visit. This is because the visitor might have been impressed with the look and feel of the website - an important criterion to visit again and possibly convert into a customer.

Digital marketers may execute analytics at the micro-level and drive optimizations for two parameters of the sales funnel - visitor traffic and conversion rate. However, these can be plagued by challenges as explained below.

An expensive proposition: Driving traffic to a website or mobile app can be costly and may not result in conversions. This is because not all visitors to the website or app constitute leads and boost a business.

A time-consuming exercise: Deriving insights from swings in the conversion rate can take a while and need not give the full picture of conversions.

Thus, the two parameters are not enough to gauge the success of a brand or business. What is needed is to understand the context of experience and the individual user. It is important to focus on an individual customer’s experience and not treat it as some nebulous statistical element. Surveys suggest that customers decide to buy more from companies or brands that care. It is this experience that can differentiate a successful business from an also-ran. Digital experience monitoring can help businesses to draw data-driven insights into their customers’ journeys. For instance, what prompts them to visit your brand and spend more? and how interactions with customers can influence the same.

What is digital customer experience management?

Digital customer experience management, also known as digital customer management, is an evolving discipline aimed at enhancing customer interactions. It leverages concepts such as the user or customer experience when customers use a brand’s digital platforms. A digital platform enables a business enterprise to deliver a host of products or services. It offers features and capabilities, namely, APIs, data centers, payment processing, managing digital assets, content management, and others.

What is a digital experience monitoring platform?

A digital experience monitoring platform is a type of enterprise software that possesses the following components:

  • Content management hub, software, or platform
  • Knowledge management system
  • Customer relationship management
  • Customer support system or platform
  • DevOps-based software development tools
  • Digital asset management
  • Enterprise UI and UX design tools
  • Data storage, security, monitoring the network, and other managed services
  • Payment processing

Examples of such digital platforms include social platforms (Facebook or LinkedIn), online marketplace platforms (Amazon or Walmart), search platforms (Google or Yahoo), media platforms (Spotify or iTunes), and many others.

Why use a digital customer experience platform?

Business enterprises can garner a host of benefits by using a digital customer experience platform as mentioned below:

  • Get a comprehensive understanding of customers’ needs in real-time
  • Enhance the capability and accuracy of its marketing strategies
  • Optimize customer touchpoints
  • Ability to incorporate the changing dynamics of digital marketing using a flexible architecture
  • Build responsive software applications and integrate them into the company’s IT architecture
  • Integrate the technology stack into the system’s repository to allow better communication and collaboration among siloed processes

Further, businesses can use the below-mentioned criteria for tracking customer experience assurance:

  • Is the user interface attractive and clutter-free?
  • Can customers use the application or system easily? Does the company provide proper tech support, tutorials, or training?
  • Is content creation for the platform easy? Can it be distributed quickly across digital touchpoints?
  • Is it easy to build customizable workflows?
  • Is the digital experience assurance tool capable of monitoring digital touchpoints, key performance metrics, and visualizing data to gain insights?
  • Are there any pre-built integrations with other tools or software?
  • Is the pricing appropriate, flexible, and transparent?

How to understand customer behavior using DX metrics

The new approach to DX metrics is to understand customer interactions and derive data-driven digital experiences to achieve success. These metrics are proven to deliver insights into conversion and brand loyalty from customer behavior and sentiments. The three critical areas of digital experience that businesses can focus on to better understand customer behavior are:

Emotion: It is the primary criterion that drives increased buying and builds lifetime value. It is important to build an emotional connection with the customers by offering loyalty programs, discounts, and others at moments of truth (birthdays, anniversaries, and others). Thus, when digital experiences resonate well with customers’ emotions, they tend to buy more and spread good word of mouth about the brand.

Effort: This means thinking and moving ahead of customers’ needs and offering them customer delight. This can make their digital experiences streamlined, quick, and effortless, leading to better conversions. To ensure the same, businesses need to identify the customers’ budget and product preferences and send them timely reminders about such products.

Real-time tracking: Since customers’ preferences change quickly, businesses need to track their interests and buying patterns in real-time. This includes prioritizing customer feedback and making quick changes in products, processes, or delivery mechanisms.

Conclusion

The survival of brands in today’s competitive business environment is underpinned by the level of digital experience they offer. And analyzing traditional sales funnels to gain insights into customer behavior is not enough. What is needed is to leverage a digital or customer experience monitoring platform to understand the human side of individual customers.

Article Source: Dev.to